Complications

Carrie Coon’s existential journey to television stardom.

- Michael Schulman

When Carrie Coon was five years old, she would lie awake at night contemplating the apocalypse. “I was so ready for the end of the world,” she said recently. “We weren’t evangelicals or anything, but I knew about the Book of Revelation, and I knew that Jesus was supposed to come back.” Coon was raised Catholic, in Copley, Ohio, and her father had gone to seminary before returning to run the family auto-parts store. “My parents would be watching ‘Johnny Carson’ or whatever, and I’d come out of my bedroom and say, ‘O.K., when is the world ending?’” she recalled. When they assured her that it wouldn’t be during her lifetime, she would say, “But you don’t know that. We don’t know when it’s happening.”

Decades later, Coon landed a role on the HBO drama “The Leftovers,” based on Tom Perrotta’s speculative novel, in which two per cent of the world’s population has spontaneously disappeared in a Rapture-like event, known as the Sudden Departure. The remaining ninety-eight per cent is left dumbfounded, and world religions crumble amid a surge of cults and charlatans. One woman, Nora Durst, has lost her husband and two children: her entire family gone in an instant.