Last year, we lost Betty White. This year, we gained Jennifer Coolidge.
Images: Adweek, iSpot.tv
New Year’s Eve is coming up, and while it’s an evening we usually take to celebrate with our loved ones, last year’s holiday had an air of melancholia. That day was the day many fans on Twitter feared every time her name trended on the platform, but knew was coming. That day, veteran actress Betty White passed away at age 99.
Apart from being a revered actress with a career spanning eight decades, in recent years, Betty became something of a media darling. Having reached an advanced age, she had been relegated to guest appearances on TV and not much apart from that. In 2009, she had a breakout performance in the film The Proposal, reminding millions of viewers that she was still around and hadn’t lost her acting chops. Soon after, a famous Facebook movement to have her host Saturday Night Live went viral. Of course, Lorne Michaels obliged and brought her on. From there, she became a media juggernaut. She appeared in everything from movies to television. There was her Super Bowl ad for Snickers. She landed her last big TV role in Hot in Cleveland as well as her own show on NBC. She was even featured in a pop song. In the early 2010s, Betty White had something of a career renaissance, despite approaching her 90s.
In 2022, we are seeing a similar phenomenon take place with someone albeit much younger, but until now had been stuck in a similar rut Betty was in before bouncing back. That person is The White Lotus’s Jennifer Coolidge.
Coolidge made her career as a character actress, primarily in comedic roles, appearing in movies like American Pie and Legally Blonde. In 2018, her latter role was reprised in the music video for Ariana Grande’s song Thank U, Next, which Coolidge credited during an appearance on The Tonight Show for saving her career and bringing her back into the spotlight.
But it was Tik Tok, in my mind, that really sparked her career renaissance. Comedic creators began a brief trend on the video-sharing platform of doing impressions of Coolidge, primarily as her nail tech character Pauline on Legally Blonde. Soon after, people began asking questions, looking her name up on Google to remind them of who she was.
In 2020, she was cast in Promising Young Woman, the first of many roles she would receive within a short, two-year timespan. The next year, she was cast as Tanya McQuoid in the HBO anthology dramedy The White Lotus, and this year she had two big roles: her return as Tanya in The White Lotus for its second season, and as insidious realtor Karen Calhoun in the Netflix comedy-thriller miniseries The Watcher. What soon followed was a slew of brand deals.
She made an appearance in this year’s Super Bowl spot for Uber Eats, questioning if something being delivered by the service makes it edible, regardless of what it is, making for a funny and memorable bit. She has an ongoing holiday campaign for Old Navy, joining the likes of fellow comedy actresses Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in endorsing the discount fashion retailer. Said campaign has garnered split reactions. Some welcomed her appearance, happy to see her once again onscreen. Others, however, criticized the lack of direction in the ad’s copy, unable to understand how everything, “blah blah blah” and all, ties into the campaign’s dated tagline, “#SorryNotSorry.”
Just yesterday, I spotted her in yet another social campaign, granted I forgot which brand it was for. It was seeing her on my feed yet again that led me to write this piece. This weekend alone, she was parodied by Chloe Fineman in this weekend’s episode of SNL, and I probably watched her Old Navy bit some 10 times while watching RuPaul’s Drag Race on Hulu.
With that being said, I don’t think this will end anytime soon for her, and it’s obvious she’s enjoying every minute of her newfound success. So be prepared for a whole lot more of Jennifer. Speak for yourself, but I’m here for it.
