Jennifer Coolidge famously almost didn’t do The White Lotus. Good thing she did because it’s made the already beloved actress even more adored. (Viewers, meanwhile, not only got a great performance but also stellar awards show speeches.) But she almost didn’t and in a recent group chat for The Hollywood Reporter, she revealed one of the reasons she was so reluctant to play Tanya McQuoid.
During the #THRRoundtable, @JENCOOLIDGE says she was eating three pizzas a day before she was cast on #TheWhiteLotus pic.twitter.com/XUkSTQFEB3
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) June 26, 2023
In THR’s roundtable discussion — that also included Jennifer Garner, Melanie Lynskey, Emma D’Arcy, Dominique Fishback, and Claire Danes — Coolidge remembered when White Lotus creator Mike White formally approached Coolidge about the project. At the time the world was six months into mass quarantine, and Coolidge had been “locked up in my house in New Orleans just pigging out on these vegan pizzas.”
She then detailed her dietary regiment at the time:
“A good friend and I were doing two at breakfast, two at lunch and two at dinner. We were in COVID, no one knew I’d be getting a call going, ‘Hey Jennifer, my show got greenlit, let’s go do it. And it’s all going to be on a beach in bathing suits!’ So, I was just like, ‘No, I’m not doing this,’ but I didn’t tell Mike I wasn’t doing it. I just said, ‘Oh, that’s so nice, Mike. God, congratulations.’ I thought we were all going to die during COVID…”
Coolidge continued to skate around it. But White was persistent:
“And then [I hear] that little ping in my bedroom in New Orleans at like 2 a.m. and I look down at my phone and it said, ‘Are you afraid?’ It was from Mike. He knew. But I still wasn’t going to do it, and I think this happens to actresses a lot. You sit around and bitch your whole life that you’ve never been given the role of your dreams, and then when it comes, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I can’t do it. I ate a bunch of pizza.’ You can ruin it. And thank God I have a bestie that just caught on to my bullcrap. She knew exactly what I was doing, and she was like, ‘You are an idiot. I’m not going to let you do this.’”
So Coolidge finally accepted and the rest is history. Looking back now, she chalks her hesitancy up to “self-hate and not being prepared.”
White has teased that Coolidge’s Tanya could return in some fashion. In the meanwhile, perhaps he’ll honor Coolidge’s request that a certain character get whacked.
(Via THR)