Jennifer Coolidge very nearly turned down the role of a lifetime. When Mike White approached her to play Tanya McQuoid in The White Lotus, she was aghast – mainly at the idea of being on camera at all. Jennifer had picked up nearly 20kg during lockdown, hunkered down in her 19th-century New Orleans mansion with a friend, doomscrolling and eating ‘five or six’ vegan pizzas a day.
‘I was really affected by the pandemic. It was an incredibly sad time. I was reading tragic news stories on a daily basis, had a fatalistic approach and assumed the virus was going to win. I knew people who lost their lives and I was convinced we wouldn’t make it through. I wasn’t thinking about work; I didn’t think we’d be alive.’
Out of nowhere, her friend Mike called. His show had been picked up by HBO and he told Jennifer to pack her bags for a stint in Hawaii, where they would be taking over a Covid-abandoned hotel. ‘That was an impossibility to my mind,’ she says. ‘I’d been gorging at home for months, eating pizza all day. There was no way I wanted to be on film unless they shot me from the neck up. I’m sort of vain, so there was no fucking way.’
Jennifer’s plan was to come up with a believable medical excuse: something involving ‘partial hip problems’ or some sort of foot. To back up her story, she talked a paramedic into bandaging up half her head, and she wore the makeshift eye patch for several days to keep up the facade.) But Mike was having none of it: he had written the role specifically with Jennifer in mind and he wasn’t going to let her off that easily. At 2am one morning, he called her out in a three-word text message: ‘Are you afraid?’
