Carrie Coon joins Samantha Bee to discuss being a classic midwestern middle child, almost attending a naval academy, how the first decision she ever made in her life was to go to graduate school, why comedians are the darkest people, and how when she was younger she would collect boyfriends and leave the country rather than break up with them (didn’t we all??).

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Samantha Bee, Carrie Kuhn

Samantha Bee  01:37

Hello, dear listeners, fall is in the air. It’s time for the September scaries, including school supplies, parent teacher conferences and tuition payments. At least that last one is top of my mind because my oldest child just started college, and they said they weren’t going to accept all of Mike quince points, college is one of those crazy things in America that you’re told you need in order to get ahead, but it is so much more expensive and so much more attainable than ever you want to go to the right school, but not a school that will make you seem like an elitist. Should you ever run for president? You want to be involved in campus activities. You want to make your mark, but don’t put anything questionable in writing. Should you once again, ever end up running for president? Today, I wanted to talk to all of you college fresh people waking up from the hangover of orientation, if you’re spending the next few weeks trying on different classes for size, oh, boy. I hope you have some fun with it, if you can, if you can even entertain the idea of having some fun with it. Look, I entered college thinking that I was going to be a lawyer, but I ended up with a comedy career. All I’m trying to say is that you might not know exactly what you want to do forever, when you’re 18 and it’s so okay. We don’t always encourage people to embrace not knowing the choice to make, but I do think we do need to do more of that. It’s okay to live in the unknown for a while, it’s okay to test things out. It’s okay to be really bad at something and change your mind if you are lucky enough to get the opportunity to go to college, I hope you squeeze out all the juice from that orange.

 

Samantha Bee  03:48

This is Choice Words. I’m Samantha. Beat my guest today is perhaps actually undoubtedly my favorite actor of all time. I feel like I started podcasting just so I could interview her. It is true. Oh, I love Carrie Kuhn with my entire self. Look, you know, Carrie from the leftovers, which I cannot stop talking about from the Gilded Age. And her new film, His Three Daughters, is out soon. We talked about how she had close to 50 majors in college, from business to Japanese to English, philosophy, political science. Look, if it existed, she dabbled, and I think that is so great. It certainly helped her to become one of my favorite people ever, so take a listen and make good choices.

 

Samantha Bee  04:50

So, okay, okay, so listeners, we’ve been waiting for this conversation for years, and then we were talking for like 15 full minutes technology died, and the Earth’s axis shifted, and our entire recording vanished. It was raptured, very leftovers. So we’re starting again, and I love it because I want to talk to you forever, because you’re my absolute favorite. But we are going to I’m going to ask Carrie, who is one of the most important people in my life right now, my god.

 

Carrie Kuhn  05:28

You’re making my face turn pink.

 

Samantha Bee  05:30

I know you’re not going to want to talk to me ever again because I gushed too much. And I bet like you’re Midwestern, I’m Canadian. We don’t take compliments well.

 

Carrie Kuhn  05:41

No, we don’t.

 

Samantha Bee  05:42

It’s horrible.

 

Carrie Kuhn  05:44

I know, I keep ducking out of the frame.

 

Samantha Bee  05:47

If someone says something nice to me, I start to sweat. My body goes like I want to go inside my own navel. I want to crawl up inside.

 

Carrie Kuhn  05:57

So why can’t we receive anything? I guess we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. That’s what on the other side.

 

Samantha Bee  06:06

Yeah, you like me now, but just wait.

 

Carrie Kuhn  06:08

Just wait. I’m still damaged.

 

Samantha Bee  06:12

so I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask her this very important question about choice again, and I’m hoping that, because it was is fantastic. We talked about choices and like big swings, a big choice in your life that you think changed the trajectory of absolutely everything in your answer was incredible.

 

Carrie Kuhn  06:33

Well, as I said in our previous iteration, I feel like I never made any choices until I was about 30, because I was such a Midwestern people pleaser, because I was raised Catholic, and I came from a big family middle child, and I was taught to say yes, and I was a very good girl and a very good student, and I also never made any trouble for my parents as a very good girl, I was the class president and The Homecoming Queen. And I was, by all outward appearances, incredibly high functioning person, but what I was actually doing is compartmentalizing and shape shifting to accommodate whoever, whoever I was talking to. And that’s why I was popular, right? I could sort of move through any circle socially, right? Because I was just and I but I also as as I think people like who, who suffer from this particular affliction feel never really felt like I was actually fitting in anywhere. So that’s what the secret was. Right. I looked very successful and very um settled, and I was actually incredibly unsettled and uncomfortable in my own right skin, and again, was constitutionally incapable of having any kind of conflict. So I was incapable of advocating for myself in any way, especially about my emotional needs. And as as such, I was a terrible girlfriend, as we related to that Samantha, I was a serial overlapper Because I I was incapable of breaking up with anybody. And so I would just gather boyfriends and try to juggle them and enlist the help of my entire dorm to help me do that, and all my roommates, which was very punishing for everybody involved.

