Carrie Coon

Carrie Alexandra Coon is an American actress known for her performances across stage, film, and television. Over her career, she has earned a Critics' Choice Television Award, a TCA Award for Individual Achievement in Drama, a Theatre World Award, and nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, and a Canadian Screen Award.

Coon was born on January 24, 1981, in Copley, Ohio, to Paula and John Coon. She grew up alongside an older sister, an older brother, and two younger brothers. She graduated from Copley High School in 1999 and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Spanish from the University of Mount Union in 2003. She went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in acting from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2006.

She began her professional career in regional theater, making her debut with the Madison Repertory Theatre in Our Town. She spent four seasons with the American Players Theatre and later moved to Chicago in 2008, where she debuted in Brontë with the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. While commuting between Chicago and Wisconsin productions, she provided for herself by performing motion capture work for a video game company. Her theatrical breakthrough came in 2010 when she was cast as Honey in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She made her Broadway debut in the revival in 2012, winning a Theatre World Award and receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Coon made her television debut in 2011 on NBC's The Playboy Club, followed by guest roles on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Ironside, and Intelligence. Her television breakthrough came with the HBO drama series The Leftovers (2014–2017), playing a widow in a performance that earned her a Critics' Choice Television Award. She achieved further prominence starring as a police chief in the third season of Fargo (2017), as Bertha Russell in the period drama series The Gilded Age starting in 2022, and as a divorced lawyer in the third season of The White Lotus in 2025, all of which earned her Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

In film, Coon made her debut in Gone Girl (2014). Her subsequent feature roles include Strange Weather, The Keeping Hours, Meg Greenfield in The Post (2017), Widows (2018), The Nest (2020), Boston Strangler (2023), and His Three Daughters (2023). In blockbuster film franchises, she provided the voice and motion capture for Proxima Midnight in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), and starred in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024).

Coon's stage work also includes Off-Broadway productions such as Placebo and Mary Page Marlowe. She returned to Broadway in Tracy Letts' play Bug, earning a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play. In her personal life, Coon married actor and playwright Tracy Letts in 2013, and they have two children, a son born in 2018 and a daughter born in 2021.