Jennifer Coolidge almost lost her chance to play the iconic Tanya McQuoid on ‘White Lotus’. In her recent appearance at the Hollywood Reporter’s drama actress roundtable, she revealed how her ‘self-hate’ made her almost lose her role.
Jennifer Coolidge said for self-hate and not being prepared she rejected the role
The 61-year-old told Claire Danes, Emma D’Arcy, Dominique Fishback, Jennifer Garner, and Melanie Lynskey of Mike White, the show’s creator, “Mike and I were going to do another show, which had been turned down by a lot of people, and he mentioned he was going to write [his next] show about rich people on vacation, but I never heard anything more about it.”
“We were like six months into COVID, and I’d been locked up in my house in New Orleans just pigging out on these vegan pizzas. A good friend and I were doing two at breakfast, two at lunch, and two at dinner,” Coolidge says. “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.'”
Moreover, she hilariously added she “thought we were all going to die” during the COVID so she adopted a “do whatever you want” mindset in her life.”But then it started to become a real thing,” Coolidge says of The HBO series, “and I was hearing from business people.”
“[I heard] 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,”- Jennifer added.
However, the team insisted to sign she “wasn’t going to do” because of “self-hate and not being prepared.”
“I think this happens to actresses a lot. You sit around and b**ch 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,” Jennifer says. “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.'”
Needless to say, this role indeed added some more feathers to her crown as she earned a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Emmy.
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