 

Samantha Bee  08:05

And try to force them to break up with you.

 

Carrie Kuhn  08:07

Yes, big mistakes that they would actually, pull the trigger on that. But in fact, it never quite worked out that way. It was. It’s terrible. And I said I actually, one time I was dating two boys, and I just, instead of dealing with I just left the country, I decided to study abroad in Spain. And I thought that was, you know, so, and I was gonna leave letters.

 

Samantha Bee  08:24

I bet they waited for you.

 

Carrie Kuhn  08:25

So I came home. I don’t hate, I mean, hopefully they never listen to this. I came home the next day after the plane landed, I went to one’s house and I told him what had been going on, and then I went to the other guy’s house and I told him what had been going on, and then I was on like a hunger strike, like I fasted for three days. You know, it’s very Catholic, too. You have to punish yourself, of course. And then, and then I got back together with.

 

Samantha Bee  08:46

Stop it.

 

Carrie Kuhn  08:47

We got back together. We were together until I left for graduate school, which is my big decision that I finally made.

 

Samantha Bee  08:53

Oh, my God.

 

Carrie Kuhn  08:54

He’s a very dear friend of mine still, actually.

 

Samantha Bee  08:57

But I love him for that, for

 

Carrie Kuhn  08:59

His kind of a great, great guy. Yeah, he ended up where he should be. Wasn’t with me.

 

Samantha Bee  09:07

It’s good.

 

Carrie Kuhn  09:08

But the only decision I ever made was going to graduate school, because I had never made a decision up to that point, even my even my decision to go to to undergrad was sort of by default, because even though I was a straight A student and I was at good grades and blah. I really hadn’t prepared myself for the transition, and because I outwardly looked very competent, nobody was helping me make that transition. So I almost went to the Enable Academy, Annapolis Naval Academy, which is insane now when you think about my life, and when I finally ended that process, I had an offer to play soccer at the University of Mount Union. So I just said, okay, because I could afford it, they gave me good financial aid, and Kenyan didn’t, which is where I wanted to go, and so I could afford to go. There I was on academic scholarship, and I said, my first week I was a business and Japanese major. And then.

 

Samantha Bee  09:54

That’s so funny.

 

Carrie Kuhn  09:55

Really, I know it’s absurd. Realized very quickly in Kanji class that it probably wasn’t a. A natural fit for that trajectory. I was like, I’ll do international business, you know, something I heard about on a TV show, I’m sure.

 

Samantha Bee  10:06

And so Japanese, like.

 

Carrie Kuhn  10:08

Never had any exposure to Japanese at all. It was insane. I don’t know what I was thinking. And so very quickly, I became an education major, and I did my classroom observations. I was in a special education class, and I realized that I was not special enough to be a teacher, and I dropped that. And then I joined the philosophy department, and I was flirting with poli sci of course. I took no math. I was purely I went pure logic after that. So that kind of led me to philosophy. And then what else did I do? And at that point, I had amassed enough credits in English literature, just because that was something I loved. Was always a big reader. So I had an English literature major by default, and I actually got a Spanish literature degree also. So I did a thesis in English Lit, a thesis in Spanish lit. I had a psych minor. I studied abroad in Spain to run away from my boyfriends and my sister’s from El Salvador. And so I always had an interest in Spanish anyway, and I was waiting for somebody to tell me what to do. I didn’t know what to do, and I had worked up a thesis on language acquisition. And as I said before, if you read the Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, you realize what an insufferable cliche my whole life was up until that point. And and I was, I was kind of talking to the Poli Sci department, you know, what? What should I? What could I parlay this into? And I was looking for some mentor to give me guidance, and finally, Dr hendl, in the theater department, I had done maybe four or five plays. My grandparents used to pick me up from soccer games and drive me back to school, you know, to rehearse plays in my university. They were wonderful. They were my mom’s parents were always there for me. And he said, I think you should go to graduate school for acting. And he said, you can go to these university slash resident theater auditions. I think they still have them, and you can go and audition for all of these graduate programs at once, and I think you could go to graduate school to be an actor. And I had never, it had never occurred to me I had seen a play when I was 10, and I had obviously done two plays, so I had a secret hope. One play, one play at the Akron Civic Theater, beautiful, atmospheric theater. My, you know, my friend’s parents took me because my mom didn’t drive us anywhere because she worked Nice. Worked nice, and so he wanted to go somewhere where you had to go ride. I ended up going to the Palmer House in Chicago with my mom and her sisters and my grandma. And they were just like trash. They were just drinking martinis the whole weekend while I walked into these rooms where all these people, some of them had been out in the world being actors, and who were now because the economy was just kind of starting to turn it was still good. So people didn’t generally go to acting school right out of undergrad. They wanted you to have experience in the world before you got in. So it was already unlikely I was going to get in. So all these guys were like, these people are stretching and doing vocal exercises. I’m just standing like, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. And so the stakes were kind of low, because I thought there was no chance in hell I was going to get in. I had worked up a monolog from Imogen and Cymbeline. And then, you know, the Heidi Chronicles, like you say, was the last play my professor would probably see. God bless you, Dr Hendel and and then I ended up getting called back to Rutgers and got on their waiting list, but they never invited me to the program. And then the UW Madison, Wisconsin, called me, I mean literally, a couple of weeks before school started, to offer me their final spot in their group of 10 actors for three years in a program that they were revamping. And I said to my parents, I said, do you think I should go to grad school for acting? That seems very impractical. And they were like, what the hell, why not? And so I got in my car and I drove to Wisconsin, and I found an apartment by the Capitol and then spent three years banging around in Wisconsin, that famous art school.

