Jennifer Coolidge Almost Turned The White Lotus Down Over Some Pizzas & COVID Anxiety

Hard as this may be to believe, we almost missed out on Jennifer Coolidge's award-winning performance on "The White Lotus."

Coolidge, the venerated character actor who played the eccentric, bizarre, and severely thoughtless heiress Tanya McQuoid on Season 1 & 2 of Mike White's acclaimed HBO series, recently revealed in a roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter that she almost said no to the role because the pandemic just sent her into a full-body state of anxiety.

After recalling that she and White tried to sell a different show but were turned down — a fact she and White have both referenced in multiple awards show speeches — Coolidge said, "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 —"

"Eat pizza!" offered Jennifer Garner, who was also a panelist at the roundtable.

"Yeah, just do whatever you want," Coolidge continued." COVID-19 quarantine definitely was a lawless time, as Coolidge correctly recalls, but soon, White came calling again. 

"But then it started to become a real thing, and I was hearing from business people," she said. "And then [I hear] 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. But I still wasn't going to do it, and I think this happens to actresses a lot. You sit around and b*tch 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.'"

Thankfully, Coolidge's friend talked her into it, and the world got her performance of Tanya, which became one of the most celebrated of her career. It's definitely easy to understand, though; if you've spent months eating pizza and lounging in sweatpants, the idea of getting up and doing stuff doesn't exactly sound wildly appealing.

Perhaps the funniest aspect of all of this is — which is saying something, considering that Coolidge, who used to pose as "Muffy Hemingway" to get into New York nightclubs, is full of wild stories — is that Coolidge eventually had such an incredible time on "The White Lotus" that she begged White not to kill her off in Season 2.

Fans probably remember that, during Season 2, Tanya befriends a group of men led by Tom Hollander's Quentin, and it turns out that they're part of a plot to harm her in some way (likely orchestrated by her estranged husband Greg, played by Jon Gries). Tanya, for just a moment, manages to stay one step ahead of the men, stealing a gun from one of their bags and blindly shooting her way through the boat on which they're all stranded. (No, really; she closes her eyes the entire time. It's amazing.) Because it's Tanya, though, she can't figure out how to get off of the boat and towards safety, and as she tries to jump into a lifeboat, she smashes her head on the side of the boat and dies.

Asked about when White delivered the news that Tanya would die, Coolidge replied, "I kept thinking if I did a good enough job, he wouldn't kill me." Unfortunately, her gambit didn't work, but at least she got to spend two seasons playing in the showrunner's sandbox.

The world is definitely Coolidge's oyster in a post-"White Lotus" world; she's picked up awards right and left for her role as Tanya, and she's got a few things in the pipeline, including the long-awaited threequel "Legally Blonde 3." When asked what she would want to do during the roundtable, though, Coolidge had a unique answer — and no, she didn't say she wanted to play a dolphin this time, though that's presumably still a long-held desire of hers.

"I just want to be given a job where I have to improve myself," Coolidge said, when asked about her dream role. "Like, you're a famous ice skater and you have to do triple whatevers, and you have to really do them, so you'd have to get in great, physical shape. And if you don't, you're fired." When the moderator asked if that meant a superhero, Garner said Coolidge would look great in pleather, the character actor replied, "Well, there we go. I've always wanted to wear pleather."

"Wear it exactly as you are," said co-panelist Melanie Lynskey, completing the entire interview. Whatever Coolidge does next, everyone will want to watch it — and if that means playing a superhero, she'd certainly make it incredibly entertaining.