Safe to say, after recent star turns in “The Gilded Age” and the monologue of the year about friendship in “The White Lotus,” Carrie Coon is having a moment.
I asked her, “Would you agree with me that where you used to say you’re at the bottom of the A-List …”
“I think I used to say, ‘The bottom of the B-List,’ but yeah,” she corrected.
“But don’t we need to revise our assessment as where you are?”
“Maybe,” said Coon. “But the thing that’s changed for me is that I was on ‘The White Lotus,’ and now I can be in a Broadway play. That wasn’t true for me five years ago.”
Carrie Coon starring in “Bug,” now on Broadway.
CBS News
The play is “Bug,” which opened just this past week. Coon is leveraging her newfound star power to play the demanding, harrowing lead role in this examination of paranoia, conspiracy, and loneliness. And she is adamant that her success should not obscure a larger, sadder reality of the theater these days: “We live in a country that is fundamentally unsupportive of the arts. So now, in order to do a play on Broadway, you have to do ‘The White Lotus,’ or else you’re not allowed. They have to replace you with somebody more famous.”
“Hang on, if you hadn’t done ‘White Lotus’ and ‘Gilded Age’ and hadn’t sort of blown up as a star …”
“Yeah. We wouldn’t be sitting here, absolutely not,” Coon said.
“Your acting ability, what you do on stage, not enough?” I asked.
“No, that’s not how we make those decisions anymore,” she said. “And you can ask all these extraordinary theater actors who don’t do plays anymore because celebrities are doing plays. It’s just a different world that we’re living in now.”
Tracy Letts is the playwright of “Bug.” He’s in love with Coon’s fearlessness. “She has ice water in her veins,” he said. “In another life, she’d make a great assassin.”
Actress Carrie Coon and playwright Tracy Letts during rehearsals for “Bug.”
CBS News
He’s in love with her acting chops. “She’s a great stage actress,” he said. “For the people who’ve only seen her do ‘Gilded Age’ or ‘White Lotus,’ they just don’t know what a stage animal she is.”
Letts is in love with her. He and Coon have been married for the last dozen years.
I asked, “Your partners, your life partners, they had to be theatre people, right? Because it’s such a consuming world?”
“I came to that conclusion a long time ago that, whoever my partner was had to be in the profession; civilians just don’t get it,” Letts laughed. “They just don’t get it. It’s a hard life.”
Playwright and actor Tracy Letts and actress Carrie Coon, collaborators on stage and off.
CBS News
A couple of Midwesterners (Coon is from Ohio, Letts from Oklahoma), they met in 2010 doing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Letts said, “We had a palpable attraction to each other. We just wanted to be with each other.”
Coon said, “When we confessed to our director and our castmates that we were officially together, they were like, ‘Yeah. Of course.’ We thought it was shocking, this shocking revel – [and they’re] like, ‘Yeah, hello! We’ve been here the whole time.’”
When the show got to Broadway in 2013, Letts won a best actor Tony. That’s some impressive artistic range, considering his Pulitzer Prize for writing the play “August: Osage County” in 2008, and his steady presence in film and TV for the last several decades, from “Seinfeld” and “The Big Short” to “A House of Dynamite.”
He’s been around a while. Coon noted, “Tracy’s entering into sort of this …”
“Oldness?” Letts offered.
Letts is now 60; Coon is 44.
“He always gave me room to grow, because I was not in the same place in my life as him,” Coon said. “Like, what you’re sitting in contemplation of at this stage in your life is different than where I am in mine.”
So, how does that meld? “Oh, a lotta jokes,” said Coon. “Like, ‘Your second husband’s gonna love this couch.’”
Whether playwright and actor, or husband and wife, what makes this partnership work, they told us, is honest feedback and mutual respect. Letts said, “She knows I’m gonna tell her the truth. She’ll put on a dress and say, ‘How does this look?’ And I’ll say, ‘It doesn’t look good.’”
“No, no, no, no….” I said.
“It’s true!” Letts reiterated. “And she appreciates it, because she knows I’m not lying to her.”
“Isn’t rule number one of husbanding, Not bad? Which we all know means… “
“No. We don’t do that,” Letts said. “So when she puts on something and I go, ‘You look fantastic,’ or when she’s in this play and I say, ‘My God, you’re a great actress,’ she knows I’m not bulls****ing her.”
Later, I asked Coon, “If you have something to say, whether it’s praise or criticism, you know it’s the truth?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Even with things I wear.”
Letts smiled. “See?!”
While any couple might recognize that trust required to navigate life’s challenges, Letts and Coon’s “moment” is providing some uncommon tests. Take Coon landing the “White Lotus” role: “I turned to Tracy and I said, ‘There’s no way I can go away to Thailand for six months.’ We had a three-year-old and a six-year-old. And Tracy was the one who turned to me and he said, ‘We’re gonna figure this out.’
“Tracy was doing every morning. He was doing dinner and bedtime every night, and bath time by himself. So that was a really hard six months.”
“I wasn’t doing anything extraordinary; I was taking care of the kids while she was gone doing a job,” he said.
“We know when the undeniable thing comes along, and we’ll both make room for that to happen,” Coon said.
Which is why this chance to collaborate on Broadway is so important for them. The best way to handle a whirlwind is to find a place to anchor. For these two, that’s always been the theater.
“This is where we’re most comfortable,” Letts said, “in a rehearsal room preparing this on a stage, doing this in a theater. This is what we know. You just have a sense of accomplishment and gratification in the theater. You’ve told a story over the course of the night. You don’t get to do that when you make a film or TV show.”
Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts are a couple now living in some of the culture’s brightest lights. But they’re theater people – bright lights don’t faze them. “I got my first credit card at 43,” Letts laughed. “It’s a tough gig!”
Besides, they have work to do, the kind that’s most affirming for them: Work they can do together.