 

Carrie Kuhn  10:36

That most worlds are now.

 

Carrie Kuhn  12:53

I believe polymer science is really their you know, because the actors are kept in the basement of a brutalist building the most uninspired.

 

Samantha Bee  13:40

Academy Award winning actors, yeah, left, right and center, yes.

 

Carrie Kuhn  13:44

I believe that program is now defunct, but, yeah.

 

Samantha Bee  13:47

That was the revamp. They were like, wind it down. This story is incredible to me. And I mean, first of all, I want to, I want to remark that like, thank God you took a bunch of weird risks in college. And I wish that more people actually could do that, because it helps you, kind of, it helps you to narrow your focus, or, like, you need to try a bunch of weird shit, like

 

Carrie Kuhn  14:14

Study abroad.

 

Samantha Bee  14:16

Study abroad.

 

Carrie Kuhn  14:17

And go to a school where you have that flexibility to change majors, 100.

 

Samantha Bee  14:21

Well, I went to college in Canada when it cost me $800 my first semester, and I took calculus. So it was like, because I was like, I should be.

 

Carrie Kuhn  14:31

Trying that out.

 

Samantha Bee  14:32

Yeah, I should try Advanced Math. Because I never, I never tried it before. But what if I’m a genius? It was no more student they’ve ever had. They were trying to get out.

 

Carrie Kuhn  14:45

Congratulations.

 

Samantha Bee  14:47

Get the fuck out of this class. But like, what a beautiful I mean, it’s a beautiful story. It’s like risk and choice, and just like doing something fucking wild, you. At what point from the program did you go, Oh, I am actually going to do this. Like, this is actually what I want. I want this.

 

Carrie Kuhn  15:07

Well, comically, I was teaching acting as a TA, which took a little while to find my great mayor. So that was interesting. And I think so I had a great voice teacher. Her name was Susan Sweeney. Is Susan Sweeney. She’s still alive, sorry. And she had taught at the pttp in Delaware, which is this famous program that was based, kind of started in est, you know, from the 70s that sort of weird, you know, breaking you down and remaking you. So they’re the actors in that program have a very particular vocabulary. It’s kind of strange or alumni world that they come from. And so she, she brought some of those just amazing voice work. And old school voice work, I like what we call the International Phonetic Alphabet, how you learn dialects, the Edith Skinner method. So really old school voice work. And I loved it. I was an English Lit major. Obviously I was. It was rooted in language for me. The language made sense to me. So that was a really and I was a cerebral actor. I would always read books around the thing I was doing. I wasn’t necessarily in my body. I was an athlete, and I felt I understood the symmetry between the flow state that you’re in as a an athlete and the flow state you’re in as an artist. That made sense to me too. So that was always a strength, that was I was connected to my body in a way that I think, frankly, a lot of Americans probably aren’t, certainly a lot of Midwesterners aren’t. But that voice work, I mean, I literally found my voice in that class, because I had, I think, never taken a deep breath my life, and I sounded like a pirate, you know? I come from the bra, the AI sound and the Rs. I had never really heard myself talking like that. You know, you go to Wisconsin, it gets worse. I still hear I did an audition yesterday, and the Midwestern a that was popping out, and my audition was hilarious anyway.

 

Samantha Bee  16:45

When you go back there, do you slide right back into it? Oh, instantly for me, when I go to Canada, instant.

 

Carrie Kuhn  16:51

Like, there you are. Wherever you go, there you are. Oh yeah, the people start talking, and there you go. My family’s getting worse, I think. But I was I the voice work really spoke to me and.

 

Samantha Bee  17:03

Yeah,

 

Carrie Kuhn  17:04

You know, I have to say I’ve talked about, I talked about this in a New Yorker profile a number of years ago. One of the things we haven’t talked about is I was also a compulsive skin picker, which was another big secret I had in my life. Yeah, it had been happening since I was two years old. I never picked my face, so people didn’t see it, but it was my the rest of my body. And the thing that I had come to understand is that what that is, what that impulse is about, is about absence. It’s about taking yourself out of the present in order to process whatever or you do when you’re bored, when you’re hungry, when you’re tired, when you’re sad, you know, and it’s brain chemistry, right? You’re creating, actually, like a little dopamine spike. And I was so addicted, and I was incapable of being still, and the breath work is what led me to meditation, which is what led me to sort of try to create space between the moment of impulse and the actual action. And that work was what led me into therapy. And so, you know, graduate school was this door opening into becoming a more integrated person, right, and healing myself and using art, using the process of becoming an actor, it actually was the gateway to profound healing in my life and in my body. Now that healing wouldn’t come full circle until I turned 30, when I met Tracy and I did Virginia Woolf, that was another huge transition in my life. But if I hadn’t gone to graduate school. I honestly don’t know what my how I would have turned out, because mentally, I was not healthy person and but nobody could tell, nobody, nobody could tell.

