After two seasons of The White Lotus on HBO, star Jennifer Coolidge, though certainly well known before, has become a bit of a sensation. Her work as super rich grieving-daughter-turned-newlywed Tanya McQuoid-Hunt not only brought her much adoration from the show’s fans, but also led to an awards season sweep that surprised the one-time Two Broke Girls star. It turns out, though, that the thought of potentially spending so much time in a bathing suit for the series scared Coolidge, but a Alexandra Daddario bikini realization helped ground her.
What Did The White Lotus’ Jennifer Coolidge Say About Being Scared To Wear A Bathing Suit On The Show?
It’s no longer a secret that many people, even those of us who are famous, beautiful, and talented, have issues when it comes to our bodies. The same can be said for the woman who portrayed American Pie’s famous MILF, Jeanine Stifler, at least with regards to wearing a swimsuit on camera for The White Lotus.
When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter for the outlet’s Drama Actress Roundtable, Coolidge admitted that she wasn’t originally going to take the role of Tanya, which came up about six months into the pandemic. Show creator Mike White had told her it would be “on a beach in bathing suits,” and she admitted that she’d been eating pizza basically all day, every day, thinking “we were all going to die during COVID,” so she’d given up on any limits, adding:
Yeah, just do whatever you want. Walk around naked, get arrested, whatever, it’s all going to be over. But then [the show] started to become a real thing, and I was hearing from business people. 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 bitch 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.’
Listen, I think there are few people who would be willing to put on a bathing suit and parade around on camera, whether they are trained in the dramatic arts or not. It’s a scary thing for many, and some people won’t even do it in their regular lives to go to a community pool, when there’s no film crew around. We both put a lot of pressure on ourselves to look a certain way for specific clothing, and often fall to the pressure of others’ expectations that we maintain a very narrowly defined body type before showing any skin. So, Coolidge’s fears make sense.
At this point, Clare Danes and Jennifer Garner piped up, with the former asking why she was so scared, and the latter saying she’d “be scared of putting on a bathing suit” as well. Coolidge responded:
Yeah, and look, they have Sydney Sweeney and Alexandra Daddario to wear those bathing suits, I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know, it was self-hate and not being prepared.
Assuming you’ve finished both seasons of the surprising drama, you know by now that Tanya hardly spends the bulk of her time in a swimsuit, at least not one that isn’t covered by a gorgeous caftan, long, flowy dress, or some sort of wrap/full cover-up situation. Meaning that her fear was largely unfounded.
As she noted, she had talented co-stars like Sydney Sweeney and Alexandra Daddario to put on itsy bitsy bikinis. In fact, an infamous Season 1 white bikini scene featuring Daddario and Sweeney caused such a stir that people were still talking about it as the second season aired, and the duo actually recreated it because it was so popular.
I think we’re all glad that Coolidge didn’t let her bathing suit fears get the better of her, as she’s clearly happy that she didn’t let such a small thing stop her from a dream role. And, while we are unlikely to see Tanya in Season 3, she sure was a wild time while we had her.
