[Source: AP News]

It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.

She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in “The Gilded Age,” for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of “The White Lotus,” which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs’ new drama, “His Three Daughters,” in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.

But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.

In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in “Winning Time” ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night’s choice: “Once Around,” with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.

Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at Steppenwolf in 2010. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.

Coon grew up outside working-class Akron, Ohio, and Honey reminded her of some of her relatives — women either trapped in gender roles like Honey or strong-willed exceptions who defied them. Ever since, Coon has brought to life a wide array of women on screen with acute perceptiveness and fierce intelligence. She may be a character-actor chameleon resistant to movie stardom, but she doesn’t blend in. A movie tends to stand up on its feet when Coon is on screen.

A conversation with Coon, however, is. She skips easily between self-deprecation and sincere reflection, existential doom and creative belief, book recommendations and parenting laments. As much as she’s an actor head to toe, Coon didn’t do it until her senior year of high school. In between trying half a dozen majors, she performed in plays in college and was coaxed into applying to graduate programs for acting by a professor.

In “His Three Daughters,” which begins streaming Friday on Netflix, three very different sisters are brought together in a small New York apartment and, with their ailing father in the next room, argue through some of their old divisions while wrestling with their developing grief. They start a little like stereotypes – Lyonne is the stoner, Olsen the sweetly naive one and Coon the pushy, presumptuous older sister – but each character grows more nuanced. Coon is eager to praise Lyonne (“At the height of her powers”) and Olsen (“Everything she does is luminous”), and together they form an indelible trio in one of the year’s most lived-in dramas.

Asked if Coon was thinking about her own family in filming “His Three Daughters,” she lets out a laugh. “I mean, I was thinking of me!” she says. Coon adds that, unlike her character Katie, she’s sensitive and communicative.

Jacobs, the veteran indie filmmaker, delivered scripts for “His Three Daughters” simultaneously to his three stars. Actors are often valued by their box-office appeal, Jacobs notes, but Coon’s worth is harder to define.

In Coon’s performance, Jacobs sees her subtly playing qualities in Katie that don’t explicitly manifest into well into the film, as her character’s fears and vulnerabilities grow more evident.

For her, it casts a different light on her work.

Coon can’t stop from laughing at herself. “I’m basically a doomsday prepper without an insulated basement for my supplies or an AR-15 to protect them,” she says.

Another way to look at Coon’s concern is as an extension of her interest, as an actor, in the human condition. The global community is maybe another ensemble that Coon would like to play a role in, and see through to the next act.