 

Samantha Bee  18:35

We’ll be right back after this.

 

Samantha Bee  21:55

There are so many, I mean, talk about sliding doors. There are so many paths you might have taken, just because they were a little bit easier or more expected, expected, like, law school, whatever, you know.

 

Carrie Kuhn  22:50

Right, yeah.

 

Samantha Bee  22:51

Got your degree. Now, let’s you want to be able to pay a mortgage, you want to have, like, health insurance, so you got to get a job. So what’s the job?

 

Carrie Kuhn  22:59

Settle down and have your famili, I’m sure my my grandparents thought I would marry the quarterback. You know, they thought I was that girl when I brought him an old playwright. They were who wrote like dirty plays. Everybody was very disconcerted. Like he’s so old.

 

Samantha Bee  23:17

WWWhat does he do? You think that you would be primarily a theater actor? Did you like what kind of.

 

Carrie Kuhn  23:27

I was, the other gift that that UW Madison gave me was they brought in a lot of professionals. So I ended up doing, I ended up being invited to participate in our town. Richard Corley was the artistic director at the time, and I ended up doing our town as a professional with André De Shields, the great André De Shields, playing with Stage Manager. And that was I actually got caught, got credit for that, even though it was a professional show. And then I ended up going back to the Madison Repertory Theater, rip, it’s great space. And doing Anna, Christie and, and Frank, I ended up working professionally at that theater for a number of years. Likewise, they invited the artistic director of the American players theater in Wisconsin, a gorgeous place. It was just written up in the Times this week. Actually, it’s a wonderful regional theater. It’s one of the only theaters that still has a company. So I ended up, after graduate school, I went immediately out there to do an apprenticeship, and at that apprenticeship, I met a lot of directors who were based around the country at other Shakespeare theaters, but also in Chicago, which, of course, was the closest big city and a Midwestern city, so very relatable for me. And I was in that company for four years. That was almost eight months of my life for four years. And I was, I, you know, you pick blackberries and swim in the river, and then you go rehearse Shakespeare, and then you perform it under a full moon. I mean, it’s a really special place, and you’re also filling an 1100 seat house, so you have to find in your body and in your voice how to be in that space, truthfully, but reaching the back of the house, that education, I just feel like so few young actors get that kind of education anymore. In acting, you can mean that scale, to try to tell the truth. At that scale, you can almost do anything after that, right? And I would have been very content to be a company member at that theater. I love that theater, and I thought that’s where I was headed. I was really gunning to be in the company at American players theater. I really wanted it, but I started to get commercials in Chicago, and then my third year in Chicago, that was when I was finally cast in the main stage at Steppenwolf by Erica Daniels, who had been my judge at the urda Auditions when I had no idea what Steppenwolf company was, and she had advocated for me in Chicago. She had put some auditions in my way, and she kept calling me into Steppenwolf. She kind I don’t know if she remembered me from the urdas, but.

 

Samantha Bee  25:40

Okay.

 

Carrie Kuhn  25:41

She claimed she did.

 

Samantha Bee  25:42

Okay.

 

Carrie Kuhn  25:42

But I think she, she claims she did, and she and she always invited me to audition, and eventually, I finally got the main stage job that I had coveted. And that’s when I started to understand I did have instincts about material, and I knew what was good for me and what I was going to be good at, and I knew what roles weren’t mine. Roles belong to somebody else, right? And that became really clear, and that’s where I met Tracy, and that’s where my life got, got really kind of shifted into the next phase.

 

Samantha Bee  26:11

Right, how do you choose projects? Or do do projects choose you? Do you choose? Or is it like a meeting of the minds? Because I mean, and people are people write parts for you. They think of you, they write the part for you now.

 

Carrie Kuhn  26:27

That’s happening now, yeah, yeah. When you’re younger, you say yes. When you’re younger, you say yes, and you get chosen, and you wait for people to choose you, and you have no control, then you get to the privileged position I’m in, where you get to choose what to say yes to. And for us, I would say in our house, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright husband always it’s a writing that’s the first and foremost consideration, because if it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage, as we like to say, and no matter what you do, you’re probably you’re not gonna be able to fix it.

 

Samantha Bee  26:57

So words have never been spoken. My husband and I talk about that all the time, because so we are also, we also work in this business together, and we’re like, if the writing’s not there, there is literally nothing you can do to go in and fix it. It just is what it is you can.

