Hollywood actress and comedian Jennifer Coolidge, known for her roles in ‘American Pie’ and ‘Legally Blonde’, said she binged on pizzas during the Covid lockdown thinking “we are all going to die”.
Coolidge, 61, revealed that she was also hesitant about accepting her award-winning role as Tanya McQuoid in Mike White’s ‘The White Lotus’ because she wasn’t in shape after eating pizzas for her meals during the lockdown.
Speaking during The Hollywood Reporter’s ‘Drama Actress Roundtable’, she said, “Mike White 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.”
She continued, “Then 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. 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, so I was just like do whatever you want. Walk around naked, get arrested, whatever, it’s all going to be over. But then it started to become a real thing,” Coolidge said of ‘The White Lotus’, adding, “And I was hearing from business people.”
She eventually heard from White too.
“(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.”
Even with White’s insistence that she sign on, Coolidge said she “wasn’t going to do” the show, a decision that was due to a mix 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. 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’,” she added.
The series earned Coolidge a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Emmy.
Coolidge says she’s “thrilled” by the turn her career has taken.
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