Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for FLC
Actress Carrie Coon Shares Why Performances of Broadway Show ‘Bug’ Were Cancelled: “It Was My Fault”
Actress Carrie Coon, best known for her roles in shows like The Gilded Age and The White Lotus, has made her return to the Broadway stage.
However, her return hasn’t started off quite as smoothly as she would have liked.
Coon is starring in a play called Bug, which was written by her husband, Tracy Letts.
While the lead up to any show’s opening night is stressful, for Bug, things were extra nerve-wracking thanks to Coon having a negative reaction to the fake stage blood.
“This is my chance to apologize publicly for canceled shows,” Coon said in during her interview on the January 15 episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers. “The day before [opening night], halfway through our Wednesday matinee and then the Wednesday evening show. And it was my fault!”
Coon then clarified that she had only ever missed one other performance in her life prior to this, so it was a very strange situation.
“We were doing the matinee and there’s a moment where I squirt fake blood into my nose,” she explained. “And as soon as the fake blood hit my throat I started to cough. Which, you know, is not unusual. But then I realized that my throat was closing every 12 seconds.”
Coon then noted that her co-star Namir Smallwood could clearly tell something was wrong and had a look of panic in his eyes as they continued the scene.
“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 go like this,” Coon said, making her voice squeaky and strained.
Coon powered through and finished the first act of the show, hoping to find out what was going on with her throat during the show’s intermission.
“We go offstage, my director comes and he’s like ‘are you okay?’ and I said ‘No. No I’m not okay,’” she recounted. “They sent his assistant to the pharmacy, they got me Afrin and Pepcid AC and Advil, and I just filled my body with things.”
Unfortunately their makeshift cocktail of medications did not seem to help the situation.
With Coon’s throat still swelling up, the cast and crew felt they had no choice but to cancel the show and rush her off to the doctor.
“I went into an otolaryngologist at 5:00 p.m., we kept her, she stayed in her office,” Coon explained. “I got scoped and my vocal cords were totally fine. But you could see my throat just, like, contracting.”
There didn’t seem to be any medication the doctor could give Coon for the issue, so she went home and continued to experience the throat contractions throughout the night and the following day.
“The next day was our opening night, 6:00 p.m.,” Coon said. “We didn’t know if the show was going to go on because it was still happening.”
Coon decided to take a slightly different approach to calm her body down, while also preparing her fellow castmates for how to adapt the show to deal with her throat spasm.
“I went back to [the doctor’s] office and there was an acupuncturist and he put needles in my ear–I don’t know–and then I went and got a massage,” she said. “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.’”
Luckily, the spasm seemed to randomly disappear just in time, about an hour before the opening night show began.
“And my husband was terrified,” she said. “He’s worried about his opening night, but he’s also worried about his wife. So that was very stressful for him.”
Coon then clarified that, as the writer, her husband was totally on board with playing the spasm off as a condition her character has due to her trauma, if it came down to it.
“That was his way of saying ‘you can’t miss opening night,’” Meyers joked.
“Yeah, probably!” Coon responded with a laugh. “But it was a great show.”
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