Jennifer Coolidge wants ‘White Lotus’ husband to die — in a horrific way
Jennifer Coolidge’s beloved “The White Lotus” character Tanya McQuiod didn’t get the ending fans wanted for her — but the actress has an idea of how the show can avenge her fate.
The wealthy, lonely Tanya first appeared in Season 1 of the HBO series and returned in Season 2 married to Greg Hunt (Jon Gries), whom she met in the first season.
The sophomore installment, set in Sicily, ended with the shocking death of her character.
In the Season 2 finale of “White Lotus,” viewers learned that Tanya was being plotted against and taken advantage of for her money — by the man she married.
While Coolidge, 61, won’t be starring in Season 3 of the show — considering her character’s tragic ending — she doesn’t think Tanya’s story is quite finished.
Coolidge, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of the lovably flawed Tanya in Season 1, revealed in Variety’s Actors on Actors series that she wants to see Greg return in the next season to get what he deserves.
“My hope for Jon is that he’s not finished with Greg. I hope there’s some comeuppance for evil Greg,” she told “The Bear” star Jeremy Allan White in a conversation for the magazine.
As for what specifically Coolidge wants to happen to the evil character, she has a pretty gruesome idea.
“I think he should, I don’t know, end up in a meat-grinding machine,” she admitted.
In the season finale, after Tanya learned of Greg’s plan to get her murdered — the scene that brought the iconic, meme-worthy line, “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!” — she went on a shooting spree on the yacht on which she was trapped, eventually falling overboard and dying.
But Coolidge didn’t know exactly how her fateful ending was going to happen.
“[Show creator] Mike [White] did tell me that I was going to have a horrible ending. But he said it more like, ‘I’m sorry, Jennifer, but you’re going to have to die,'” she shared.
“It’s my awkwardness with the gun that I think really helped. We had to reshoot that a bunch of times,” Coolidge continued. “But it all felt real. When you’re on a boat and you’re in the middle of the ocean and there is nowhere to go, what if your castmates hate you? They could just push you. Anyone can get rid of you on a boat.”
The “Legally Blonde” actress admitted that being on a boat was the “scariest thing” and she is “never getting on a boat again,” adding: “I was creeped out, because we did shoot it in order, hanging out with the guys,” she said. “It felt very real. I really did like killing them all.
“Mike was looking for a big Italian opera ending, and it was big and dramatic, so he wanted me to die for many reasons,” Coolidge added. “But I also think Tanya’s a lot. Maybe people would get sick of her on another season. Maybe people would be like, ‘Oh, my God. Get rid of Tanya!’
“But if Tanya could come back in any form, maybe she could come back as a seagull and poke Greg’s eyes out,” she suggested.
Coolidge previously admitted in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that White used her own personality traits to inspire Tanya, as the two have been friends since they met while working on “Gentlemen Broncos” in 2009.
The “American Pie” actress confessed that she thinks White took real-life situations she had been in where she was with people she “shouldn’t have been in with at all” and combined them to influence Tanya’s storyline.
“I still want to call it naïveté — otherwise, I’m just stupid,” Coolidge said with a laugh. “It’s just people that are putting on a really good show, but they don’t like you, really, deep down. You know, I’m not one of these people that’s made millions and millions of dollars in our industry, but whenever I had, whatever little I had, they were there to take it.”
She continued, “And my obliviousness, my oblivious nature of not seeing the writing on the wall and actually denying any sort of sign that something was amiss, I was denying it. I think that happens to a lot of people, but I definitely think Mike had observed that and made that part of the script.”
