Jennifer Coolidge on co-star crushes and the truth about her Golden Globes speech
Speaking to news.com.au, Coolidge reveals the truth about her hilarious Golden Globes speech - and confesses her crush on a co-star.
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She stole the show with two hilarious onstage moments at this month’s Golden Globes, but Jennifer Coolidge has no interest in turning that into a full award show hosting gig any time soon.
“You know what I love about being my age? I know my limitations,” the 61-year-old star tells news.com.au.
She may have a point – she delivered a hilariously rambling five-minute monologue about her anxieties leading up to the Globes when she took the stage to present the award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Coolidge would bring a lot of laughs as an Oscars host – but she might also make for a 12-hour ceremony.
“I know that that job of hosting, you have to be so conditioned for that gig, and I don’t think I’m the one. I think people would hate me by the end of the night! It would be a risk, and I don’t know that they should take that risk,” she says.
Better to stick to acting, then – and Coolidge’s White Lotus-assisted career renaissance (or “second chance,” as she humbly calls it) continues with Shotgun Wedding, a new Jennifer Lopez action rom-com out today on Prime Video.
Lopez and Josh Duhamel play couple Darcy and Tom, who’ve gathered their loved ones together for a beachside destination wedding that goes horribly wrong when their resort is taken over by gun-wielding pirates.
Coolidge does what Coolidge does best – stealing the show with a wonderfully OTT turn as mother of the groom, Carol.
And yes, the math ain’t math-ing: Duhamel is 50, Coolidge 61. It is more than a little odd watching him repeatedly refer to her as “mom” on-screen.
“I made the decision that she didn’t know she was pregnant, and then she had it one day. Not a lot of girls are doing that at 11, but Carol was,” Coolidge quips.
It was made even more awkward by her decidedly un-maternal feelings towards the man playing her on-screen son.
“When I did American Pie, I was very attracted to Seann William Scott, who played my son. Then I felt the same way about Josh Duhamel. It’s hard – they’re my son! But who cares, they’re really attractive,” she laughs.
There’s definitely a throughline from The White Lotus to Shotgun Wedding: Both projects have seen their casts assemble in exotic locations (Hawaii and Sicily for White Lotus, the Dominican Republic for Shotgun Wedding) for shoots that seem – at least to us non-actors – to be half business, half pleasure.
Is Coolidge only accepting jobs that involve a free holiday nowadays?
“I don’t want to go where it’s freezing,” she admits of her recent career choices.
“I left Hawaii and went straight to the Dominican Republic, living in a house with (co-stars)Lenny Kravitz and D’Arcy Carden, having dinner every night in a mind-blowing villa. It was paradise, really … except for being in the pool all day.”
Ah yes, that. Coolidge and many of her co-stars spend much of the film’s runtime fully-clothed in the hotel pool, held at gunpoint by those pirates. It made for a “waterlogged” filming experience – “and it didn’t seem like a lot of people were taking bathroom breaks,” she says.
Coolidge was her usual charming self accepting her recent Golden Globe award for The White Lotus, but one moment in her speech revealed just how much her stock has risen.
Speaking from the stage, she told series creator Mike White that he’d changed her life in “a million ways. My neighbours are speaking to me now. I mean it! I was never invited to one party on my hill, and now everyone’s inviting me!”
I had to get to the bottom of this: Who on earth would have Jennifer Coolidge as a neighbour and not invite her to parties?
Coolidge was happy to give a bit more context to the onstage admission, confessing she’d become something of a shut-in before her White Lotus career boost.
“Look, I’ve had a lot of great things happen in my life, but what I wanted in life was a challenging acting role. Mike White gave me that,” she says of her two-season stint as the troubled, self-obsessed heiress Tanya McQuoid.
“So it’s not that I wasn’t invited to things, it was that I wasn’t putting out that I was happy and wanted to be invited to things. It’s a two-way street. It opened the door for people to say hello.
“I think I was a recluse, and White Lotus made me... something else.”
Shotgun Wedding is available now on Prime Video.
Originally published as Jennifer Coolidge on co-star crushes and the truth about her Golden Globes speech
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