 

Carrie Kuhn  27:14

So if you’re not willing to accept what it is, don’t sign up.

 

Samantha Bee  27:18

You can bring your whole heart to it, but you can’t make it real.

 

Carrie Kuhn  27:21

No, you can’t. And I don’t know if anybody even knows anymore What’s good, but we can talk about that, right? But good writing. And then secondly is, is it asking something from me that I haven’t done before, that it’s compelling or interesting to me, is it seeing me in a new way, right? Is it asking for more of me than has been asked previously, and then, of course, the third thing you have to say is, what will this do in terms of the advancement or the longevity of my career? What does it contribute? And of course, included in that is sometimes the financial consideration, which is, is this one of those jobs you can’t really afford to turn down because now you have two children and two nannies?

 

Samantha Bee  27:55

Yeah.

 

Carrie Kuhn  27:55

There’s that job too.

 

Samantha Bee  27:57

Now you gotta play the college, yeah, play the game a little bit.

 

Carrie Kuhn  27:59

Exactly, paying for elementary school. Sorry, my side, I think, is somebody who needed that. And I’m a public school kid, and I believe in public school, but man, you know, my kid needed something else. And oh my gosh, yeah, just so painful.

 

Samantha Bee  28:14

Oh, it’s all very painful. It is painful to write a check to.

 

Carrie Kuhn  28:18

And a privilege to be able to do it. Of course.

 

Samantha Bee  28:20

Yes, of course. Oh, my God, I have so many questions for you. Okay, I was, you know, I was so familiar with your work on such a deep level. I mean, we talked all about this. None of you can listen to it, because it disappears.

 

Carrie Kuhn  28:35

Doesn’t exist anymore, into the ephemeral, like all of us.

 

Samantha Bee  28:39

But you and I was also reading about what other people have, because I know how I feel about your work, but I you know, I wanted to read how other people define it in a way, or talk about it. And I read something that Damon Lindelof wrote, which is that you tune into a dangerous frequency, and that, to me, was the most that I thought hit to the actual that was like the the the button that was the one for me, because.

 

Carrie Kuhn  29:10

I haven’t heared that.

 

Samantha Bee  29:11

True, you tune into a frequency that is very dangerous and like a darkness in all the light, in all the everything, there’s something so deep. And I it just resonates with me so hard. You’re just, you just go there.

 

Carrie Kuhn  29:30

Oh, that means a lot to me. I think it started young. I used to wake up during Johnny Carson and come out of my room and say, I was five or six. I’d be like, so Jesus, let’s talk about Jesus. When is he coming back? And my bird’s like, we he’s not coming back in here. Back in your life, I’m like, you don’t know that. Nobody knows when Jesus is coming back. What am I gonna get married and have children like?

 

Samantha Bee  29:49

Do I have time?

 

Carrie Kuhn  29:54

I love my mummies.

 

Samantha Bee  29:56

Oh, my god, me too. Did you ever have oh my gosh, when we, I’m a little older than you. I’m probably, I’m 54 very when.

 

Carrie Kuhn  30:04

Barely.

 

Samantha Bee  30:05

Thank you, just out of fresh out of college. But we had King Tut. Was like a huge I was just, it was like, King Tut.

 

Carrie Kuhn  30:16

Totally.

 

Samantha Bee  30:17

I had a friend who had a t shirt that said, Don’t touch my Tuts with two little Tuts.

 

Carrie Kuhn  30:26

I have to have a store for your podcast. You have to buy in your store.

 

Samantha Bee  30:29

It’s the only item that would ever be in the store. Don’t touch my Tuts, this is all.

 

Carrie Kuhn  30:36

I totally buy that.

 

Samantha Bee  30:38

Death, like I thought death. I’m an only child, but like, oh, wow, I obsessed with like and still, and still, there’s that, core interest in like mummy ism, what does it look like? So I guess a lot of material that you grapple with has to do with death and has to do with, you know, different planes of different dimensions of existence. And this new, the new film that I just saw is his three daughters. It’s beautiful, and it, you know what? It’s like a play.

 

Carrie Kuhn  31:12

It is like a play.

 

Samantha Bee  31:13

It is like a play. And it opens with your monolog, yeah? You just like, it’s the entry point to the whole world, and it’s really beautiful. Okay, so the it’s, you’re with Natasha, Leon, Elizabeth Olsen, all of you are great. And you played three sisters who returned home as your father is dying. Two sisters return home to the one sister who’s already there. And it is full of conflict.

 

Carrie Kuhn  31:43

You, like that.

 

Samantha Bee  31:44

I definitely deeply liked it. There was one moment where gives your your characters battling with Natasha Leon’s character in particular. You know, everybody brings their own thing to the table. And there’s a moment where she kind of walks out of frame. And I know, as a person who knows how the sausage is all being made, she’s walking toward the camera, and your eyes follow her, and the look in your eyes, the seething, the seething, was so deeply felt by me. I was like, If anyone ever looked at me like that, I would cease to exist in one second. And I was like, and you know what? I know what Carrie’s looking at. I know she’s looking at like 15 people who are standing there with sandwiches and a bunch of cables, and a lot of lights. And still, it doesn’t sound like you played that role in your own family.

