SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This interview was conducted prior to the strike.
It’s the parties, says Jennifer Coolidge. She has spent the last year collecting trophies for her role as Tanya McQuoid in HBO’s The White Lotus – an Emmy and a Golden Globe among them – but it’s the invitations to the parties, the really good parties, that have proved to Coolidge exactly how much things have changed.
We’re at a spa in a fancy West Hollywood hotel, where our senses are being pleasantly assaulted by the scent of fig diffusers, and Coolidge is recounting the story of her experience at an exclusive awards-season shindig. “They wouldn’t let me in for a decade,” she says, reclining on her elbow on a chaise longue-style spa bed, while her massage therapist, Irfan, kneads my hands. The treatment was intended for Coolidge, but she wouldn’t hear of it, so after a futile argument we agreed to split the service. This compulsive generosity reminds me of the late Tanya, as does her floral sundress, which she bought in Hawaii while filming season one of the resort drama. But whereas Tanya was an irreparable wound of a person, Coolidge is playful, mischievous, and very much alive.
“I’ll keep this party nameless, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she continues. About 10 years ago, Coolidge pleaded with her agent to secure her an invite, so she knew it was bad news when an assistant called back instead. “‘I’m really sorry, Jennifer, but they said no, they couldn’t squeeze you in,’” she says, imitating the saccharine tone of a junior employee who’s trying to approximate sympathy. When Coolidge relayed her disappointment, more apologies ensued. “And then she goes, ‘Well, look. It’s probably not going to be that great. I’ll let you know.’”
They’d said no to Stifler’s mom. To Paulette Bonafonté from Legally Blonde. To Sherri Ann Cabot from Ariana Grande’s favourite film, Best In Show. But the agent’s assistant gets in? “Let me know?!” says Coolidge. “I have done a lot of movies and stuff at this point.” This is an understatement: she’s talking about canonical roles in some of the most canonical American comedies of the last two decades.
But Coolidge isn’t indignant. She recounts the drama like a baffled tourist pulling souvenirs from a shelf: “I guess I made her feel really bad, because she called me back about five minutes later. She goes, ‘Hey, Jennifer, look – I know you want to go to the party. I understand it’s disappointing that I’m invited. But I just want to let you know something that might make you feel a little better.’ And I said, ‘What?’”
Later, Coolidge will describe her brief foray into stand-up comedy as desultory and ill-received, but right now that’s hard to imagine, because she knows how to build toward a punchline. Her White Lotus co-star Murray Bartlett says that while they were shooting in Hawaii, the cast would go down to the beach at weekends and instinctively gather around her: “She would tell a wild, wonderful story that was from her life, but maybe partly fiction, and, at times you’re like, ‘Where is this going?’ Eventually, she brings it around.”
Coolidge brings it around now. The assistant tells her: “Phil Collins can’t get in either.” Then she laughs – not the startling outburst her characters are known for, but a low rumble of amusement. For the record, this did not make her feel better. Anyway, in possibly unrelated news: a few weeks before we spoke in March, Coolidge was photographed looking bodacious in a svelte black dress at the Vanity Fair Oscars party.
It was never just about the parties. For Coolidge, 61, playing Tanya was like being granted a wish for more wishes. The genie in this case was White Lotus creator Mike White, a close friend of Coolidge’s who wrote the role with her in mind after reportedly failing to land a project with her at the helm at HBO – if it’s impossible to imagine anybody else as Tanya, that’s because nobody else was ever going to be Tanya. Before the first season aired, Coolidge’s performance generated enough buzz that she estimates she booked “seven jobs in a row,” including a Netflix Christmas movie, the Jennifer Lopez-led action rom-com Shotgun Wedding, and Ryan Murphy’s mini-series The Watcher, in which she played a rare villain: the scheming real-estate agent Karen Calhoun.
“Ryan is always looking for eccentric people, and Jennifer has this incredible presence,” says Naomi Watts, who starred opposite Coolidge in The Watcher as a newcomer to the neighbourhood who falls under Karen’s spell over boozy country club lunches. “You believe anything she says, even if it’s completely bizarre. There are lines that were in the trailer – really impactful lines – that were not on the page, that came straight from her mind.”