Letts said, “I needed somebody who understood what it means to be an artist in America.”
“And I needed somebody who reminded me that it was important to be an artist,” Coon said, “and that it was powerful, and necessary.”
Losing a loved one brings pain no matter the circumstances. Not knowing what happened to them only adds more agony. That grief and confusion is what propels The Leftovers, but on a global scale—leading to three fascinating, thought-provoking, audacious, cigarette-filled, and often miraculousseasons of TV.
At the start of the first episode, it happens: two percent of the world’s population vanishes into thin air. The amount of missing isn’t huge, but it’s significant. The people who lost someone dear are personally wounded, but nobody escapes being touched in some way by the event, which leaves humanity with an infuriating array of mystical questions. Why did those who left get “chosen”—and why were those who didn’t go get left behind? Was God or some other cosmic being involved? Where did they go? Will they ever come back? And will it happen again?
As the anniversary of the show’s “Sudden Departure” approaches—October 14, unless you’re in Australia, in which case it’s October 15—and the levels of existential dread in our own world continue to rise, it felt like just the right moment for a rewatch.
Created by Damon Lindelof (course-correcting with a successfully enigmatic story after Lost’s unsatisfying end) and Tom Perrotta (who wrote the source-material novel), The Leftovers ran from 2014-2017 on HBO. Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Christopher Eccleston, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, Regina King, Jovan Adepo, Margaret Qualley, Scott Glenn, Kevin Carroll, and the almighty Ann Dowd anchored its core cast, with many other memorable players popping up in its ensemble along the way.
Season one is set in Mapleton, New York—a small town with pockets of dysfunction like any other place—three years after the Sudden Departure.
Throughout its run, The Leftovers’ storytelling made great use of flashbacks, flash-forwards, and events replayed from different points of view. This patchwork approach extended across seasons—even in season three, for instance, we’d get glimpses of life before the Sudden Departure—bringing valuable insights into character motivations and perspectives, particularly useful on a show where reality sometimes meant different things to different people.
It also set up points that paid off sometimes years later in the show’s timeline and did wonders to avoid plot holes, even as The Leftovers kept the answers to its biggest questions carefully ambiguous.
In Mapleton, we meet the Garveys—police officer Kevin Jr. (Theroux) and his teenage daughter Jill (Qualley), and his estranged wife, Laurie (Brenneman). Kevin Sr. (Glenn) has been institutionalized after a breakdown following the Sudden Departure; he claims to hear voices, and the viewer soon suspects that Kevin Jr., who has blackouts and strange visions, may have inherited a similar mental illness… or perhaps an ability of a more metaphysical nature.
Tom (Chris Zylka), Laurie’s son from an earlier relationship, has moved west and is working for a self-styled holy man, a highly marketable calling in the world’s new climate of uncertainty.
Laurie, meanwhile, has joined the Guilty Remnant, a cult-like group that dresses in all-white clothing, discourages talking, encourages smoking, and stands around in menacing groups to remind people that life is meaningless.
The Guilty Remnant is led by Patti (Dowd); one of its new recruits is Meg (Tyler). Both women become important figures in The Leftovers’ expanding drama.
We also meet Matt (Eccleston), a Mapleton pastor struggling with a nosedive in church attendance since the Sudden Departure—not to mention his own newly conflicted feelings about religion. He’s certain what happened wasn’t the Rapture, but he hasn’t ruled out the almighty in having some hand in it.
His sister, Nora (Coon), is still reeling after her entire family—husband, son, and daughter—all vanished, a statistical rarity that’s made her something of a local celebrity. She sparks with Kevin in season one and their passionate but tumultuous romance comes to form The Leftovers’ emotional backbone.
Season one takes us through the Sudden Departure’s aftermath at a time when life has returned to “normal” for all intents and purposes. Bureaucracy has moved on: the ATF has added “Cults” to its jurisdiction, and Nora works for the newly formed Department of Sudden Departures, helping decide who qualifies for survivor benefits.
Commerce has moved on, too, as companies manufacture eerily realistic replicas of departed people so their families can bury them—some small comfort for anyone desperate enough to buy into the lie.
But three years isn’t long enough to forget what happened. The opposing feelings about whether people should just move on with their lives or remain paralyzed in remembrance—as the Guilty Remnant would prefer—is the biggest tension point in season one.
The Sudden Departure itself aside, season one of The Leftovers is mostly rooted in realism, though it strays into magical realism on occasion. It makes its inciting incident vivid and awful; there’s nothing blessed, for instance, about realizing the last interaction you’ll ever have with your family is an angry scolding at the breakfast table—something that haunts Nora every day.
The season ends with Nora realizing she has to “move toward something, anything.” There’s a hopeful promise for the future as Kevin, Nora, and Jill discover an abandoned baby—we know its origins, since we’ve been following Tom’s storyline—on Kevin’s front porch.
By season one’s end, viewers had long since realized The Leftovers wasn’t gearing up for some tidy reveal about the Sudden Departure. It’s all left open-ended—with plenty of room to explore new wells of emotional trauma as the story continues.
Season one feels a bit downbeat overall, given its fascination with grief and regret in a world where reality itself has suddenly become uncertain. But with that world established, season two of The Leftovers has room to inject more surrealism into its characters’ lives—especially Kevin’s—and even some levity, evidenced by the song accompanying season two’s revamped opening credits.
Rather than the instrumental of season one, season two uses Iris DeMent’s upbeat, folky “Let the Mystery Be,” which addresses humanity’s deepest conundrums—where did we come from, and where do we go when we die? Its message also fits perfectly into The Leftovers’ specific puzzle, seemingly encouraging characters and viewers alike not to hope for an answer: “But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me, I think I’ll just let the mystery be.”
