Coolidge getting recognition she deserves
Actor finally being acknowledged for her work with first Emmy nomination
Here are two stories told by an actor; try to guess who it is.
One: She is among a star-studded group at the home of a very famous writer for a play reading. Afterward, the writer unexpectedly suggests the guests help him scatter the ashes of an equally famous comedic actress in his garden. “She left him part of her ashes and he said he had been waiting for the right time to sprinkle them.” Now was that time. “It was an unusual moment . ... It was ... not what I expected when I went.”
Two: She is working with a trainer, running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl. “It’s killing me and just as I get up to the final step, there is this family, scattering someone’s ashes and — I swear to God this is true — I inhaled a face-full of those ashes. It was terrible. I felt so bad.”
I could mention that the actor in question just received an Emmy nomination for playing a woman obsessed with the need to scatter her mother’s ashes, but I shouldn’t have to. If you think about it, there is really only one person who could — and would — describe not one but two inarguably hilarious encounters with cremated remains. Only one person you could visualize in both of those situations.
It could only ever be Jennifer Coolidge.
Too long “best known” as “Stifler’s Mom, the original MILF” from “American Pie,” or Paulette from “Legally Blonde” (films that came out more than 20 years ago), Coolidge, at 60, is finally having the
moment her career, which includes three Christopher Guest movies and a slew of television series, deserves.
It is, in fact, very difficult to place Coolidge in the Hollywood hierarchy.
Just as Mike White’s scathing HBO resort-satire emerged unexpectedly from the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Coolidge was, from the moment she staggered onscreen as a woman in need of a massage and a place to scatter those ashes, a revelation.
Even by Jennifer Coolidge standards.
Say her name and pretty much everyone yelps, “I love her.” But this Emmy nomination — for supporting actress in “The White Lotus” — is her first, which seems both impossible and totally on brand. She is often classified as a “character actor,” a term that can have a lot of subtext in the entertainment business but almost always means “rarely if ever the lead.” But Coolidge’s cultural footprint is larger than that,
rivaling many performers who are considered leads.
If stardom is about talent, recognition and audience devotion, Coolidge is a very big star. But she is just now starting to believe it. Maybe. Kind of. Almost.
“It is so weird,” she says. “Even though I’ve had a lot of training, I never walk off thinking, ‘Wow, I nailed that.’ I’m always insecure. I didn’t think [the “White Lotus” performance] was going that well. I mean
I had a great time, it was very cool to be locked up in Hawaii instead of selfdestructing somewhere else, but I had no idea. We had no idea.”
The nomination puts Coolidge smack in the middle of her very first awards season even as her post-“White Lotus” career has sent her all around the globe on a string of projects, including the series’ second season, in which she is the only original main cast member.
As she has said in earlier interviews, Coolidge had been initially reluctant to
take the part White offered her; after months in lockdown at her New Orleans home, she didn’t feel up to it.
But it was more existential than that; while she considers herself a successful actor, she still had that star problem.
White had, in fact, just pitched HBO a show revolving around Coolidge as a flailing actor, which the network turned down. So when he asked her to be in “White Lotus,” she was a bit confused.
“Mike called and said, ‘Remember when I told you I wanted to write something about rich people on vacation? Well, I wrote it and HBO wants it.’ And I was like, ‘Huh?’ I mean we had pitched something ... and they didn’t want anything to do with it. I thought they would want someone else, a bigger name.”
But White had tailored the role to Coolidge and Coolidge could see that as soon as she read the script. “If you call me and say,
‘We’re looking for a kind of 1940s dame who can ricochet dialogue around the room,’ I’m probably not your girl. I am a slow performer. But I knew Tanya.”
More important, Coolidge related very strongly to Tanya’s loss.
“I lost my mother almost 30 years ago and I am still grieving. I was there when she passed — and it isn’t like it is in the movies. All I had to do was think about it and it was right there, very easy to pull up again. The sadness and the guilt — you think you have so much time and then you don’t.”
Even when the show began airing, Coolidge had no idea of the impact it — and she — was having, in part because she hadn’t watched it. “Oh my God, my TV in New Orleans is just terrible. I’ve got like five remotes and none of them work and I can never seem to get a repairman.”
In Tanya, as in many of Coolidge’s performances, there is the tension between hope and resignation that so often fuels great comedy. And like most great comedic performers, Coolidge experiences that tension personally.
“You’re so lost in the beginning,” she says of her career. “I know actors who have a completely different story — these people who say they want to play Hamlet and they turn around and play Hamlet. That was not me. All those restaurants, all those years telling people I was an actor when I was a waitress. All those creeps saying ‘Come to my house to audition’ or ‘We can’t find our lead so come meet me at the Bel Air hotel.’
The stories you hear about those creeps are totally real.”
If she had been smart, she says, or born a couple of decades later, she would have written something for herself. “That’s what you have to do,” she says. And that’s what White did for her.
“Mike lives on a whole other level of brilliance,” she says.
When it came time to film “White Lotus,” she drew on an overseas adventure with White. “He was going on safari and at the last minute his boyfriend couldn’t come so he asked me because I am obsessed with animals. And it was this very fancy safari and I was the least fancy person there. I met these really rich people but I identified more with the staff. I felt like an imposter, very insecure.”
Tanya is also deeply insecure, she says, in part because she’s rich. “The deadliest thing about being rich is it isolates you. It puts you in a false position — you either feel guilty or superior. The loneliest people I know are rich. And,” she adds, laughing, “some of them never pick up the check.”
She hastens to add: “I always pick up the check, so no one says ‘Oh, she wasn’t worth the price of the linguini.’ ”