NEED TO KNOW
Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon’s partnership is solid — onstage and off.
Speaking with PEOPLE at the Thursday, Jan. 8 Broadway premiere of his new play Bug, Letts, 60, reveals the secret to working with his wife when she’s acting in one of his projects: “We just like each other.”
Coon, 44, who’s been married to Letts since 2013, stars in Bug at New York City’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre as Agnes, a waitress with a fragile sense of reality. The White Lotus actress and Tony-winning actor-playwright first met in 2010 while starring in Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , which marked both their Broadway acting debuts.
“We just like each other and like being with each other,” says Letts. “We met working with each other, so we’re fans of each other’s work. So it’s not a challenge.”
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Asked about the abrupt cancellation of Bug’s two Jan. 7 performances due to illness within the company, the Lady Bird star confirms, “Everybody’s fine.”
Letts adds, “Live theater, baby. Ain’t nothing like it.”
First-look images of the David Cromer-directed Bug, shared exclusively with PEOPLE, showed Coon onstage with costars Namir Smallwood, Randall Arney, Jennifer Engstrom and Steve Key. Letts’ play was first staged in London in 1996 and has been produced several times since, including in a 2006 film starring Michael Shannon, Ashley Judd and Harry Connick Jr.
“I love this production of Bug,” the Pulitzer Prize winner said of the Broadway outing in an August 2025 statement. “It’s scary and funny and intimate, and it features five great stage actors working at the peak of their powers, under the direction of my long-time collaborator David Cromer. But what I love most about it is just how involving it is. When an audience is pulled into a story — when they lose themselves in it — it’s a kind of sorcery. And it only happens in live theatre.”
Letts and Coon share a son, who they welcomed in 2018, and a daughter, who they welcomed in 2021. In addition to their collaborations on Chicago and New York City stages, the couple also starred together in 2017 movie The Post and season two of USA anthology series The Sinner.
Matthew Murphy
Following its Jan. 8 opening, Bug is now playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