“Let the Mystery Be” is the most lingering song The Leftovers uses—it’s repeated each week during season two and pops back up for the series finale in season three, and is an earworm on top of that. But the show’s needle drops throughout its run were cultivated with just as much attention to detail as its writing, furthering themes and emotions as much as the poignant piano score that threaded through each storyline.
The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” was one choice that was maybe too on the nose, but it propels Kevin’s season two arc as Kevin, Jill, Nora, and the newly adopted infant, now named Lily, move from Mapleton to Jarden, Texas, looking for a fresh start. It’s been four years since the Sudden Departure. Matt is already there with his wife, Mary (Janel Moloney), still in a coma-like state after a car accident caused by another driver who vanished from behind the wheel that fateful October 14.
Why trade one small town for another? Jarden, now more commonly called “Miracle,” is a special place: none of its 9,000-ish residents departed. Despite its mysterious earthquakes—an occurrence since prehistoric times, as we see in a prologue that kicks off the season—it’s considered one of the safest places to live.
That makes it especially appealing to Nora—as well as tourists, pilgrims, hucksters, and would-be new residents forced to camp outside its guarded entrance—but in keeping with The Leftovers’ refusal to offer closure, it’s soon clear that moving house is much easier than actually moving on.
In Jarden, Kevin and company are neighbors with the Murphys (Regina King and Kevin Carroll as parents Erika and John; Jovan Adepo and Jasmine Savoy Brown as twins Michael and Evie), and their lives become intertwined. At one point, Patti asks Kevin if they’re part of his story—or if he’s part of theirs.
Patti’s presence in season two is extremely prickly, since she died by suicide in front of Kevin during season one. She appears to Kevin as a vision only he can see, and her constant presence pushes him to the brink of madness. But the show, never revealing its cards fully, makes the case that Patti is neither ghost nor hallucination, but a presence attached to Kevin so fierce he must die to rid himself of it.
Which he does, in “International Assassin,” one of The Leftovers’ most wonderfully audacious episodes. It imagines the afterlife as a sort of alt-reality centered around a hotel. Kevin, who’s suddenly an international assassin, must kill his way out of it to shed his Patti parasite and return to life.
Kevin’s ability to die and revive (always visiting this purgatory realm in between) becomes a recurring theme on The Leftovers, with certain characters coming to believe there’s a holy aspect to it.
The tensions in Jarden come to a head in the season two finale, as a Guilty Remnant faction that’s embraced violence under Meg’s leadership brings chaos and confusion to the town—revealing a possible second Sudden Departure to be a fraud, just as Kevin’s friends and family realize he’s proof that there really are miracles in Miracle. Season two ends with reconciliation and forgiveness, but it also underlines that The Leftovers characters, as well as its audience, will never get concrete answers. “I don’t understand” and “Is this real?” are frequently repeated lines with good reason.
In all honesty, The Leftovers could have ended after season two. It would have been just fine to leave the story there, in Jarden, with everyone reuniting and Kevin realizing “Homeward Bound,” the song he’s assigned while singing afterlife karaoke—yes, it’s a thing—encapsulates where his mind’s been all along.
But season three, which ran just eight episodes after two 10-episode installments, arrived to further elevate The Leftovers. Picking up seven years after the Sudden Departure, as many in the world believe either a repeat Sudden Departure or perhaps a full-on doomsday is looming, the final season indulged an international quest for meaning while filling in some fresh texture.
We learned what pushed Laurie to join the Guilty Remnant, a cause she wisely ended up leaving behind. We got a rich payoff for The Leftovers’ most bizarrely funny running joke, involving the 1980s sitcom Perfect Strangers. Matt finally came to a sort of detente with his God, in a standout episode set aboard a ferry carrying a lion-worshiping sex cult.
And we got to spend a lot of time with the wacky Kevin Sr., whose wanderings bring him to Australia on his own personal fight to prevent the end of the world. His search ends up dovetailing with Kevin Jr.’s own internal struggles; many of the main characters end up together the Outback. One last visit to the afterlife sees Kevin Jr. confront his real enemy—himself, at long last—in a twin-on-twin end-of-the-world scenario that puts a cap on his ever returning to that realm.
As wild as Kevin’s adventures are, season three is Nora’s story. The season kicks off with another historical prologue, this time illustrating the futility of believing in—and waiting for—the Rapture. Later in the premiere, we flash-forward to a much older version of Nora; she’s living in the Australian countryside and when she’s asked, she says the name “Kevin” doesn’t mean anything to her.
With the tease of that strange scene, season three plots Nora’s trajectory by leaning into the themes her character is interconnected with. As someone who lost her entire family on October 14, Nora’s a curiosity for scientists (and kooks) studying the Sudden Departure. She’s targeted by conspiracy theorists, mystics, and even, as it turns out, legitimate physicists who think they’ve figured out where the departed people went. Sort of.
Though she found love with Kevin, Nora has missed her kids terribly, an ache that became newly raw when she agreed to return Lily to her birth mother. So when she gets a phone call asking if she’d like to see her children again, she barely hesitates, though she does initially pretend her interest is part of her fraud-investigation work with the Department of Sudden Departures.
After a falling-out with Kevin in Australia, Nora goes full-throttle on her mission, with the help of Laurie and Matt… and a pair of eccentric doctors in possession of a mysterious machine. Purportedly, it emits just the right sort of radiation to send people into the dimension that claimed so many souls on October 14.
“Families of the departed don’t want closure,” Laurie tells Nora. “With departures there is no end.” But Nora wants closure. She wants an end. If there’s a chance at seeing her kids again, she’s going to take it, even it if means stepping into a machine that ends up just incinerating her into oblivion.
But we know she survives into old age, thanks to that flash-forward. After a season of using different songs for each opening-credits tune, The Leftovers dusts off “Let the Mystery Be,” and unfurls a series finale that further encourages that message.
