As Mike White prepares for a third season of his HBO hit The White Lotus, it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that this will be the first installment without Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge). Luckily, Coolidge—a known genius—has an idea for White about how to honor her character’s memory.
Tanya, a foolish billionaire with a penchant for the White Lotus hotel chain, was killed off in Season 2. She died after falling for a scam, in which her husband Greg (Jon Gries) teamed up with his secret lover to murder Tanya and take her money. She nearly escaped, after killing off the team of men trying to strangle her and get the dough Greg was entitled to in the McQuoid will. But after murdering the crew of thieves, Tanya accidentally kills herself by jumping off the boat they were on and hitting her head on another boat.
This means that her family fortune will probably go to Greg, who Tanya never got to remove from her will. Gross! Coolidge thinks we ought to see this play out in the next season, though, and believes it should end with Greg meeting his own demise.
“My hope for Jon is that he’s not finished with Greg,” Coolidge said, during a conversation in Variety’s Actors on Actors series with The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White. “I hope there’s some comeuppance for evil Greg. I think he should, I don’t know, end up in a meat-grinding machine.”
Being processed into a sausage, almost akin to Fargo’s wood chipper scene, sounds good to me. But Coolidge has another idea in mind for Greg, too—and I like this one better.
“If Tanya could come back in any form, maybe she could come back as a seagull and poke Greg’s eyes out,” Coolidge said.
So we’d get to see Tanya again—now in seagull form—and watch Greg get his eyes poked out? White should just hire Coolidge as a writer now.
The bad news is that Tanya won’t return at all in any upcoming iterations of The White Lotus. But maybe that’s also good news, considering we’ll never grow tired of her character—perhaps if we saw her too much, i.e. in another season, her legacy wouldn’t be as strong. Coolidge opened up about why that was important to both her and White in the interview.
“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 said. “But I also think Tanya’s a lot. Maybe people would get sick of her in another season. Maybe people would be like, ‘Oh, my God. Get rid of Tanya!'”
One returning star has already been announced, however: Natasha Rothwell, who played Belinda, Tanya’s spa-employee pal in Season 1. Will Belinda still be working at The White Lotus? Or will we get to see her on vacation? Either way, the spirit of Tanya McQuoid shall live on in Belinda and, hopefully, the brutal death of Greg.
