A White Lotus star and three-time Emmy nominee recently opened up about a harrowing moment that caused her Broadway play, Bug, to be canceled twice.
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Carrie Coon appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers on Jan. 15 to promote the psychological thriller, written by her husband, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winner Tracy Letts.
“This is my chance to apologize publicly for cancelled shows — the day before, halfway through our Wednesday matinee, and then the Wednesday evening show, and it was my fault,” the 44-year-old told Meyers.
On Jan. 7, Bug canceled its matinee’s second act and the evening show “due to an illness in the company,” a rep told PEOPLE. Speaking with Meyers, Coon explained that she began coughing during the matinee after a scene involving squirting “fake blood into my nose.” While coughing is common during that stunt, she soon realized “my throat was closing every 12 seconds.”
“I could feel it coming, so I was trying to talk around it, but every now and then it would happen and my voice would [squeak] like this and the audience couldn’t really tell what was going on,” the Leftovers star recalled. “So we finish the act, we go offstage, and my director comes, he’s like, ‘Are you okay?’ And I said, ‘No, no I’m not okay.’ And they sent his assistant to the pharmacy, they got me Afrin and Pepsi AC and Advil and I just filled my body with things.”
Carrie Coon Saught Unorthodox Remedies After Over-the-Counter Medicines Didn’t Help
But the over-the-counter medicines didn’t help, forcing the show to cancel the rest of that performance and the evening show.
Letts and the Bug cast were unsure if she could perform for the show’s opening night.
“But I went back to her office, and there was an acupuncturist. He put needles in my ear, I don’t know,” she explained to Meyers, “and then I went and got a massage, and then I went and gave a whole speech to the cast about like, ‘This might happen, let’s just pretend the character has this problem, this laryngeal spasm,’ but it went away at like 5 o’clock.”
In Bug, Coon plays a waitress named Agnes who meets a drifter named Peter, played by Namir Smallwood. The two characters bond over conspiracy theories in an Oklahoma motel. The play was originally written in the 1990s by Letts and is now making its Broadway debut. In 2006, the play was adapted into a psychological horror film directed by The Exorcist legend William Friedkin and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon
“He was the one who said the night before, while we were going down the Google rabbit hole thinking I had a neurological disorder. He said, ‘It’s okay, maybe Agnes has this problem because of her trauma in her life, and we’re just going to embrace it,’ ” Coon said of her 60-year-old husband. “But it was a great show, and we had a lovely audience, and the reviews have been great.”
Bug is still running on Broadway at New York City’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.