As always, the show gets away with its most unbelievable elements because the emotions feel real and the stakes feel earned. Kevin, a man who’s died and come back to life multiple times and is now searching for the greatest thing he’s lost, finds Nora living off the grid in rural Australia. After an awkward interaction where he pretends not to remember anything that happened after their first meeting in Mapleton, he comes clean: though he’s aware she went through the machine, he just knew all this time that she was still alive.
The show’s near-perfect final scene is just Nora, who’s reluctant to open up at first, sitting at her kitchen table, explaining to Kevin what happened.
After going through the machine, she tells him, she emerged in a world where 98% of the population vanished on October 14, rather than the 2% of the world we’ve been following all this time. Her kids, when she finally tracks them down in this post-apocalypse, seem so fine without her she doesn’t even approach them.
This alternate reality, she realizes, isn’t where she belongs. But by the time she’s able to find her way way back to the other side, using a version of the same machine constructed in that 98% world, she couldn’t bring herself to contact Kevin. She didn’t think he’d believe her.
“I believe you,” Kevin insists. He’s being sincere. And when I first watched that episode when it aired back in 2017, I fully believed her too.
It wasn’t until “The Book of Nora,” as that finale episode is titled, had time to sink in that I realized: maybe she wasn’t telling the truth. Maybe, that split-second when we see her gasp in the machine and the camera cuts away, she’s putting the brakes on the process. Maybe she’s been living secretly in Australia all this time. Maybe that story she told Kevin is what she wished had happened, rather than whatever really did happen.
The point is that it doesn’t ultimately matter. But not in a Guilty Remnant, “life has no meaning” sort of way. The Leftovers, which teased the mystery of the Sudden Departure across three seasons, uses this wonderful reunion to remind the viewer that it was never about giving evidence or proof.
It was about faith, in all its different meanings. It was about forging emotional connections to help you grapple with all those great unknowns, which are part of life even without a scenario where masses of people suddenly disappear into thin air. It was about believing in those you love—and making peace with letting the mystery be.
The Leftovers is available for streaming on HBO Max.
If you’re still hungry for more after The White Lotus’s April 6season-three finale, you can always scour the cutting-room floor. Writer-director Mike Whitetold the Hollywood Reporter some of his episodes originally came in at an hour and 40 minutes before getting cut down to the tight hours that aired. (Meanwhile, the 90-minute finale was originally shot as two and a half hours, per star Patrick Schwarzenegger.) “As a writer, I got a little indulged,” White admitted.
Luckily, for months now,some of the show’s stars have been revealing their cut moments, including bigger conversations and more fantasies. So, what else did we miss out on this season (other than a bangin’ theme song)? Below, all the deleted scenes from White Lotus season three, updated as moresecrets come out.
The surprise that Kate (may have) voted for Donald Trump originally carried much higher stakes. Carrie Coon told Harper’s Bazaar that, earlier in the season, Laurie shared that her kid is nonbinary. “You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting,” she said. That then made Kate’s conversation about Trump “so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie,” Coon added. However, White later cut the scene because it was “too political, or too far, or too distracting,” Coon told the Hollywood Reporter. White added to The Hollywood Reporter he didn’t want that detail to “overwhelm” his messaging. “It felt right in March of last year,” he said. “Now, there’s a vibe shift.”
Leslie Bibb also told The Hollywood Reporter about a fantastical scene with Kate that got left on the cutting-room floor. “Kate had this insane dream sequence with the ladyboys and ping-pong and everything was glowing,” she said. “It was also kind of like The Shining.” When? Why? Could it have led to Kate checking out of the White Lotus with new politics? We can only dream of that.
The women Jaclyn eyed while dancing in the club with the Russian men originally played a bigger role in that scene. Michelle Monaghan told Bustle those same women saw the trio of friends at the bar earlier, when they looked “like drowned rats” after getting soaked on the street. “They’re pointing fingers and laughing at them,” Monaghan said. “And Jaclyn was like, Oh, hell no. We’re going downstairs.”
At one point, Saxon’s emotional look at Chelsea reuniting with Rick on the beach was much more eventful. “I actually played a version of that scene where it’s full come-to-Jesus, where Saxon is just so sweet to the girls,” Schwarzenegger told Variety. But White quickly decided that wasn’t right. “He didn’t want some huge change for Saxon yet — just a small moment and to hold on my face as I watch her go off into the distance,” Schwarzenegger continued.
Yeah, we missed out on more tsunami talk. Sam Nivola shared that, in a longer version of Tim Ratliff’s conversation with Lochlan about living without money, Jason Isaacs’s character asked Lochlan about the book he was reading. “And I’m like, I’m reading this book about tsunamis, and fucking 300,000 people died, or however many it was,” Nivola told Deadline. “How do you find any meaning in life when it can all just change like that on a dime? Which I think was a cool way of describing the turmoil that he’s going through.” But that metaphor was lost on a drugged-out Tim. “And then Timothy says, What if money doesn’t matter? or something,” Nivola continued. “And I’m like, Okay, I don’t see how that’s related to what I just said, and he is just totally thinking about his own thing.”
But not to leave the resort. Nivola also revealed that during his character’s near-death experience, after accidentally making a suicide-fruit smoothie, he had a fantasy of escaping one of the show’s iconic body bags. “And that was so scary, because I had to be zipped in a body bag with no air, and then unzip myself,” he told Deadline.
We may never know what happened before this picture.
Saxon was right: Piper is a virgin. White cut an entire plotline from the finale in which, after returning from the monastery, Piper decides to have sex for the first time — with Zion, Belinda’s son. “There’s this whole scene where she’s like, It’s true,” White said on The White Lotus Official Podcast. “Saxon is right about this one thing. I need to get this over with.” White said the story line “would have added ten minutes” to the already long finale, and the “rom-com vibe” didn’t match the tone. “It just felt like I was trying to do too much narratively,” he said. Piper, no!
