Jennifer Coolidge felt some kind of way murdering evil gays in The White Lotus
Jennifer Coolidge has revealed how she actually felt about her character taking out a boat-load of gays in the season two finale of The White Lotus.
After seven episodes of more betrayal, nudity and dodgy sexual encounters than a weekend at Mighty Hoopla, Coolidge closed out season two as the “derpy” Tanya McQuoid on a yacht filled with homicidal homosexuals, pleading to the tragically non-English-speaking captain: “These gays. They’re trying to murder me.”
It was a line heard around the world.
The captain unfortunately does not understand Tanya, who takes matters into her own hands and tries to escape the boat – and by matters, we mean a gun, with which turns the tables on her boat mates to foil her husband’s plot to have her killed so that he can inherit her fortune.
Despite later bumping her head on the side of the yacht during a suitably ridiculous escape attempt and ending up “swimming with the fishes”, the line helped bolster both Coolidge’s career resurgence and place The White Lotus‘s second season at the forefront of pop culture.
Now, it turns out, that despite being a bona fide gay icon and mother of camp, among her many other defining attributes, Jennifer Coolidge took a certain joy in dispatching the murderous members of the Alphabet Mafia.
Speaking to Jeremy Allen White as part of Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Coolidge said that although she’s “never getting on a boat again”, there was a surprising upside for her as an actor: “It felt very real. I really did like killing them all,” she said.
White, who played Lip in the US version of Shameless, prompted Coolidge to say more.
“Mike [White, the show’s creator] was very confident about Tanya being pursued by these seemingly friendly gays that seem to be fans of hers. And then Mike was like: ‘We don’t see gay men as being evil, this is a bad group.'”
As Jennifer Coolidge said, gay men are obsessed with the moment, with Tanya becoming everything from a Mardi Gras costume to a Twitter-dominating meme.
“There was a whole group of gay men in New Orleans who went out on Mardi Gras as Tanya. Some of them were on scooters, and they all had: ‘These gays, they’re trying to murder me’ [on them].
“It’s happened in other cities, even in Boston. So it really did strike a chord.”
Despite the loss of Coolidge’s character, The White Lotus is set to return for a third season with series one regular Natasha Rothwell confirmed to reprise her role as Belinda – and the next batch of wealthy guests seemingly heading for Thailand.
The White Lotus has won a shed-load of awards, including two Golden Globes and 10 Emmys but no release date has been announced for season three.