How “special” Jennifer Coolidge became Christopher Guest’s favourite actor
There are few actors in the 21st century that have enjoyed a career rejuvenation quite like Jennifer Coolidge. She had previously been best known for her roles in the American Pie movies as Stiffler’s Mom and the Legally Blonde films, as well as her collaborations with Christopher Guest.
The 2010s were particularly unkind to Coolidge, who once admitted that she considered giving up acting entirely. However, after earning critical acclaim, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe for her performance in Mike White’s HBO black comedy-drama The White Lotus, Coolidge was brought back into the limelight, earning the respect she’d been missing for the years prior.
However, screenwriter and director Christopher Guest had understood Coolidge’s stardom long before she appeared in The White Lotus and believed she was far more than just Stiffler’s Mom. Coolidge regularly collaborated with Guest in his mockumentary films Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration and Mascots.
During an interview with Variety, Guest once explained how Coolidge became his favourite actor. “No one else acts the way she acts,” he said. “I don’t mean acting as an actor. I mean behaves the way she behaves. It’s so striking to see her with other people because she’s on a different plane of her own reality.”
Guest’s films are impossible to audition for, and their actors come with their own improvised lines and backstories. Auditions simply do not make sense. But when Guest saw Coolidge perform in 1999, he knew she was “special”.
He said: “When I met her, I knew there was something going on that was special. And I was right, fortunately.”
Coolidge’s ability to improvise was exemplified in Guest’s Best in Show, particularly in a scene where her character bangs on about her love for her comatose husband as he lies silent beside her. Guest said of that moment, “I could go on about the things she said, but they come from this unique place. You could write a book about it and never really get to what it is.”
But the real brilliance of Coolidge for Guest is how she doesn’t actually need to say anything to command the audience’s attention. “Most conventional actors would be wary of that idea and flip through the pages to see the first thing they do,” he noted. “But if someone doesn’t speak, the audience will naturally be riveted to that person. Just her looking out at the camera or looking wherever she wants to look. That becomes the magnet. And she understands that.”
Coolidge clearly has the power to command a room or a camera without having to speak, and that’s why she is Guest’s favourite actor, seeing the immense talent she has as an actor. “This person stands out,” Guest concluded. “Everyone else to me is invisible. I’m not grinding any kind of axe; I’m just saying — you want to see her.”
