Carrie Coon and Shea Whigham met in the police department of “Fargo,” where both strived to uphold the law in that crime series’ third season. They connected instantly together, becoming “fast friends” as Whigam says, and always wanted to work together again.
Both have established themselves as go-to ensemble actors on TV, with Coon appearing in “The Leftovers” and “The Gilded Age” and Whigham in “Boardwalk Empire,” “Homecoming” and “Perry Mason.”
Their movie roles have been plentiful but usually smaller, although Coon recently gained attention as one of the three co-stars, along with Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen in “His Three Daughters.”
Now they’ve finally found a vehicle to share the screen together, but this time, they’re not faces in the crowd but the two stars. “Lake George,” directed by Jeffrey Reiner, is essentially a two-hander in which Don (Whigham), a claims adjuster who took the fall for a mobster, has just emerged from prison and wants what he’s owed. Instead, said mobster (Glenn Fleshler) says he wants his disloyal ex, Phyllis (Coon), dead and assigns the task to the hapless Don.
Unable to pull the trigger on the brazen and impetuous Phyllis, the staid Don falls under her spell and the two wind their way from Glendale and Goleta up through Bishop and Mammoth Lakes, trying to get what they think is coming to them.
Whigham and Coon recently spoke by video about their own journey together. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Carrie, in a recent interview you discussed being a character actor and you said, “I’m always going to be part of the ensemble.” And yet, here you are as a leading lady.
Coon: Nobody offers me, or Shea, leading roles, even though they should. We do love being part of an ensemble but these are the roles we both have to fight for.
Whigham: Carrie has charisma off the charts. She’s a whirling dervish, a hurricane. She’s going to do leading roles from here on out. You can feel it with some people – Michael Shannon had this same thing.
Coon: Oh, people have been saying that for years.
Q: Phyllis’ moxie and assertiveness propels the story forward. How much did you relate to her?
Coon: There are ways in which Phyllis is closer to me than anything I’ve played. I often play emotional, serious, hyperverbal and high-strung women. But that’s actually not the way I move through the world. So it was really fun because I was more myself in this than I have been in any other work.
Whigham: When I gave her the script, I knew she’d love it. She called me within an hour and said, “Let’s do it.” Don has a lot of me too – he doesn’t say a lot but he does have a lot to say. One theme of the film is about guilt, which Don feels; at the end, he doesn’t get what he wants but he gets what he needs and gets done what he needs to take care of.
Q: Have Phyllis or Don stayed inside you since filming ended?
Coon: She is relentlessly positive and if something happens, she immediately pivots. I’m not inclined that way. I’m a lot more cynical than Phyllis, so I should probably be leaning into her traits in these troubled times.
Whigham: I’ve seen the film several times and each time I get something different out of it but Don has definitely stayed with me.
Q: Carrie, when I interviewed you in 2016, you talked about preparing for your characters in great depth, even before auditioning for a role. How did each of you find your character for “Lake George”?
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Coon: It’s interesting to reflect back on that. My tendency was always to read and do research and all those delightful things you do before you have a family. Now I do have a family, and I don’t have time to do anything to prepare. Now hopefully I have my lines memorized. And then it’s really about just being in the moment with the other person, which seems simple, but in acting, you always return to those first principles. The most important thing you’re doing is listening. And if you’re listening, that means you’re breathing. And then hopefully something accidental and spontaneous happens inside of the structure.
Whigham: Early on, you learn each role is different but you do the same type of preparation, whether it’s for this or “Mission Impossible.” I want the script in my hand so I can daydream on it and go take walks on it and let things come to you. I don’t force things. When you’re young, you might force things.
There’s a scene where our characters are walking in the forest and connecting but we didn’t want to go the cliché route. I said, “We need something here but I don’t know what it is.”
And Carrie said, “Watch this.” And they called action and she did a cartwheel right in front of me. That’s not in the script, but it’s happening between these two people and you want to allow for that to come in with all the work that you do on the script.
Q: This film was shot in places like Glendale, Mammoth Lakes and Bishop, which aren’t typical spots for Hollywood movies. What did that bring to the film?
Whigham: This was a personal movie for Jeffrey – we used his house and his sister’s house and his car.
Coon: I destroyed his transmission.
Whigham: Beforehand, I said to Carrie, “I know you don’t like coming out to Los Angeles. I get it. We all started in New York or Chicago. But we’re going to take you on a trip all the way through and it’s a love letter to Southern California.”
Coon: It was such a gift to do a California movie. And I had never gone north. I’d never been to Lake George, I’d never been to the hills where all those great westerns have been shot. In my free time, I got to walk around in the hills and sort of reflect back on all that film history and just the breathtaking beauty. This is a noir movie but it’s also a road picture, and it’s a buddy movie, and it’s a love letter to all of those genres. And I just love that it took place where all of those were born, which is in California. And it was a real education for me about the contours of that place.
Whigham: And it was hard for Carrie because she’s very proud so when we were filming up there I said, “Do you like it now?” She said, “It’s OK.” But she loved it.