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Carrie Coon has little interest in being liked.
“I think likability is an overrated quality,” she tells Variety. “It’s more interesting to play a character that is not just likable.”
It’s an attitude that has served Coon
well throughout a career that has moved from Chicago’s regional theater scene to Broadway and, eventually, to film and television roles, including “The Leftovers,” “The White Lotus” and “The Gilded Age.”
At this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), where she received the festival’s inaugural Luminary Award for acting, Coon also appears in Guy Nattiv’s Vancouver-Island shot “The Liberation,” about Rita, a Holocaust survivor who leaves her family to join an all-female cult with a charismatic leader (played by Lily James).
The film is inspired by Nattiv’s grandmother, whose archival testimony was recorded by Yad Vashem. Coon studied it extensively prior to filming and it became central to her understanding of the role.
“I was so fascinated by her. Just the vulnerability. How difficult it was. The fact that she could only do it when she was deep in the cult.”
The film’s central question, as Coon sees it, is why someone might willingly abandon a conventional life for an alternative community.
“What we know is that the people who find themselves in that situation are often extremely intelligent,” Coon says of people who become involved in cults. “They’re often, at heart, seekers — spiritual seekers.”
The simplistic idea that cult victims are gullible or unintelligent, she argues, misses what makes their stories disturbing.
“They’re not stupid. I think so often, when we watch documentaries about cults, we stand outside it and we think, ‘Well, that would never happen to me.’”
What Rita finds inside the cult is something that’s been missing from her own life: female friendship, self-exploration, the processing of her trauma — even singing and dancing. Rita has been robbed of her childhood, and inside the cult she finds herself returning, in some ways, to a childlike state.
“She was really being controlled,” Coon says. “And she was, frankly, also in love with this person. For better or for worse. And who are we to say what somebody needs to process the kind of trauma that she survived? Who are we to determine for a person what she needs in order to, frankly, not kill herself?”
On some level, Coon adds, we all understand that the rules we’re living by are made up.
“It’s all a social agreement. There’s nothing real about society. We’ve just absolutely made it up. And then we make up these rules and we live by them, and we shame each other when we step outside the bounds of them, and yet none of it is real.”
That refusal to judge also informs Coon’s broader approach to acting. She believes every character, even one capable of terrible things, must be understood from the inside.
“Human beings have a tremendous capacity — including, in its most extreme form, to murder somebody,” she notes. “Acknowledging the human capacity is fundamentally an act of compassion, which is why you can’t judge a part that you play.”
And if you do it right, “it always changes you … because there’s something of you inside the piece.”
That’s why she’s never been particularly concerned about how the audience might respond to her playing some less sympathetic characters.
“I don’t care what other people think. I’m not afraid of it. And I don’t know why, except that I’m in pursuit of what’s most interesting to me, and I don’t get to control how it lands in the world. I have no control over whether a project is successful, who likes it, who hates it, what they write about it.”
To that end, Coon admits to reading everything written about her work, including good reviews, bad reviews and “mean tweets.”
Why?
“I think it is an inoculation,” she says. “If you’re willing to take in the praise — if you’re hungry for the praise and the validation — you have to be willing to take in the criticism too.”
When asked to name a pivotal moment in her career, she says that it was when Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” transferred to Broadway.
“It has felt slow and steady ever since.”
Had that not happened, she believes she might still be working primarily in regional theater, a world she says has been “decimated” by a lack of funding.
“It’s a good training ground,” she says. She’s saddened when she encounters young actors who haven’t ever done theater. “It’s such a gift.”
Theater builds a particular storytelling muscle as actors are responsible for reading an audience. “You know when you’re losing them. You know when you’ve gotten them back. That muscle is really important, because it’s teaching you what good storytelling feels like.”
In film and television, someone else makes that decision.
In her television work, Coon often gets to explore more unconventional, complex characters. “That’s where the more interesting, meaty parts for women are happening,” she says, noting that there’s more of an appetite for risk-taking in television. “Film has been slow to catch up.”
She points to this year’s Emmys, where four out of the six female acting winners were over 50.
“I think what the business is finally starting to acknowledge is that women are also economic drivers in their households. So it is actually good economic policy to make art that women want to consume. And maybe, as women are taking over in executive roles, we’ll start to see more of those projects being greenlit in the film space as well.”
Another subject that “The Liberation” has brought to the forefront for Coon is the erosion of community. Cults, she suggests, can fill a certain vacuum that’s been left by modern life: the vanishing of “third space,” remote work, social media and isolation.
“Fundamentally, human beings are seeking belonging,” she says. “That is a biological imperative, because it helps us survive.”
Without community, she argues, something else will fill the void.
“White supremacy. QAnon. A strong political affiliation. Something will fill the void.”
For Coon, the answer is not simply to condemn the communities people find, but to build better ones.
“We’ve forgotten how to build community, at a really fundamental level,” she says. “And I think it’s the source of a lot of the problems we’re seeing, particularly in our country right now.”
As she contemplates the last third of her own life, which she thinks of as her “crone years,” she hopes to surround herself with a community of her own, namely women she admires and can turn to for advice.
“I really just want to lean into my crones,” she says. “I want to be surrounded by witches.”