The two became friends; Watts helped Coolidge find a place to stay when she was in New York, and in return, she says, Coolidge gifted her a “very generous” hand-painted box. Watts explains that she understands what it’s like for Coolidge to have this pivotal moment. “The same thing happened to me with David Lynch: somebody gave me the right role that resonated with the audience at the right time,” she says, referring to her breakout role in 2001’s Mulholland Drive. “She’s obviously worked very, very hard for a very long time. And I can relate to that. I feel like everything that happened to me that was good happened later as well, or a bit later than what’s considered regular in Hollywood.”
Now, having concluded season two of The White Lotus, Coolidge is in even more demand. “What’s cool is I’m being offered parts that I didn’t show any sort of glimmer of in any of the things I’ve done,” she says. “It’s not like they saw another character and were like, ‘Oh, then you can do this, too.’”
She can’t announce any future projects, because she’s still deciding. The big question from fans is whether Legally Blonde 3 is happening; Coolidge only knows what she hears from her hairdresser, whom she shares with Mindy Kaling, who co-wrote the script. “He says Mindy’s very excited,” says Coolidge. “So it seems like it’s happening.”
Choice is somewhat of a new luxury for her. “I can tell you that it’s leads and stuff,” she says, her husky voice turning to a conspiratorial whisper. “I wasn’t being offered leads in a lot of things before.”
Prior to The White Lotus, many of Coolidge’s characters shared a predictable fate. They were objects of desire, pity or ridicule. Coolidge was always in on the joke – a send-up of cosmetically augmented bombshells in tacky outfits – but some landed better than others. The intentional campiness of her dim-witted characters in Guest’s beloved ensemble comedies like Best In Show and A Mighty Wind could be too easily exaggerated to preposterous effect, as it was for Sophie, the bawdy Polish sexpot she played in 2 Broke Girls, which ran for six seasons on CBS and yet would barely warrant a footnote in her biography. That role, along with the “little jobs” she expressed gratitude for in her Golden Globes speech earlier this year, kept her going for two decades. “I don’t think I’ve turned a lot down,” she says.
Tanya McQuoid was different. She, too, was preposterous, but she was many other things as well: damaged, manipulative, desperate for affection. Coolidge played her like a child lost in a shopping mall, vulnerable and urgently needing comfort. “If anyone categorised Jennifer as just a comedic actress, or had a limited view of her, she blew that apart,” explains Bartlett, who played Armond, the hotel manager in The White Lotus’s first season. “It’s not just, like, great little comedic moments. It’s a fully fleshed character with this amazing arc, and she nails it.”
Her most hilarious scenes were also her most tragic, like when she gives her late mother an increasingly horrific eulogy before scattering her ashes over the side of a boat. Incidentally, Coolidge suffers from seasickness, so that eulogy was delivered in between bouts of vomiting into a bucket within close proximity of her colleagues, a level of commitment bordering on ego death. She claims White promised her he’d never shoot on boats again, but then when season two unfolded in Sicily, she says, “Sure enough, there couldn’t have been more boat scenes.”
Playing Tanya was life-changing for Coolidge; perhaps inevitably, she can’t help wondering what her career would have looked like if the role had come along sooner. But, then again, when it did come along, she almost turned it down. This was during the pandemic, when Coolidge was holed up at her house in New Orleans, eating vegan pizzas with a friend and “trying to be creative” by shooting mini-movies starring dolls and puppets. (One of these turned into a surreal commencement speech for her alma mater, Emerson College. You can find it on her Instagram.) She got word from White: the series was greenlit; he wanted her to star. “I was, like, not in the mood,” she says. She has previously blamed this on feeling physically out of shape and not camera-ready. White had an inkling she was hesitating, and sent her a text message in the middle of the night that read, “Are you scared?” I ask her the same thing. Was it fear of failure – or possibly success? She thinks for a second. “I was depressed,” she says. “I was very depressed.”
