From The Gilded Age to the 1960s, Carrie Coon’s latest role as Jean Cole in Boston Strangler might be the most true-to-life yet for this multi-tasking, female-empowering, Emmy-nominated actor and all-round super mum.
Carrie Coon is midway through telling me about packing up the family home in Chicago to move to New York to film the second season of HBO period drama The Gilded Age when she announces, “My baby is crying.” Her motherhood antenna is clearly on alert as it takes a moment before the sound of a small infant sobbing penetrates our Zoom call. Without missing a beat, she continues matter-of-factly, “I think I might have to go help get her to sleep for a minute. Do you mind?”
Coon returns to the screen a few minutes later, her adorable 14-month-old daughter in her arms. “She loves a new face,” she explains as we coax her into giving us a smile before her mum carries her back to bed, breezily waving a bottle of milk and declaring, “She’s going to go to sleep and then we can talk for hours.” Sure enough, the multi-tasking actor is back in no time, her daughter now peacefully napping. Coon shares that both her children – she and her playwright/actor husband Tracy Letts also have a four-year-old son – are “good sleepers” and what an “easy baby” her second one is.
As an example of how to juggle motherhood with work, Coon’s graceful and remarkably relaxed demonstration must rate as a masterclass. In fact, after just a short spell in her orbit, you realise that she is naturally unflappable; the middle child in a family of five offspring, she describes herself as “the harmoniser, the negotiator and the peacemaker”. She is clearly comfortable in her own skin, willing to share the mundane reality of domestic life, rather than trying to project the kind of idealised version that many in the public eye often feel obliged to perpetuate.
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