Tracy Letts is nobody’s newcomer. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“August: Osage County”) and a Tony Award-winning actor (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) with three decades of performance credits on Chicago stages, many at his artistic home, Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
None of the above qualifies Letts as Chicagoan of the Year in film. But 2017 was his year anyway — the year his movie and television work as an actor, at long last (and long after the 1997-2001 years he spent living in LA “waiting for the phone to ring”), enjoyed enough range, variety and quality to make a mass audience realize: Huh. Helluva actor.
Or, as Letts put it the other day, in a Wicker Park coffeehouse underneath the “L”: “Maybe this guy can do more than another (so-and-so) in a suit, in front of a committee, ordering the drone strikes.”
On the 2013 and 2014 seasons of Showtime’s “Homeland,” Letts played Sen. Andrew Lockhart: suit, committees, drone strikes. “I’d done a little film and TV for 20 years, but that was my first gig as a series regular, and it was a show people watched.” Just like that, Letts started receiving offers of similar gruff, callous and/or sinister authority figures, including, memorably, the imperious college dean in “Indignation” (2016).
Then 2017 happened. He shot Season 2 as best friend Nick on HBO’s “Divorce,” which premieres in a couple of weeks. He co-starred with Debra Winger in the well-regarded indie “The Lovers.” Greta Gerwig’s splendid “Lady Bird,” currently in theaters, came out a few months later; in it he plays Saoirse Ronan’s quietly valiant father, the nicest guy Letts has ever played on screen.
Opening Jan. 5 in Chicago, director Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” features Letts in a tasty supporting role along with Carrie Coon, 36, another not-really-overnight-success saying goodbye to a very, very good year (“Fargo,” “The Leftovers,” etc.) Coon and Letts married in 2013 and are expecting a child in March. They live in Wicker Park and have a place in New York City.
It’s a good time to work a little less. “I’m in an enviable position as an actor, because I’m a playwright,” Letts says. “Some of the roles I would’ve jumped at as a younger man because I was broke, trying to make a living — I don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to be a guy in a suit in ‘Geostorm.’ ”
On the radar:
Steve James: The “Hoop Dreams” documentarian returns to the Sundance Film Festival with “America to Me,” a 10-part portrait of a year in the life of Oak Park and River Forest High School. The Sundance festival runs Jan. 18-28, Park City, Utah; sundance.org.
Mimi Plauche: The artistic director of the Chicago International Film Festival enters her second year at the helm. With luck we’ll learn more about her artistic tastes and priorities this fall. The 54th festival opens in October (dates TBA), AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St.; chicagofilmfestival.com.
Raul Benitez and Nando Espinosa Herrera: The programming duo’s eclectic film series, screened at the charmingly unlikely Comfort Station gallery space in Logan Square, offers more surprises each year. Check for 2018 updates at comfortstationlogansquare.org.
Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
