Carrie Coon Details the Scary Reason She Had to Cancel Her Broadway Performance Mid-Show: I Was 'Not Okay'
- - Carrie Coon Details the Scary Reason She Had to Cancel Her Broadway Performance Mid-Show: I Was 'Not Okay'
Tommy McArdleJanuary 17, 2026 at 2:04 AM
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Carrie Coon explained why her Broadway play Bug recently cancelled two consecutive performances
Bug is written by her husband Tracey Letts
The White Lotus actress said the problem only resolved itself roughly one hour before the production's opening night performance on Thursday, Jan. 8
Carrie Coon is explaining why her Broadway play Bug recently cancelled two performances just before its opening night.
Coon, 44, appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers on Thursday, Jan. 15 to promote Bug, a psychological thriller written by Coon's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning husband 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," she said, as she opened up her conversation with host Seth Meyers.
Bug cancelled the second act of its Wednesday, Jan. 7 matinee performance and its evening performance the same day "due to an illness in the company," as a rep for the show told PEOPLE on Jan. 7. On Late Night, Coon explained that during the Wednesday matinee performance, she began to cough after a moment in the play in which she squirts "fake blood into my nose." While the actress said that coughing "is not unusual" when this happens, she quickly realized that "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," she said. "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."
As Coon said, over the counter medicines did not help ease the medical issue, leading to the cancellation of the rest of the performance and the Jan. 7 evening performance of Bug.
Matthew Murphy
Carrie Coon and Namir Smallwood in Bug
The White Lotus alum said she, Letts and the company of Bug were uncertain if she would be able to go on the next day for Bug's opening night performance. "But I went back to her office and there was an acupuncturist and he put needles in my ear, I don't know," she told Meyers, 52, "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."
Bug stars Coon as a waitress named Agnes and Namir Smallwood as a former soldier and drifter named Peter, who meet and discuss conspiracy theories at an Oklahoma motel. The play was first written by Letts, whom Coon married in 2013, in the 1990s and is currently making its debut on Broadway.
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Matthew Murphy
Carrie Coon in Bug
"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 husband, 60. "But it was a great show and we had a lovely audience and the reviews have been great."
Bug is playing on Broadway at New York City's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre now.
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
