Ohio’s Carrie Coon coming to Cleveland’s Capitol Theatre; Midwesterners exploding on fall television and film

Carrie Coon, Copley, Ohio, native and
'Gone Girl' co-star

One thing I love about working on Midwest Movie Maker is that I’m always delighted when I discover new actors, actresses and filmmakers from the Midwest making it big on the silver screen.

Take for example Carrie Coon. Coon co-stars in the upcoming David Fincher flick Gone Girl. She plays Ben Affleck’s sister in the film. She also stars in the HBO show The Leftovers, as Nora Durst, and was nominated for a Tony Award in the Best Featured Actress category for her role in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

And get this. Coon is from Copley, Ohio. Copley! That’s where I’m from. Of course now I’m searching every nook and cranny of my memory to determine if I’ve ever met Coon. She’s a bit younger, so it’s not likely. Though she may have rented videos from the video store where I worked. So, you know, six degrees of K-Mart Video and all of that.

Anyway, Coon is coming to the Capitol Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio, to participate in a post-screening Q&A of
Gone Girl after the 7 p.m. showing. Tickets are only $6 bucks – so if you’re a film fan, filmmaker or aspiring actor or actress, I mean, you got to go, right? If only to support one of our own.
Who else from the Midwest can I see on my TV?
Speaking of our own, there are a ton of Midwesterners appearing in on screens big and small this fall. Here’s a short list:

Pittsburgh's Greg Nicotero, executive producer of 'The Walking Dead'

• Pittsburgh’s Greg Nicotero stirs up more zombie fun as special make-up director and executive producer of AMC’s The Walking Dead. (Remember last year when we talked about the Zombie Apocalypse starting in the Midwest?)
• Ed O’Neill, a Youngstown, Ohio, native and famous for his role as Al Bundy on Fox’s Married, with Children, returns as the patriarch Jay Pritchett in Modern Family.

• Detroit’s Sherilyn Fenn continues her role as Donna Cochran on the Showtime drama Ray Donovan.
  
  
• Toledo’s Eric Kripke, who we interviewed before his now-cancelled NBC show Revolution debuted, is still going strong as creator and executive producer of the CW’s Supernatural.
  
  
• Judy Greer finished up the first season of Married on FX in the lead as Lina Bowman. You’ll next see the Detroit native in summer tent poles Tomorrowland, Ant-Man and Jurassic World (or catch her now in Men, Women and Children).
  
  



Pittsburgh's Gillian Jacobs as Britta on 'Community'

• Another show that disappeared from NBC’s schedule after last season was Community. It returns on Yahoo! Screen with co-stars Yvette Nicole Brown (Cleveland), Ken Jeong (Detroit) and Gillian Jacobs (Pittsburgh) still onboard.

Detroit's J.K. Simmons

• Michigan’s Crystal Reed continues as Allison Argent on MTV’s Teen Wolf.
  
  
• Cleveland’s Halle Berry moves from her big screen summer in X-Men: Days of Future Past to the small screen and CBS’s sci-fi summer series Extant, which Berry is executive producing.
  


• Speaking of superhero movies, Detroit’s J.K. Simmons, who starred in Michigan-native Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, picks up another franchise in next summer’s Terminator: Genisys. But catch him as the Farmer’s Insurance instructor on your small screen now. Or hear him as J. Jonah Jameson on Disney XD’s Ultimate Spider-Man.
  


• Clancy Brown, from Urbana, Ohio, took a turn as the beheaded Sheriff in Fox’s Sleepy Hollow last season. This season he’ll join the cast of The Flash as General Wade Eiling.

• If you missed Flint, Mich., native Terry Crews in The Expendables 3, watch him in the second season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine as Sgt. Terry Jeffords.
  


• Patricia Heaton, from Bay Village, Ohio, returns as exasperated mother Frankie in The Middle on ABC.

• And finally,did you catch Timothy Busfield as Benjamin Franklin in the Sleepy Hollow premiere? I mean, did that even look like the Lansing, Mich., native?