Mike White originally intended that ending to be even more tragic, with Rick and Chelsea really solidifying their bond in a finale love scene. In a joint Varietyinterview (mostly devoted to how they’re not feuding, okay???), Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins said they had a finale sex scene that showed just how much Rick threw away by returning to his revenge plot. “We designed the whole journey, even down to the fact that Chelsea gets on Rick in the first scene,” Wood said. “Then in the last episode, it was Rick picking Chelsea up. It was so, so delicate.” Goggins agreed, saying it was a scene about “two people who were free. It was this very long, suspended moment of these two people looking at each other. It was so powerful.”
Yes, it is possible for Jason Isaacs to talk about full-frontal nudity without bringing up Mikey Madison’s vulva. When asked by self-described “peen-iatologist” and Jimmy Kimmel Live! guest host Tiffany Haddish about Tim’s exposed penis in episode four, Isaacs shared that his character had another “flashing” moment that got cut from the show. “It was funnier the second time, because the kids went, ‘Dad! Put it away!’’’ he recalled. “But the rest of the scene didn’t work. And I said, ‘Mike, you cut my second dick!’” Maybe White decided that we’d gotten enough scenes of Ratliff family members seeing one another naked?
Writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ feature is set to hit select theaters Sept. 6 and begin streaming Sept. 24 after premiering last year at the Toronto International Film Festival. Olsen, Lyonne and Coon co-star as the titular estranged sisters who reconnect in a Manhattan apartment to help their ailing father and aim to repair their tense connections with each other.
“It’s nice that it’s us,” Olsen tells her sisters about the three of them spending time together. “This is the way that it should be — the way he would want it.”
Later, when asked for help in writing their dad’s obituary, Lyonne quips, “Married a couple of crazy bitches, raised a few crazy bitches.”
Rounding out the cast are Jovan Adepo, Jay O. Sanders, Rudy Galvan, Jose Febus and Jasmine Bracey. Serving as producers are Jacobs, Matt Aselton, Lia Buman, Tim Headington, Diaz Jacobs, Marc Marrie, Duncan Montgomery, Alex Orlovsky, Jack Selby and Mal Ward. Executive producers include Lyonne and Maya Rudolph.
In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, senior reviews editor Jon Frosch wrote that “filmmaker Azazel Jacobs makes a satisfying New York homecoming with His Three Daughters, a sharp, tender tale of sisterhood under duress.”
Frosch continued, “Blessed with a trio of superlative turns from Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne — all playing both to and against type in bracing ways — it’s the writer-director’s strongest effort since Momma’s Man put him on the indie map in 2008.”
DR. MANHATTAN: The year is 1989, I am watching Road House and the new Ghostbusters. The year is 2024, I am watching Road House and the new Ghostbusters.
Brief Plot Synopsis: Ghooooooooost ice.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 2.5 Honk If You’re Horny marquees out of 5.
Better Tagline: “There are *non-evil* Spin Doctors CDs?”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: When last we left the Grooberson/Spenglers (Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard — if that’s his real name —, McKenna Grace), they were in Oklahoma. So how they came to occupy Ghostbusters HQ in New York City is an exercise best left to those unconcerned with the appearance of an ancient freeze god. Or that same god’s connection to an antiquarian adventurers’ society. And if none of that interests you, just hang around and maybe Venkman will show up.“Critical” Analysis: Most film franchises operate on a principle of diminishing returns. The original entries are (usually rightfully) fondly remembered, and followed by the inevitable cash grab. Subsequent movies fail to capture that initial magic (though may be perfectly okay in their own regard), while the series limps along until the nostalgia is no longer profitable.
Is Ghostbusters at this stage yet? Probably not, but you can see the end from here. Frozen Empire doesn’t wallow in nostalgia the way Afterlife did, and follows a (mostly) more coherent story, while many of the movie’s good feelings come from the return of the original Busters.
The weight of the film is largely carried by Grace’s Phoebe, who chafes at being excluded from the specter battling shenanigans because of New York’s strict paranormal child labor laws, or something. Her relationship with a young ghost (Emily Alyn Lind) looking to reunite with her family grounds the story, but is that a good thing? Haven’t all the GB films aside from the original and 2016 been too emotionally heavy?
And what the hell is Podcast (Logan Kim) doing here? Getting past the fact his name is “Podcast,” why is he in NYC at all? For that matter, why is Trevor’s erstwhile girlfriend Lucky (Celeste O’Connor)? It’s understandable that Callie and the kids would want to return to her father Egon’s haunted home, but these two feel like child endangerment.
Which is also the angle used by the NYC Mayor (hint: you know him, you loathe him, from such ’80s classics as Die Hard and Real Genius) to threaten to shut the Ghostbusters down for good. It’s slightly less egregious an offense than making Phoebe your main character and relegating her to fourth banana on the movie poster.
A perfect time to say they’re “getting too old for this.”
As a direct sequel to Afterlife, Frozen Empire’s an improvement. It doesn’t wallow in nostalgia as much, and when it does, it’s with a respectable amount of irreverence. Yes, the original (surviving) Ghostbusters all return, capably aided by Janine (Annie Potts), but with actual meat on the bones for the roles of Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston (Ernie Hudson).
Bill Murray returns, too. He’s introduced in one of the movie’s many callbacks (the ESP testing scene) but is otherwise used sparingly. It’s definitely the correct approach, as a little Venkman goes a long way.
At least he’s having a good time. Frozen Empire suffers from the same problem of just about the rest of the GB sequels: it takes itself so seriously. It’s still a comedy, but there’s little of the anarchic whimsy that was a highlight of the 1984 original. In addition to Grace, Coon has the best arc, balancing her kids’ desire to follow in granddad’s footsteps with attempting to be a responsible mother.