 

Carrie Kuhn  32:41

Yeah, it’s more of a harmonizer. I mean, I was responsible, and I am a know it all. I still firmly believe that if my siblings did everything I told them to do, their lives would be better.

 

Samantha Bee  32:51

Oh my gosh.

 

Carrie Kuhn  32:52

They, you know, so annoying they hate it.

 

Samantha Bee  32:55

I love that so much. Just wish, I feel like people should just ask us how they want the world.

 

Carrie Kuhn  33:01

We’ll fix it. It’s probably about time for the ladies to get a shot, don’t you think?

 

Samantha Bee  33:05

Listen, I say this all the time. I’m like, you need to give control of all the levers of everyone to women. Just eat for five years.

 

Carrie Kuhn  33:14

Just let us give you five years.

 

Samantha Bee  33:15

Watch us go for five years. If you don’t like things better, at the end of five years, you can have the whole thing back. You have that whole enchilada back, and you can with that as much as you want.

 

Carrie Kuhn  33:27

But give us five years.

 

Samantha Bee  33:28

You’re not gonna You’re not gonna want it. You’re not gonna want it back, because we’re gonna fix it. Do you? Oh, wow, yeah. You’re from Ohio. You’d love to be loving JD Vance right now, just like a whole.

 

Carrie Kuhn  33:40

Trolling JD Vance and Frank Larose is like half of my life right now. I know it’s just Twitter, but man, do I, you know, I went to school Frank Larose, the Secretary of State, and, oh, wow. I find the the implosion of JD Vance gives me so much pleasure every single day, because he has done absolutely nothing for Ohio and absolutely nothing for my family so, so.

 

Samantha Bee  34:00

There absolutely nothing. Oh, boy, I can’t wait for that. I’m so excited for the debate.

 

Samantha Bee  34:35

Yeah, I’m just, I get goosebumps thinking about it.

 

Samantha Bee  34:46

We’ll be right back after this.

 

Samantha Bee  36:59

You’re very active, you’re very political. You talk about climate change a lot. Do you okay when you I mean, obviously, the climate’s changing. We’ve talked about it already, like, we’ve referenced it like 10 times in this interview, because we’ll feel that way. And got little, got my little solar panels, I’m like, ready to go for whatever.

 

Carrie Kuhn  38:40

Jealous.

 

Samantha Bee  38:41

But how do you I mean, it was so hard, even working on, like, even having my TV shows, really, anytime we did anything climate themed, people literally turned off their televisions, and you could track it, track the data, and you’d be like, this is the the point where you said climate is when everybody went and made.

 

Carrie Kuhn  39:01

Incredible.

 

Samantha Bee  39:01

You went to the bathroom and turned you off and went and, like, read a book instead. Do you see that changing? Do you see more engagement just from not?

 

Carrie Kuhn  39:13

No, I think you know what it’s going to take. I hate to say this out loud, but what it’s going to take is a mass dying event that happens because of wet bulb temperatures in some place like Texas, if overnight, suddenly, 12,000 people die because there’s what won’t evaporate. People are going to say, wait a minute, and at that point it will be too late, because we really have, I mean, if you, if you’re paying attention to any of the really, like wonky climate scientists, right now, we have this, the tipping points. Some of the stuff that’s happening around us is not what they anticipated at all. It’s happening. It’s such an accelerated rate. And they’re like, we have three months, three months to mitigate, or we’re gonna hit, I mean, the temperatures we’re gonna hit in my children’s lifetime. I mean, they’re gonna be in their 20s when we hit these and if. Course the poor people will die first, and people won’t care. It happens all the time. It’s happening right now. Poor people are already dying. You know, 500 people died in one night on the Hajj. People didn’t pay any attention to that news.

 

Samantha Bee  40:10

No.

 

Carrie Kuhn  40:11

It’s going to take white people dying somewhere for other white people to say, Oh, no. What have they done?

 

Samantha Bee  40:17

They’ll be like, why didn’t you tell us that there was something, that there was a problem.

 

Carrie Kuhn  40:21

Yeah, hey guys. And the thing is, you know, it’s because I think, I think people shut down, because, on some level, they know what it requires is sacrificing the entire way of life that we’re living. And people just can’t even, they’re trying to pay the bills, and they can’t reckon with it. I mean, most people can’t even recycle. They don’t have the bandwidth, because part of what late stage capitalism does, it keeps people, you know, enslaved to that machine. And it’s an impossible, it’s impossible. You cannot thrive in that machine. It keeps you, it intentionally keeps you running, and so you don’t have time to pay attention to these things, which are unfortunately existential. And no, I don’t know that we’re gonna, it’s gonna take something really catastrophic. We’re seeing, I think we’re seeing, we saw climate move up the list of concerns as people get pulled in the presidential race. And I think people who do know, and young people certainly know how screwed they are. I think that’s part of the enthusiasm, because we know if we have a Republican administration, they’re literally got to take away the EPA, at any climate issues, so we’re already behind. And if they take away even the very small effort we’ve made, then we’re we’re just dead so much faster. But we are dead. I mean, I really believe that.

