'I’ve been in the business long enough to know I’m not the first offer, so I’m so grateful to whoever turned it down so it came my way because it was such a great part,' he says. McKinney, an egghead managing egos on and off the court, is a natural fit for his particular set of skills. Ferrari, and, most recently, a snooping mystery writer in the erotic thriller Deep Water. (He won a Tony Award in 2013 for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a revival he starred in alongside Coon.) But he’s carved out a distinct lane onscreen as a character actor in recent years, playing Saoirse Ronan’s father in Lady Bird, Henry Ford II in Ford V. Letts, the playwright behind works like Killer Joe, Bug, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County, is best known for his stage work and is currently starring in the Broadway production of his play The Minutes, which premiered in 2017 at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. “I turned to Carrie and I said, ‘I’ve gotta do this, right?’” he recalls over the phone. He liked that the part (mild Lakers spoiler) would only last one season, with McKinney getting sidelined by a tragic bike accident. Reilly from his days doing theater in Chicago, and he had previously worked with producer Adam McKay on The Big Short. Like McKinney, who arrived from Portland with a strategy for transforming the Lakers offense, he has a system.Īfter watching the Winning Time pilot, which was shot prior to the casting of his part, Letts recognized the series could be something special. Pretty quickly, he knows what’s doable and what’s not. Letts is married to Carrie Coon, the star of HBO’s other recent coastal period piece about money and power, The Gilded Age, and they have two young children, which has streamlined the way he makes decisions about his acting career. Before Tracy Letts took on the role of Lakers head coach Jack McKinney on Winning Time, HBO’s glitzy saga of the “Showtime” Lakers of the ‘80s, he turned down a few parts that didn’t fit with his schedule or the demands of his COVID-era family life.

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