And yet it all feels weirdly abbreviated. The original Ghostbusters went out of its way to show the city-wide effects of a trans-dimensional cross-rip, but aside from one establishing shot, we don’t get any real feel for the effects of an extra-dimensional god releasing the spectral hounds. There’s no rallying the city behind the Ghostbusters (until the end), and no real connection between the rise of our unfriendly god with anyone beyond the movie’s inner circle.
But writers Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan (who also directs) have their formula. The core of this group can stick around for multiple flicks, or until Wolfhard gets bored or Grace wises up.
It would be impossible to look at the latest installment in the Ghostbusters “legacyquel” without ruminating on the franchise’s past. In fact, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire seems to immediately want its audience to reflect not only on the story’s history, but also New York’s itself. Hence, director and co-writer Gil Kenan (writing alongside “Ivan’s boy” Jason Reitman) commences the tale in New York, 1904. Specifically, at the Ghostbusters firehouse, long before it ever became that. Instead, it’s but an ordinary firehouse, where we see firefighters being dispatched to a members only club for the colonialist-type rich fucks who liked to show one another their stolen/pillaged spoils after returning from far-flung, overpriced adventures.
Among the spoils during this session is a metal sphere (made, more to the point, of copper). One that, unbeknownst to the richies, imprisons the ancient warrior known as Garraka. A supernatural being who gained the power to freeze empires like the one he was proverbially “iced out” of even after fighting for it. In this regard, part of the movie’s message seems to be that you should reward people for the work they do rather than punish them for it, otherwise they end up stealing your sex tape and selling it on a still-germinal internet. Or, in this case, freezing all of New York.
Which Garraka came close to doing in 1904, but only managed to freeze the entire room, at which point a mysterious ancient soldier-looking guy (or gal) in the corner appears to have regained control of the orb, startling the investigating firefighters when he opens his eyes abruptly. The “authorities,” of course, are useless in matters such as these (and most others), and end up getting partially frozen as well.
That general uselessness is also conveyed in the next scene, when the Spengler family, now consisting of Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon), Trevor Spengler (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe Spengler (Mckenna Grace), speeds down a busy NYC street wreaking havoc in pursuit of a ghostly dragon. The police watch them whiz by, eager to let them handle it without interfering, lest any blame or responsibility be put on them. Indeed, one of the main distinctions between present-day New York and 80s-era New York is how much more concerned the former is with property damage. If one thought that concern was bad in the 80s, it certainly seems tenfold now. This speaking to both a lack of punk rockness in local government (long gone are the days of Ed Koch) and a general vibe of empty coffers everywhere despite constantly collecting from the public.
Things in New York have gotten so “by the book,” in fact, that Walter Peck (William Atherton), reprising his role from Ghostbusters, even prevents Phoebe from continuing to work as a Ghostbuster by citing her involvement as child labor. Considering how much ghostbusting has become a major aspect of her identity, this little shutdown enrages her to no end. Because in the time since 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Phoebe has come even more into her own on the ghostbusting front, while Trevor is clearly meant to be the beleaguered do-nothing of the operation. And, despite being certain to tell his mother he’s eighteen now and can’t be told what to do, it would seem he doesn’t know how to function otherwise.
In the midst of this dynamic, Gary is trying to find his footing on the shaky ground between “Mother’s boyfriend” and full-on “dad.” This cast of main characters is rounded out by a quartet of OGs from the original films: Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), Peter Venkman (Bill Murray, whose abuse allegations couldn’t shake him from this gig) and Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts). The latter clearly subbing out for the spot where Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) used to be (and since his ghost was already used as a gimmick in Afterlife, Melnitz was up to bat).
As if that weren’t already enough main characters to “service,” so to speak, another important character, Nadeem Razmaadi (Kumail Nanjiani), is introduced as the “Firemaster”—an obvious nod to the Keymaster role that Louis Tully (Rick Moranis) took on in 1984’s Ghostbusters. Then there is Phoebe’s new ghost friend, Melody (Emily Alyn Lind, who also appears in another New York-related reboot, Gossip Girl). She makes Phoebe’s acquaintance after trying to scare her during a game of ghost chess in Washington Square Park (miraculously deserted at night, even though it never is in real life). And it doesn’t take long for things between them to quickly start leaning toward a sexual tension vibe, just one of many “modern updates” to the franchise.
Somewhere in between all these cast members is stuffed yet another character: New York. Because Ghostbusters is to NYC as Sex and the City is—it would be difficult to reconcile one without the other (though that’s what audiences did for Afterlife). And yet, perhaps the only truly standout scenes involving the city from Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire are, as we already saw in the trailer, the moment when the lion of the NYPL (who, what do you know, additionally cameos in the Sex and the City movie) comes to life and attacks and the moment when the Wonder Wheel is stopped, just before those frolicking in the dubious waters of Coney Island are sent running for the sand again as the “death chill” invoked from Garraka proceeds to freeze everything. Unfortunately, Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” is only playing in the trailer and not the actual movie when this all goes down.
As for the buildup to Garraka’s inevitable unleashing from the sphere, which is sold to Ray by Nadeem, who mentions it was part of his now-dead grandma’s collection, it’s filled with ominous forewarnings. Including the fact that the Containment Unit is starting to act a bit, let’s say, fickle when additional ghosts are deposited. Phoebe, realizing that the chamber hasn’t been “cleansed” since it was first installed, asks the valid question of whether or not anyone considered what that might result in without a backup plan. Melnitz is the first to quip, “It was the 80s, people weren’t thinkin’ too much about the future.” Except, apparently, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale when they wrote Back to the Future. Faint allusions to the headier days of NYC life are also made by Melnitz when she says that a bunch of homeless people in the 90s ripped off any copper they might have had at the firehouse. Brass—another metal agent known for trapping demonic and supernatural forces—will have to do for outfitting the proton packs in a way that will have any kind of effect on Garraka. Specifically, the brass Phoebe siphons from the pole they usually slide down when there’s a specter-related emergency.
