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When Mike White’s The White Lotus returned for its highly praised season 2, everyone agreed that it wouldn’t have been the same without its Emmy-winning season 1 star, Jennifer Coolidge. The veteran actress, who has been a Hollywood fixture since the ’90s (when she delivered a breakout performance in the raunchy comedy American Pie), is having some kind of renaissance as of late.
After winning an Emmy for her performance as Tanya McQuoid (-Hunt) in season 1 of The White Lotus, Coolidge has also been receiving a lot of praise for her masterful performance in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix horror drama The Watcher. Around the same time, Coolidge was also asked to return for the second season of The White Lotus, only to be killed off in the end. And as it turns out, no one is more devastated about that series death than Coolidge herself.
Jennifer Coolidge Is ‘The Reason’ Why Mike White Created The White Lotus
Essentially, Coolidge is the reason The White Lotus happened. “Jennifer’s the reason I did White Lotus in the first place, because I just wanted to write something for her and I just adore her,” White revealed.
As it turns out, the two go way back and in fact, Coolidge and White were even co-stars at one point.
“He played my love interest in a movie, like 12 years ago, called Gentlemen Broncos, so we’ve known each other,” Coolidge said of White.
“He’s tried to write some things for me — he tried to sell a show to HBO about another character. So, he has said that he had me in mind, but I don’t know.”
Over the years, they’ve also become close friends, so much so that White knew immediately that Coolidge was hesitant to do the role when he told her about it.
“At one point, I even wanted to back out of it because I was so nervous about the fact that the start date was during COVID and I had been eating pizza and ice cream for eight months solid. I wasn’t in good shape and mentally I thought we were gonna die every day,” she recalled.
Luckily, White got her to change her mind. “I’m glad that Mike picked up that I was trying to get out of it. He texted me one night, when I was in my bedroom in New Orleans at two in the morning, and it just said, ‘Are you afraid?’” Coolidge recalled.
“It was Mike’s way of telling me that he knew that I was afraid and that I wasn’t going to be able to get out of it.”
The Actress Was ‘Very Disappointed’ Upon Discovering Tanya’s Fate In Season 2
When the time came to work on season 2, White was set on welcoming a different cast. Nonetheless, he also knew that he wanted to have Coolidge back.
“Because the seasons are so thematically different, the locations are different, the cast is generally different, it felt like it would make sense to have somebody be the connective tissue between the two seasons,” White said.
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“Obviously people loved her, and she’s my friend. So it just made sense that it would be Jennifer.”
And that was essentially when Coolidge received a phone call from White once again. This time, however, there was a catch.
“I forget how many months it actually was. But last year, maybe a few months before this one, I got this phone call from him, and we were having sort of a social call, and he said, ‘I just want to let you know something about season two,’” the actress recalled.
“He said, ‘We found these great locations in Sicily, and you’re going to love it here … oh and also, you die.’ I was like, ‘I what?!’ He was like, ‘You die.’ I said, ‘Oh, really? Aw, really?’ He didn’t tell me how I was going to die, but he told me I was definitely going to bite the dust. I was very disappointed, but not everyone can live!”
That said, Coolidge did try to change White’s mind about killing Tanya off once they got to the set. “Even when we were shooting the scene in the ocean where Daphne finds her body. She was like, ‘Should we just do one take where I pull myself up on the shore? Just one’” White recalled.
As it turns out, however, White’s mind was already made up by then. There may have even been a foreshadowing of Tanya’s death early on.
“In the first season, Tanya’s last line is, like, ‘I’ve had so many treatments in my life. Death is the last immersive experience I haven’t tried,’” White pointed out.
Will Fans Ever See Jennifer Coolidge In The White Lotus Again?
Much to the delight of fans, The White Lotus has been officially renewed for a third season. Even better, White already has an idea about where the show is going next.
“I think it’d be fun to maybe go to a whole different continent,” he told Deadline. “You know, we did Europe, and maybe Asia, something crazy like that, that would be fun.”
And while Coolidge was killed off in the second season, White still can’t imagine doing the show without her.
“Jennifer is my friend and everybody loved her in the first season, and I was like, ‘I can’t go to Italy without Jennifer,’” he continued. “And maybe that’s still the case. Like, maybe you can’t go to Japan without Jennifer, either.”