 

Samantha Bee  41:33

Right, I mean, we’re all cruising toward our deaths.

 

Carrie Kuhn  41:36

Yeah, which is why I’m not gonna get Botox, like it’s just something. You’re not gonna maintain your Botox. And the apocalypse, no one’s going to be around to shoot your face full of Botox. So I’m not going to do it, because it doesn’t matter.

 

Samantha Bee  41:46

AAll the boil, all the Botox is boiled. It doesn’t work anymore. […]

 

Carrie Kuhn  41:53

It just melts out of your face.

 

Samantha Bee  41:55

It just melts right out of your face.

 

Carrie Kuhn  41:57

That’s why I just don’t care about so many of I mean, I hope that making entertainment is at least doing no harm.

 

Samantha Bee  42:06

I think it does no harm. I think it does no harm, and it’s needed palliative care, you do need a moment. You do need a moment. At the end, unfortunately, as a person who works primarily or has worked in comedy. The only thing I want to watch is everyone literally getting raptured.

 

Carrie Kuhn  42:25

That track team with comedian. Comedians are the darkest people.

 

Samantha Bee  42:28

Darkest, I know everyone’s like, what fun? What’s your summer beach read? I’m like, I’m reading a book about the Holocaust.

 

Carrie Kuhn  42:36

Nuclear.

 

Samantha Bee  42:37

Do you want to, can I’m gonna finish, gonna reread Chernobyl because it’s a real page after the second time. Oh, my God. Okay, so you and your husband. You both I mean, just as I stated prior to our interview, departing, um, you are my power couple, like you’re the power couple the entertainment powerhouses that I looked to, because I like that. My husband and I are in the same industry. I think it’s helpful. The language is shared. Do you feel that?

 

Carrie Kuhn  43:14

Absolutely we love working together. Tracy and I haven’t worked together a lot on camera, but we’ve done a lot of theater together. I’ve done a lot of his plays, mostly that he’s written very little acting on stage together, but we worked really well together. And I it’s so important to have a partner, because I suffer from that Midwestern affliction of people pleasing, right? Of taking such a long time to be able to hear my own voice, to be able to feel like an integrated woman, it is very important to me to have a partner who can reflect me back to me in a way that’s very affirmative. And so, I do trust my gut more, but I still rely on him to confirm how I feel, and it’s and it’s so important to have somebody in my life that does that, because I haven’t been practicing it for that long relative to the rest of my life, and and he’s so great at it. You know, he’s 15 years older than me, and he’s lived many, many lives. He never wields his experience like a cudgel. He always lets me come to my own conclusions. He’s somebody who he never gives unsolicited advice. Samantha, what I find it extraordinary. And he gives great advice. You have to ask him.

 

Samantha Bee  44:25

You have to ask him.

 

Carrie Kuhn  44:28

But he doesn’t just walk around. And so every time he’s on a job, women just fall in love with him because he just asks questions, because he genuinely loves women. He loves them, anyone, and he’s and he thinks we’re the superior gender, and he respects us. And so to have that kind of partner in my life and in my work and helping me decide when I am on the fence about a project, right? He’s the only opinion that matters to me.

 

Samantha Bee  44:48

You know, right.

 

Carrie Kuhn  44:49

And, of course, the logistics of our.

 

Samantha Bee  44:51

TThe logistics, yeah, the logistics are difficult, but so challenging, but they’re not impossible. I think they’re actually people are always like, how, you, how do you do it with the two it’s easier than if two people had Wall Street jobs and you either at like, seven o’clock in the morning, seven to.

 

Carrie Kuhn  45:08

Yes, it’s so annoying that our kids don’t understand how other children live. It’s like, you actually see me a lot. You think you don’t see me. You see me a lot a lot of kids don’t see their parents the whole week.

 

Samantha Bee  45:20

Don’t you love it when your kids are like, you’re gone, you’ve been gone, and you’re like, where are you going? All the time.

 

Carrie Kuhn  45:26

All the time, I just spent the entire weekend with you. You never bank any points with kids. You never bank anything.

 

Samantha Bee  45:32

You never.

 

Carrie Kuhn  45:33

Mine are still young, and it’s so tedious, so they it doesn’t count.

 

Samantha Bee  45:37

You know what’s fun is good that they actually, well, it’s great. It is great because I have, like, all mine are teenagers. They actually need you more in a different.

 

Carrie Kuhn  45:46

That’s what I’ve heard.

 

Samantha Bee  45:47

They it’s really nice. It’s actually great.