While there is some sense of “all hell breaking loose” (even though it’s ice we’re talking about), there’s also a generally blasé attitude about the bizarre goings-on. Even when the lion comes to life at the New York Public Library, there isn’t that much shock about it from any passersby. This portrayal being almost like a subconscious nod to how desensitized New Yorkers have become to all calamities. Half-awake in their increasingly fake empire, as it were (side note: never forget the on-the-nose absurdity of Barack Obama actually using an instrumental version of The National’s “Fake Empire” for an election campaign video—of which Aaron Dessner remarked, “When they first asked permission to use ‘Fake Empire’ we wondered, ‘Do they know it’s about how fucked up America is and wanting to leave?’”).
But perhaps the threat of The Day After Tomorrow-esque plot of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire could be enough to shake them from their half-awake reverie (for, yes, one can’t help but feel a subliminal climate change message here). If not, perhaps there are worse fates than freezing to death. Like OD’ing on nostalgia because looking to the future seems to be a lost cause. To put it in The National lead vocalist Matt Berninger’s words, “…you can’t deal with the reality of what’s really going on, so let’s just pretend that the world’s full of bluebirds and ice skating.” Oh so much ice skating in this particular scenario.
SPOILER ALERT:This story contains spoilers from the Season 2 finale of HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” now streaming on Max.
Bertha Russell, who never really cared for opera, can now watch Verdi from the best seat in the house.
Polite society’s battle royale ended with the New Money triumphing over the Old Guard, as “The Gilded Age” wrapped up its second season on Sunday. Mrs. Astor’s attempt to steal Bertha’s thunder by getting the Duke of Buckingham to attend the opening night of the Academy of Music instead of the Metropolitan Opera House ended in disaster. After Bertha made the cash-starved royal an offer he couldn’t refuse, he showed up box-side with her at the Metropolitan, gazing at her daughter Gladys as New York’s elite looked on. That left Mrs. Astor gazing down at row upon row of empty aisles at the Academy.
And that’s not the only big moment from an action-packed finale (well, by “Gilded Age” standards, where everything unfolds in the Julian Fellowes HBO drama at the frenetic pace of a leisurely stroll through a botanical garden). The van Rhijn family was saved from social ruin by an unexpected financial windfall, Peggy Scott was forced to sacrifice her dream job, and Marian Brook called off an ill-considered engagement, only to draw closer to the Russell’s son, Larry. Are wedding bells in their future?
To break it all down, and get some hints at what might come in a third season, Variety convened a roundtable of “The Gilded Age” stars Morgan Spector (George Russell), Carrie Coon (Bertha Russell), Louisa Jacobson (Marian Brook), Denée Benton (Peggy Scott), Cynthia Nixon (Ada Forte) and Christine Baranski (Agnes van Rhijn).
Has Mrs. Astor been deposed at the end of this season? Is Bertha the new queen bee of society because the Metropolitan Opera superseded the Academy of Music in popularity?
Carrie Coon: Yes. The opera war was a fierce battle, but Mrs. Astor always knew that she was going to have to yield at some point because the new money Bertha represents comes with such ungodly wealth. It’s just that Mrs. Astor wanted to yield in her own time, and in her own way. And somebody like Bertha is going to just keep pushing until those doors are thrown wide open for her.
And so I think Bertha recognizes that as long as she keeps this up, she’s going to get everything she wants. And it’s true. If you look at history, the people with the most money did get what they wanted. They still do.
Courtesy of HBO
This season ends in a moment of triumph for Bertha, just as the first one ended with her successfully luring Mrs. Astor to her ball. But this victory feels like it comes with a troubling undercurrent. By promising her daughter to the Duke of Buckingham, has Bertha crossed a moral line?
Coon: Morgan is very upset right now.
MorganSpector: I just find it very disturbing, because I think in the next season, we’re going to go to war basically over this. I guess I’m hoping that Gladys [Taissa Farmiga] actually likes the duke.
Coon: Well, of course, the inspiration for Bertha is Alva Vanderbilt, who did this exact same thing to her own daughter Consuelo, marrying her off to this duke who she didn’t love, only to turn around a decade later and become a suffragette. That was infuriating for her daughter, to have her mom suddenly become a feminist.
Now you have to remember, in my eyes, Bertha is no villain. She’s looking out for her daughter in a world that is not built for her daughter. Bertha is going to make sure that her daughter is safely married and ensconced and supported financially. With his social position, her son is fine no matter what he does, but her daughter doesn’t have that freedom.
ChristineBaranski: The same thing is true of Agnes in terms of [her obsession] with marrying off Marian. It’s why she’s so insistent that she play by the rules and find the right man or she will slip through the cracks. The stakes were very high for women in that society. If you got into that social circle, you held on for dear life. I mean, read “The House of Mirth.” It’s just a study of a woman’s position, and how it can start slipping away as you get older and you lose those opportunities.
Courtesy of HBO
In the finale, the roles of Agnes and Ada are dramatically reversed — Agnes’s son Oscar has been conned out of the family fortune, just as Ada comes into an unexpected financial windfall following the death of her husband, Rev. Forte. Where do you think their relationship goes from here?
Baranski: That is up to the writers, but it’s just the most delightful twist. That final scene with [the butler] Bannister deferring to Ada as the mistress of the house instead of Agnes. The ramifications of that are so huge.
CynthiaNixon: We did have a lot of fun supposing what might happen with Ada in the driver’s seat. She would throw open the doors of their mansion and make it a home for unwed mothers or stray cats or Bohemian artists or overseas missionaries.
