Tracy Letts

Tracy Shane Letts (born July 4, 1965, in Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor who has earned both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. Raised in Durant, Oklahoma, he moved to Chicago at age 20 and became a core member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where he has remained an ensemble member for decades. As a playwright, he is best known for August: Osage County, which premiered at Steppenwolf in 2007 before transferring to Broadway, winning six Tony Awards including Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2008. He also wrote Bug and Killer Joe, both of which were adapted as films directed by William Friedkin.

As a stage actor, Letts performed with Steppenwolf throughout his career and made his Broadway acting debut as George in the Edward Albee revival Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, earning the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 2013. On screen, he appeared in recurring roles on Homeland (Showtime) and has taken on film roles in productions including Lady Bird (2017) and Ford v Ferrari (2019).

His appearance in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) came about through circumstance: his wife, actress Carrie Coon, was already cast in the film 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."