Coolidge has the disarming quality of owning up to her humanness. She doesn’t have it all figured out. She’s made mistakes. In the late ’80s, there was cocaine, and rehab, which she’s talked about, and which happened before she scored her first big breakthrough, as a withholding massage therapist on Seinfeld in 1993. There was her move from LA to New Orleans, circa 2005, after American Pie, Legally Blonde, and Best In Show had established her franchise-readiness, and she loves it there, but, she says, “unless your husband’s a director and he’s gonna put you in all his films, you can’t just leave town for big chunks of time.”
And so she took jobs, and that’s mostly all they were. Quick stints on Party Down and Glee. “You’re a blip in the story,” she says. “People don’t see you as part of the whole thing.” She admits to occasionally “dropping the ball,” like when she almost missed out on playing Carey Mulligan’s anxious mum in Emerald Fennell’s 2020 revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, because she didn’t follow up after an initial meeting. “Your life goes a certain way for a long time and you can’t imagine it changing,” she says. “I always thought, like, What if I was in a train crash or something? What if I’m very alive inside, but everything is paralysed?” Now she can laugh about that, and she does. “I’d think some thoughts like that. But I never thought, like, Would my career change?”
Coolidge studied drama during and after college and, like countless students before and after her, the Massachusetts native dreamed of following in the footsteps of Meryl Streep. After one class, taught by Saturday Night Fever star Julie Bovasso, she would go out to bars in New York City and do silly imitations of people’s performances until one of her classmates, a guy named John, turned to her and said that she was in the wrong place. She should be doing comedy. So she left New York for LA to join The Groundlings, the legendary improv group that launched the careers of Lisa Kudrow, Will Ferrell, Conan O’Brien and many more.
Coolidge thinks John was ultimately right, but she turns to me, intently. “Isn’t it weird when you’re younger, literally some guy on a bus could tell you, ‘I think you should go to Jerusalem and open up a sheep farm,’ and you’re just like… ‘All right?’” she says. “I’ll take direction from anybody.”
The spa manager, Cliff, enters the room to bring us blood orange lemonade and some essential oil testers that Coolidge wanted me to try. “Chamomile makes you go to bed,” she warns. “You don’t want to fall asleep while you drive.” Cliff describes Coolidge as one of his good friends; he teases her about her makeup, she nudges him about freebies – again, for my benefit, because she’s already purchased most of their Bamford products, and today, with minimal makeup, her skin looks soft and dewy. Their dynamic is nothing like Tanya’s with Belinda, the sweet, beleaguered spa therapist played by Natasha Rothwell in season one of The White Lotus, but it’s probably no coincidence that life is imitating art – or perhaps it’s the other way around. Mike White is known for borrowing liberally from his friends when crafting their screen personas.
“There’s a lot of her in a lot of the characters that she plays, but there’s much more self-awareness in the real Jennifer,” says Bartlett. “She knows the effect she has on people. She kind of leans into the elements of herself that people love. Even when you’re with her, there’s a winky eye.”
Bartlett recalls losing it during one scene in which Coolidge, as Tanya, babbled on more than usual when Armond was needed in another crisis, improvising lines about the therapeutic benefits of mongoose poo.
Now Tanya, like Armond, is gone, having slipped off a yacht in season two after a shootout with “the gays” – the ones who were trying to murder her, to quote from the line that instantly became a GIF, a meme and even a disco remix. Coolidge partially blames herself for the plot twist. “I had encouraged Mike to tell an Italian story,” she says. “I said I would love to be in Italy or something, riding around on a Vespa with all these men reaching out and trying to light my cigarette. That’s my fantasy.” She nibbles on a slice of blood orange. “But then I guess that suggestion got me killed.”
She’s a little wistful, because she just bade goodbye to White a few nights ago, before he left for Thailand to research and write the next season of The White Lotus. Unprompted, though, she works up to a pep talk. “Maybe it will really get me off my ass,” she says, hitting that last word with the same elongated aah people do when they’re impersonating her. “I’ll take one of these other jobs. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I’ll have to work with some new people.” She looks around the room and muses, “I think sometimes it’s good to be nervous.”
