When Carrie Coon got the call to film The White Lotus, she was excited about visiting Thailand – and also about getting some time away from her family.
The actress, 44, told Marie Claire in a new interview that she felt a sort of autonomy from her family when she was away filming. “I don’t know any mother who isn’t suffering from burnout. Because of the way we parent now — alone in a house without community — it’s very hard to be a parent,” she said.
Coon shares son Haskell and a daughter, whose name has not been revealed, with husband Tracy Letts.
“There’s a different psychological demand on women when their children are young,” she continued. “Trying to balance a successful career, which I’m in the throes of right now, while raising young children means there’s always an opportunity cost. I either have to turn down a really great job or my relationship with my children will suffer on some level.”
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The actress went on to say that her kids are “incredibly privileged” and have amazing people in their lives to help support them.
“However, women at all levels are struggling with this question of work-life balance that is absolutely impossible to achieve. For me, to go away [to film in Thailand] for weeks at a time, I would sleep when I wanted to sleep, somebody was cooking for me, and I didn’t have to clean up,” Coon shared.
“I could read books and I could exercise and take care of myself. I could meditate, and I could go swim in the ocean,” she explained.
“Being the arbiter of how I spend my time is something that I don’t know another woman who’s parenting right now has. The idea that my career affords me the chance to step away from being a mother and them come back to it so that I can appreciate it on another level is a thing most women don’t get.”
Coon and her husband Letts first crossed paths in 2010, during her audition for a revival of the 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago.
After marrying in 2013, Coon and Letts welcomed two children — their son, Haskell Letts, was born in 2018, and their daughter was born in 2021.
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