Carrie Coon Ditched Marvel Because of Their Insulting Offer

Many artistic jobs for inexperienced folks (films, plays, doing interviews at comic conventions) are offered with one kind of compensation: experience. That can be valuable early on. Actors, writers, and other production folks with minimal on-the-job training get hired for paying gigs if they have done those gigs before. So, they sometimes have to take a loss and do things for free. Ideally, it doesn’t happen for long, but many factors could contribute to how long it takes to get out of that zone. Multiple award nominations would push an actor past that point, right? Not so!

Carrie Coon has multiple award nominations (including Tony and Emmy noms). By the time she appeared in Avengers: Infinity War she had noms out of the wazoo, had won a Critics Choice Television Award, and had an extensive filmography of high-profile projects by people like David Fincher and Steven Spielberg. Carrie Coon is a talented, experienced actress and any production company would be lucky enough to have her. Certainly, one of the most successful companies in the history of the world wouldn’t try to big-time her, right?! Right?!?!? Wrong again!!!

Coon appeared as Proxima Midnight in Infinity War, which ended up being one of the most successful films of all time. She’s fantastic, albeit slightly underused, as one of Thanos’ powerful henchpeople. Coon even did the motion capture for the character. She was in it. While she would later go on to reprise her role in an episode of What If…?, the Fargo actress did not return for Avengers: Endgame. Now, we know why (according to her husband anyway). Disney tried to pay Carrie by giving her the privilege to be in the MCU. So, she told them to go screw.

“I believe [Marvel] went to her for the second one, and they asked her to be in the second one,” her husband, Tracy Letts, said on the Big Picture Podcast. “And she said, ‘Well, the first one is the most successful movie ever made. Are you going to pay me any more money?’ And they said, ‘No. We’re not going to pay you any more money.’” The nerve! The gal! This is Carrie f***ing Coon. Her character has a name! She put on one of those stupid ping-pong suits! You couldn’t give her any more money?!

According to Letts, Disney was not pleased that Coon pushed back on their insulting offer. “She said, ‘Wow, you’re not going to pay me any more money, then I don’t think I’m going to do it,’” he noted. “And they said, ‘Well, you should feel yourself fortunate to be part of the Marvel Universe.’ So she declined … We would’ve made a bigger deal out of this, but it would have involved us watching the movies and we weren’t going to do that.” Coon is a professional, so she spoke positively about her experience with Marvel at the time, but, if what Letts is saying is true, it’s some Grade A horse s***.

Acting is hard work and you can go a long time without earning a paycheck. Someone in Coon’s position, who is performing for a living, shouldn’t have to work for free unless she wants to. That can happen when someone of her stature wants to help a smaller theater or production company. That shouldn’t happen when she’s doing work for a megacorporation that has enough to (presumably) drop a billion dollars to resurrect a bunch of old X-Men and former Avengers.