With so much momentum in her career, Coolidge is spending more time in Los Angeles. It’s been an adjustment. “I’m bored here,” she says. We swap complaints about how there’s so little potential for spontaneity, and how you have to drive everywhere and then also drive home. She remembers going to a really fun Halloween party many years ago, thrown by (she thinks) George Clooney and Trey Parker. It was at a theatre downtown, in an era before every minute of such an event would be captured on a phone. There were four floors, she says, and “each floor had a different thing going on, and it was kind of wild. There were no rules to the party; no one seemed very worried about manners; everyone was just having a really good time.” Coolidge wants more nights like that, nights that, in her words, have the potential to get “weirder and weirder, like a Quentin Tarantino movie.”
In reality, Los Angeles is more like a Judd Apatow movie, where, in the end, the main character learns to stop having fun with their friends and settle down. Maybe that’s unfair, but then again, neither of us wants to drive very far to find out. “I think I’d appreciate it more if I had kids or something,” she says. Her friends have encouraged her to adopt, but Coolidge thinks she might just make a better stepmother. “I’m very, very immature,” she says. “I think that has kept me from having children, because I’m sort of a child. Maybe if I had kids, I would’ve had to have grown up.” She also attributes it to her habit of dating intense men. “I’ve never had, like, a laid-back boyfriend that was just full of joy, you know?” she says, toying with the straw in her lemonade. “Like, someone who laughs at all your shortcomings. That’s never who I choose for myself.”
As we exit the spa, Coolidge picks up an apple and, upon biting into it, is so enchanted that she asks Cliff where it came from. He says all the fruit is sourced within 200 miles. “Two hundred miles?” she repeats. “So that makes it very easy for us to figure out!”
As Coolidge walks me to the lobby, which she politely insisted on doing, a family from Ireland is visibly thrilled to spot her. They thank her for bringing laughter into their home, and she asks them if it’s true that the best castles are in Ireland, because she’s always wanted to stay in a castle. They give her a few recommendations: Adare, Castle Leslie, Dromoland. “Which one’s the most dramatic?” Coolidge wants to know. (It’s Dromoland.)
Meeting new people is one of Coolidge’s favourite things about being on set. She imagines many people don’t know that she and Eddie Kaye Thomas – whose character, Finch, bedded Stifler’s mum in the American Pie movies – lived together in Los Angeles, platonically, for a year or two in the early noughties. “I wasn’t the love of his life,” she says, chuckling. “He had girlfriends. My bedroom was across the hallway from his.” The potential for new connections is what excites her about forthcoming opportunities. “I’m single,” she says. “My way of talking myself into a different job is like, well, it could be romance, or it could be, you know, a whole different group of friends. Cool things could come out of it.”
Her biggest obstacle these days is staying focused. Coming out of the pandemic, Coolidge wonders if she might have ADHD, or if her concentration has just been shattered by social media, along with the rest of us. “I don’t know whether I’m answering the phone or if I’m undoing my seatbelt; it’s just making the same dinging sound,” she says, pretending to look for a device in the folds of her sundress. “I’ll see a very important text, and then there’s like a dog with a butterfly on his nose on my Instagram, and then I’m sending it to my friend. Or, like, ‘Oh! My sister would love to see this.’”
She shakes her head at herself. No, that won’t do. She mustn’t forget to respond to the important text. As much as she loves animals, the pets of the internet won’t be allowed to conspire against her. She says, “I have big things happening.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Charlotte Rutherford
Styled by Sean Knight
Hairstyling by Sami Knight
Makeup by Lilly Keys
Manicure by Vanessa Sanchez Mccullough
CGI by Metapoint.Xyz
Creative Consulting/Movement Direction by Henry Metcalf
Retouch by Kushtrim Kunushevci
Masking by Ariel Laspiñas
Tailoring by Marko Guillén
Set Design by Lizzie Lang
Personal Styling by Gaelle Paul
Production by Photobomb Production
See Jennifer Coolidge at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 19-21 July, in association with BMW UK. For more info and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com