Carrie Coon Teases Season 3 of ‘The White Lotus’: Mike White Is ‘Playing with Some Really Interesting Dynamics’

Harrison Richlin
·2 min read
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Who doesn’t love Carrie Coon? For those of us lucky enough to see her star-turn in Steppenwolf Theater’s production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” during the early 2010s — a production that also earned her the affections of her now husband, Tracy Letts — there’s always been a slight obsession with her rise to fame. She stunned us in “The Leftovers” with her complex portrayal of a woman who’s lost everything and is dying to feel again. She broke our hearts in Season 3 of “Fargo” as a cop unable to make sense of a world that keeps getting crazier. Now in “The Gilded Age”, she is serving us glamor, history, and a healthy dose of petty vindictiveness. With her role in the latest installment of “The White Lotus” on the horizon, one can’t help but wonder if the sky isn’t the limit for this constantly evolving talent.

To ask Coon herself, she would probably say the evolution is more of a reward than the fame. Speaking to Vanity Fair for the “Little Gold Men” podcast, Coon said, “I work hard. I’m trying to get better. I watch myself. I try to identify what some of my habits are. I read everything. I read all the reviews. I read good reviews. I read bad reviews.” As to why she felt this responsibility, she continued, “Look, we’re all going to die. Nothing somebody writes in an article is going to be the thing that kills me. A lot of other things are going to kill me, but that’s not one of them. I understand if you’re working onstage and you’re reading reviews while you’re onstage, you can get stuck in your head on that stuff. But also… I don’t know. I like to know how the work’s being received in the world. I think it’s important.”

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Coon also revealed that death is a key theme in the upcoming Season 3 of “The White Lotus” as she heaped praise on showrunner Mike White.

“I think he’s playing with some really interesting dynamics. I think it’s something he would continue to do if they let him, because I think he would like to get bigger and more international and put together weirder groups of people — that’s what he’s passionate about,” she said. “And I think that’s important in this world, to see people banging up against each other in this way. Of course, he’s satirizing rich white people, and he’s doing it very well. He’s really speaking to people who need to be spoken to in a really interesting way. He had a season about money; he had a season about sex. And this is his season about death.”

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