Early life
Letts was born into a literary and theatrical household. His mother, Billie Letts, was a best-selling novelist (best known for Where the Heart Is),1 and his father, Dennis Letts, was an English professor, aspiring actor, and community theater performer who would later enjoy his own Broadway career.3 Letts grew up in Durant, Oklahoma, graduated from Durant High School, and relocated to Dallas before making his way to Chicago at approximately age 20.1 He has maintained sobriety since 1993.1
Career
Playwriting
After arriving in Chicago, Letts joined Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where he remains an ensemble member.2 He also co-founded Bang Bang Spontaneous Theatre alongside Greg Kotis, Michael Shannon, Paul Dillon, and Amy Pietz, a company that blended the aesthetics of Second City improvisational comedy with the Steppenwolf tradition.1
His first major play, Killer Joe (1991), is a dark thriller about a Texas family that hires a corrupt detective to murder a relative for insurance money; it has since been performed in 12 languages worldwide.1 His follow-up Bug (1996) is a claustrophobic two-hander exploring paranoia and delusion.1 Both plays attracted the attention of director William Friedkin: Bug was adapted into a 2006 film starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, and Killer Joe became a 2011 film starring Matthew McConaughey in the title role, with Letts writing both screenplays.1 The Friedkin-Letts partnership revived the director's feature career and established Letts as a screen writer of note.
His most celebrated work, August: Osage County, premiered at Steppenwolf on June 28, 2007 and opened on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre on December 4, 2007.1 The sprawling family drama about an Oklahoma clan convening after a patriarch's disappearance won five Tony Awards including Best Play,4 and Letts received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.5 His father Dennis appeared in the original Steppenwolf and Broadway productions.3
Later plays include Man from Nebraska, Superior Donuts, Mary Page Marlowe, Linda Vista, and The Minutes. The Minutes, a political satire set in a small-town city council meeting, premiered at Steppenwolf in 2017 and transferred to Broadway in 2022.1
Stage acting
Letts has been a working stage actor throughout his career at Steppenwolf and in Chicago. His Broadway acting debut came in the 2012 revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which he played George opposite Amy Morton.1 The performance earned him the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 2013.1
In 2019 he starred as Joe Keller opposite Annette Bening in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons, earning a Drama League Distinguished Performance Award.1 In 2022, he performed onstage for the first time in one of his own plays, playing Mayor Superba in the Broadway transfer of The Minutes.1
Film
Letts began accumulating screen acting credits in smaller character roles before landing more prominent parts. Notable film appearances include The Big Short (2015), Indignation (2016), Imperium (2016), Lady Bird (2017, as the school principal Father Leviatch), The Post (2017), Little Women (2019), and Ford v Ferrari (2019), in which he played Henry Ford II opposite Matt Damon and Christian Bale.1
Television
On television, Letts is known for playing Senator Andrew Lockhart in Seasons 3 and 4 of Showtime's Homeland (2013-2014),1 and Nick, a pyramid-scheme con artist, in the HBO comedy series Divorce (2016-2019).1 His most acclaimed television role is Jack McKinney, the Los Angeles Lakers head coach, in HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022-2023), for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series.6
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Letts' appearance in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) came about through circumstance: his wife, actress Carrie Coon, was already cast as Callie Spengler, and when the production lost the original actor playing the hardware store owner to a scheduling conflict, Letts, who was in Canada with Coon and their son Haskell, stepped in on short notice. He portrayed the Wertheimer's Hardware Store owner in an uncredited role.
The hardware store's name, Wertheimer's Hardware, was taken from Jason Reitman's lawyer Alan Wertheimer. A deleted scene included in the first theatrical trailer showed the character carefully walking down an aisle carrying a shovel; that footage did not appear in the final cut. On the basic cable broadcast version that aired on FX, the line in which the character says "bizarre shit" was replaced with "bizarre things."
Personal life
Letts married actress Carrie Coon on September 15, 2013, in an unconventional ceremony: the wedding took place in a hospital following Letts' emergency gallbladder surgery, with a Lutheran chaplain officiating.7 They have two children. Their son, Haskell Letts, was born on March 13, 2018.1 Their daughter, whose name and birthday the couple have kept private, was born in the summer of 2021.
References
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
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"Tracy Letts," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Letts.
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"Tracy Letts," Steppenwolf Theatre Company ensemble biography, accessed 2026-06-13, https://www.steppenwolf.org/ensemble/member-pages/tracy--letts/.
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"Dennis Letts," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Letts.
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Steppenwolf Theatre Company, "Steppenwolf Wins 5 Tony Awards" (press release, June 2008), https://www.steppenwolf.org/imported-press-release-pages/steppenwolf-wins-5-tony-awards/.
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"Tracy Letts," The Pulitzer Prizes, accessed 2026-06-13, https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/tracy-letts.
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Variety, "Married Duo Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts on Landing Emmy Noms Together for 'Gilded Age' and 'Winning Time'" (2024), https://variety.com/2024/tv/awards/carrie-coon-tracy-letts-emmy-nominations-1236111045/.
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Playbill, "Why Tony Nominee Carrie Coon and Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy Letts Got Married in a Hospital," accessed 2026-06-13, https://playbill.com/article/why-tony-nominee-carrie-coon-and-pulitzer-prize-winner-tracy-letts-got-married-in-a-hospital.
