Jennifer Coolidge
For the past couple of decades, actress Jennifer Coolidge has been making a memorable splash all across the comedy world, with her many eccentric and larger-than-life characters. From Best in Show and Legally Blonde, to A Cinderella Story and Two Broke Girls, Coolidge, 63, saw her stardom take on a whole other level when she was cast as Tanya McQuoid in Mike White’s television phenomenon, The White Lotus.
Since her character Tanya was killed off at the end of season two, following a heroic shootout, is Coolidge watching the current third season airing on HBO and Max?
“Yes, I am,” Coolidge said during our new conversation. “And I’m envious as hell.”
I then joked to Coolidge that we need her back on the show as a twin sister to Tanya, to show up and avenge her death.
“I know! Look, it’s not like I haven’t wished or whatever, but it isn’t happening. It doesn’t matter – they don’t need me. Mike White can tell a story better than anybody. I mean, in the first episode [of season three]
, I felt like – Oh, this is going to be really good! I just felt like everything he set up – it’s really eerie – you’re not quite sure what people are up to yet. My guess? Something’s going to go horribly wrong. I think it’s really going to go wrong. Mike White, he wants us to have it all, I think. I can’t wait. As you know, [actor] Jon Gries has shown up [again as Tanya’s former husband, Greg]. I hope he gets it! I hope they do something terrible to him.”
Beyond her The White Lotus departure, Coolidge has been keeping busy, as she now stars in a new crime comedy with Ed Harris and Bill Murray titled Riff Raff. In the film, which arrives in theaters on February 28, Coolidge plays Ruth, the ex-wife of Harris’s character, as their rather dysfunctional and extended family finds themselves in deep trouble.
When asked what it was about her character Ruth in the Riff Raff script that intrigued her to want to play this character next, Coolidge said, “I’ve never been offered a part like her. I think that’s what happens to a lot of actors. An opportunity comes where it’s not playing like a trophy wife or something. There’s a certain woman that I’ve played quite a few times – some sort of rich, spoiled woman or something, but this was something very different. This was someone who had a pretty decent beginning of her life, but ended up not desired by her ex-husband anymore and very lost.”
She added: “I liked the tone of [the film]. I grew up in Boston – a small town outside – and so, I did sort of feel like I knew the world.”
Jennifer Coolidge and Lewis Pullman in “Riff Raff”
So, being such a belove stapled within the comedy space, has Coolidge noticed that her creative interests or taste within the comedy genre has evolved at all in recent years?
Coolidge said, “Has it evolved? I mean, yeah! When I was pursuing a career in the 90s, the jokes – everything that I saw that I was involved with or any show that I watched a lot, the funny stuff didn’t seem to have a lot of honesty. It was like going to a stand-up club and you find out that it’s sort of child-approved, so no one is really saying anything very honest or dark or anything like that. That was my beginning – I felt like no one was really crossing the line very much.”
Jennifer Coolidge and Pete Davidson in “Riff Raff”
She added: “People are really going for it now. I’m thrilled because I never felt like it was enough. I want to see the dragon! I mean, sometimes when I’m seeing stand-up and they talk about someone’s deceased parent or something, it’s a little bit like – I don’t know if we needed that joke. Even the stand-ups that I’m obsessed with, I’m just blown away at how good and how honest their acts are, and just how vulnerable. People now really put their butt on the line and just say very shocking stuff. It’s so much better than the watered-down version I had for a decade or two.”
