After celebrated turns on Fargo and The Leftovers, Carrie Coon has been winning plaudits for her performance in Mindhunter, the new David Fincher-produced Netflix series about the birth of serial-killer profiling at the FBI. There’s just one problem: Carrie Coon is not on Mindhunter. The role of Dr. Wendy Carr, an academic psychologist with a thing for stray cats and jumbo-sized glasses of white wine, is actually played by Anna Torv, an Australian actress last seen at length on the (extremely great) Fox sci-fi series Fringe. It may be true, as Vulture’s Jen Chaney noted in her review, that Torv’s performance has “deeply Carrie Coon-ish overtones,” or that, as the A.V. Club’s Sean T. Collins noted, she gives off “serious Carrie Coon vibes.” But they are nonetheless entirely separate women.
In the era of binge-watching and “skip intro,” however, it seems not everyone has taken notice of who’s playing what part. Since Mindhunter’s debut, Coon has been graciously redirecting compliments like this one.
A Twitter search turns up dozens more confused souls, so Coon has taken the further step of updating her Twitter bio to address what she calls “the ongoing Mindhunter controversy.”
There, now that clears everything up. Except wait. Wasn’t Fringe a show about parallel universes? And didn’t Torv play multiple roles on the series, including at one point being possessed by the spirit of Leonard Nimoy? What if … Carrie Coon has been Anna Torv all along? Maybe Mindhunter’s next season will finally clear things up.