Baranski: Agnes will never leave her bedroom, and there’s the smell of cats all over the house.
Would Ada have been able to assert herself like she does in the finale if she hadn’t married Rev. Forte? How did that relationship change her?
Nixon: At the age that she is, the idea that she would find a man to love her is really startling to her. His love and belief in her, and his choosing of her out of all the women that were possible for him made her trust herself.
Peggy also has a very dramatic arc this season, where she falls in love with her boss, T. Thomas Fortune, who is a married man. What led her to sacrifice her dream job at the New York Globe?
DenéeBenton: Peggy starts the season in such deep grief [over the death of her son], and she’s running away from her pain through her work. But that work forces her to run deeper into the grief of the country. Her time in the South [reporting on Booker T. Washington], it shapes her for the rest of the season. She experiences a life or death moment down there, and that centers her in a way.
So, instead of seeing her as walking away from her dreams at the Globe, I think she’s walking toward them. A lot of her life has been derailed by men — from her dad’s decisions about what to do with her son, to her husband leaving her. And now here’s T. Thomas Fortune, who she has strong feelings for, but who is married and unavailable. Only she’s not going to let her life be derailed by this man. It’s actually a step toward herself, even though it’s a step away from that gig.
Courtesy of HBO
Do you think Peggy was naive about the extent of the problems and violence in the South before she made that trip?
Benton: I think so, but it’s a naivete that came from a passion. You always want to think that your personal power is bigger than the oppression you’re walking into. And I think it was really easy for Peggy to be in New York with her ideas about how to solve things. And it was very humbling to be with Booker T. Washington and be like, no, no, no, these are not the same strategies for survival in your parts.
George obviously embodies this new kind of wealth and this harder-hitting type of businessman. It’s weird because as an audience member, we find ourselves really rooting for this rapacious capitalist. Why is he so seductive?
Nixon: I mean just look at Morgan!
Spector: The show offers a variety of fantasies in which the audience can immerse themselves. One of them is the fantasy of having nearly absolute power. That’s pretty seductive just on its face. When George has a problem, he solves it by dint of his own indomitable cleverness, as well as his seemingly bottomless bank account.
But he’s also honorable. He’s certainly not a leftist or a humanist in any way, but he has a code of ethics. It’s an honor among thieves approach, but that’s better than amoral corporate capitalism.
There’s a pivotal moment when George decides not to have the troops fire on the striking workers. It’s later revealed that there’s also a business strategy behind that decision. But in that moment, was he responding emotionally because he wanted to avert a tragedy, or was he just thinking about it in terms of dollars and cents?
Spector: It’s a little bit of both. He’s more farsighted than some of his business peers. And I think he sees that he’s going to have to come to some sort of sustainable truce with union power. And there’s also that scene where he goes to [the union leader] Henderson’s house, and he sees his family and starts to understand the conditions that his workers are living in. So when he sees the troops start to aim and he’s looking at that little kid who is standing with the strikers, he realizes that killing a child is a step too far.
Courtesy of HBO
Marian calls off her engagement to Dashiell. When did she realize he wasn’t the right person for her to marry?
LouisaJacobson: It wasn’t love at first sight by any means. But after what she went through in Season 1 with Tom Raikes, she’s more open to the possibility of something that just makes sense and that is safer. And I think she tried a little bit to fall for Dashiell, and she got in too deep with his daughter and she didn’t think things through. So she has deep regrets about it when she breaks things off with him. But Dashiell, as she saw over the course of the season, he didn’t take her employment seriously. He didn’t want her to continue teaching watercolors when they are married. And that’s actually a big passion for Marian. It’s not just a flippant thing. So for him to be like, “Oh, it’s not serious,” is frustrating. And it made her realize, OK, I don’t feel good about this.
Why is Marian so drawn to Larry Russell?
Jacobson: She sees a similarity. Larry is also artistically minded, and has this interest in architecture. He wants to pave his own path. He doesn’t just want to follow in a family business. He’s sort of a free spirit. There’s an equality of interests there that’s really attractive to Marian.
Spector: They’re both searchers. They’re both still looking for the thing that’s going to be like their big purpose in life.
Would Marian be welcomed into the Russell family?
Coon: Marian would be a really good fit for the family. She’s ambitious like Bertha. Bertha has always liked Marian, and she’s stylish and modern in her thinking. She’s not afraid of this meritocracy that the Russell family is espousing.
But Agnes seems changed by her experiences this season. In the last episode, she has this revealing monologue about how her social connections will soon vanish now that her money is gone. She’s very aware of the tenuous nature of her power and influence.
Baranski: This season, you begin to see the cracks form in her rigidity. With both her niece and her sister, she comes to understand that she cannot stop the tide of change. And that’s a wonderful thing to play as an actor – to see the emotion coming through, and realize that this woman is not necessarily made of stone. But you have to set up that strong sense of what her history is and what her purpose is and what her worldview is, and then you can let the water to start seeping through the cracks.
Many of your characters are based on historical figures. Does that give you a sense of where your story might end?
Coon: When I was presented with the possibility of doing the show, there was an accompanying document that Julian Fellowes had written up about where Bertha was possibly going. And because she’s very closely tied to Alva Vanderbilt, we know that Alva married her daughter off to a duke. And we also know eventually she became an advocate for voting rights for women and divorced her husband. I hope the writers don’t do that to this amazing marriage we have created with George and Bertha, but I think that’s a really interesting arc for Bertha.
Benton: And sometimes our biggest dreams can be limited by the history. Because originally the writers were really hoping that Peggy and T. Thomas Fortune would have a longer love story. But he was a real person with a wife, so there wasn’t as much runway. That was disappointing.
Baranski: His wife could die.
Spector: People got run over by carriages all the time.
