Carrie Coon has just the right amount of fame, right? She’s the first choice for many directors, she’s able to work on Broadway, television and film with ease, and yet she’s never really gossip-fodder. She’s currently on Broadway, in a revival of Bug, which was written by her husband Tracy Letts. To promote the play and all of her projects, Carrie recently chatted with the Hollywood Reporter about conspiracies, internet fame and the importance of owning physical media, in the form of DVDs mostly. Some assorted comments:

Being in a artist in 2026: “It feels subversive to be an artist right now, because there’s a real war on the arts in this country. So bringing something that’s a little edgier and a little darker feels like the way theater should go, and usually goes when people feel oppressed.”

Edgier roles in theater: “TV and film, it has edginess as well, and I’ve gotten invited to do some interesting stuff there, certainly, but I get to express more range in the theater, just because of the nature of theater, which is not so close up. After I did The Leftovers, I was offered grieving moms for the next decade. And as an actor, you want to be invited to do something different, not the same over and over again. And I would say that it’s more common in TV and film to be invited to sort of reiterate something you’ve done, as opposed to the theater, where you can sort of say, I don’t have any limits. When people were surprised to see me crop up in something like The Gilded Age, for example, I’d been doing period pieces in the theater for a decade before I did that, so it was like, TV and film was late to that party.

Famous versus internet famous: “I’ve seen people living with the other thing, and I would find it very oppressive. I understand why people lose their minds. I would say most actors I know are actually very grounded, even the famous ones. I’ve had very healthy experiences with people in my life who carry that and they wear it very well, but there are also some people for whom it creates distortion in their life where they can only surround themselves with a small group of people. And I would never want that, and I don’t want it for my kids. I don’t want them to have to hide from the prying eyes of the world. And Tracy and I just don’t have that problem. We’re just not that interesting, which is great. We’re old. We’re boring. We watch movies in our basement. We don’t have anything salacious going on.

Her basement full of DVDs. “I get DVDs every day. It’ll never end. It’s [Tracy’s] primary occupation, collecting DVDs. What’s wild when you think about an acquisition like Warner Bros. being purchased by a parent company, some of the stuff we have will never be available to the public ever again. It will never be streaming. When something like that happens, the collection actually has more value because we have access to movies that other people will never, ever get to acquire ever again. Tracy was right. There are gatekeepers now, and we will have the apocalyptic collection. We’ll be the movie theater. We’ll be riding our bicycle, powering the generator, charging people, you know, beef jerky, to get in and see it.

Doing a play about conspiracies: “This is about lonely people. There’s an epidemic of loneliness too, because of social media, they’re looking for connection, but more importantly, they’re looking for meaning. And I feel that there’s an emptiness that’s taken over as we’ve moved toward a more secular society, and something will rush to fill that hole. And I think as we see shootings, we see wars, we see suicides, we see conspiracy thinking, xenophobia, that’s what will rush to fill the void when there’s emptiness. And this is asking that question, how are these people finding meaning and purpose in their lives that feel so oppressive and futile? And I think people can relate to that story.

[From THR]

It’s interesting what she’s saying about her basement full of DVDs – she posts photos of her DVD collection, and it’s really cool, but I never considered it to be, like, an important record of film history. But she’s right – some of these films will never be put on streaming. Plus, I always love to have DVDs of my favorite films and TV shows for all of the extras, the commentaries and featurettes and all of that. Sure, you can hunt down some of that online, but there’s stuff on older DVDs which I’ve never seen on YouTube or anywhere else.

Our #MovieNight physical media watches for 2025. A good year in the stacks! pic.twitter.com/TzBZlNK6Co

— Carrie Coon (@carriecoon) January 1, 2026

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.