Mike White Open to ‘The White Lotus’ Prequel With Jennifer Coolidge
Don’t despair, The White Lotus fans — we may not have seen the last of Jennifer Coolidge’s unlucky-in-love Tanya McQuoid.
In the HBO hit’s second-season finale, Tanya turns the tables on the goons her husband Greg (Jon Gries) hired to kill her, offing the men in a shooting spree aboard their yacht. In her escape from the vessel, however, Tanya slips, hits her head, and drowns in the seas off Sicily.
But at a press conference for the show in Australia on Saturday, June 10, The White Lotus creator Mike White teased the prospect of a prequel series centering on Tanya.
HBO
“I absolutely think that’s possible,” he told reporters, per Deadline. “We were just talking about that. It’s a funny idea. And making Jennifer, you know, 20 years younger, that would be fun too. I think Jennifer’s like, ‘Sure, let’s do it!”
White previously mused about Tanya’s Season 2 return — and her subsequent death — in an HBO featurette, saying that he was sorry to kill off the character.
“In the end of last season, Tanya is sitting with Greg in the last episode, and he’s talking about his health issues, and she says, ‘I’ve had every kind of treatment over the years; death is the last immersive experience I haven’t tried,’ and I was thinking, it’d be so fun to bring Tanya back because she’s such a great character, but maybe that’s the journey for her, like a journey to death.”
He continued: “Not that I really wanted to kill Tanya because I love her as a character and obviously love Jennifer. But I just felt like, you know, we’re going to Italy, [and] she’s such a diva, a larger-than-life female archetype — it just felt like we could devise our own operatic conclusion to her life and story.”
Coolidge, meanwhile, is down to return for another collaboration with White, after winning an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe for her performance as Tanya. “Mike White is truly the greatest friend,” she told Vulture in December. “He gave me White Lotus one and two. If he asked me to come back as someone else? Or asked me to do a prequel? I would totally do it.”
Of course, a prequel series is still in the hypothetical stage, but fans do have The White Lotus Season 3 on the horizon. The third season, which White has said will cover “death and Eastern religion and spirituality,” will reportedly take place in Thailand, with Natasha Rothwell reprising her role as spa worker Belinda Lindsay from Season 1, Variety reports.
The White Lotus, TBD, HBO