 

Carrie Kuhn  45:49

I like, that’s good to hear some people. I mean, I’ve heard it’s right, little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems. So I always thought it’d be harder to do this career when they’re younger, but I’m starting to understand that it actually will get harder when they’re older.

 

Samantha Bee  46:01

I think it’s harder when they’re older, because older because they psych they their psyches need you more, like they don’t need you to make dinner for them, but they need you to be there and they need you to say no to them right at the right time.

 

Carrie Kuhn  46:16

Yes, oh, that’s really no. That’s interesting to hear. I want to hear more about all of that.

 

Samantha Bee  46:21

How did you learn how to say no? How did you because I don’t think I as a people current and former, it was, it’s very hard to say.

 

Carrie Kuhn  46:30

Very hard, and I think, I think it’s hard for every woman, and they were all always learning it all the time. But I have a very clear moment where it was brought to my attention my grandmother, my grandma D and my grandpa bill, they retired in their 50s because they were T boned by a drunk driver, and they almost didn’t survive, but they did, and so they were retired for most of my childhood. And so they really helped raise us. I mean, my parents had five kids. They both worked full time. There’s no way we all would have survived without grandma D and Grandpa bill, they used to drive me from my, you know, get soccer games, to my play rehearsals. And I remember distinctly, I think I was home from college, and she was on the phone. She was in her 70s, and there was this widower who had been calling her. He’d lost his wife, and my grandmother was really nice woman, and he was calling her, and he was talking to her on the phone, for you know, she couldn’t say no, she couldn’t say no to him. She couldn’t hang up. And she was in a conversation, and she finally said, in that moment, I’m so sorry, John, or whatever his name was, yeah, I just can’t have this conversation right now. I have to go. And she hung up, and she sat there for a second, and she said, my dog. She said, listen to me, if, if you can learn how to say no, now you will be so far ahead of any woman because she said, Carrie, I am in my 70s, and I am still learning, and I’m still struggling to say, no, it was a very vivid moment. And this is a woman too, who, when I was dating two boyfriends, she wrote me a letter when I was doing my my three day, punishing, you know, fast, when I was breaking up with everybody and punishing myself in a very Catholic way, she wrote me a letter. She was worried about me, and she said, you know, pity is not the same as love, and you are not respecting or dignifying someone else by staying in something where you know that you don’t want to be in and just that pity is not the same thing as love. There were these seeds she was planting in me, and they just it took them a long time to come to fruition. It’s taken a long time for me to learn how to say no, but I’m but I think being in my 40s is so empowering. I loved my 30s. It was a life changing decade for me. I really in terms of my mental health, my marriage. You know, I had my first child when I was 37 and my 40s, it just gets easier and easier to say no. And I love saying no. I love it. I just, it’s really empowering. And I and I tell young women the same thing. Start practicing, and I say, and just like you know that you’re not dignifying anyone by kind of not being fully expressed, but you’re not actually helping anybody.

 

Samantha Bee  48:55

Prolonging their agony.

 

Carrie Kuhn  48:59

They’re not allowed to exactly, and they’re not allowed to move on to move on to the life that they’re supposed to be living, you know this is not your life you want to be living your life.

 

Samantha Bee  49:09

I love grandmother wisdom so much. Oh boy, you know what is so it’s so funny when you because we’re talking so much about like, how we learn to say no and figured out how to be less of a people pleaser, Never, not a people pleaser, just less of one, you know, and then we create these children who are not at all people pleasers.

 

Carrie Kuhn  49:30

No.

 

Samantha Bee  49:31

Which is great, which is what we want for them, but it actually makes it really hard to parent.

 

Carrie Kuhn  49:35

Yes, it really does. And I am going to be up against it with this girl. This girl is, I’ve never met anybody like her. She’s really been put on this earth to test me.

 

Samantha Bee  49:45

She’s gonna be so herself, and.

 

Carrie Kuhn  49:48

She doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do. Oh yeah, yeah, she wears, she wears no pants.

 

Samantha Bee  49:54

Yep.

 

Carrie Kuhn  49:54

She’s like, I’m not wearing pants anyway, not. I do want to talk to you about this.

 

Samantha Bee  49:59

I do also, oh, my God, thank you so much for we did it.

 

Carrie Kuhn  50:04

We did recording. Is it recording?

 

Samantha Bee  50:07

We recorded it, we did it.

 

Samantha Bee  50:14

That was Carrie Kuhn, and I had no choice but to look up one thing she mentioned that she almost went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis for college. I was shocked. Her life would have been so different. I mean, do they even have a theater program there? Well, the answer is no, but they do have a theater group called the masqueraders at least. Thanks for joining us. I’m Samantha Bee, see you next week for some more Choice Words.

 

CREDITS  50:56

Thank you for listening to Choice Words, which was created by and is hosted by me. The show is produced by […], with editing and additional producing by Josh Richmond. We are distributed by Lemonada Media, and you can find me @realsambee on X and Instagram, follow Choice Words wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.