It can be hard enough to pluck up the courage to take a leap of faith in your career—harder still when it’ll be watched by millions of people. And beloved actress Jennifer Coolidge has recently revealed that she nearly didn’t take her “dream” role in The White Lotus because she didn’t feel confident in her appearance.
Coolidge told a roundtable of actors and actresses in an event for The Hollywood Reporter that she had been “pigging out” on vegan pizzas during the pandemic, so when the offer came in to shoot the hit TV series in a beach location she didn’t feel comfortable enough to sign on.
It wasn’t until a friend called her out on her “bullcr-p” that she realized what an opportunity she would be missing, she said.
That’s despite building her reputation as a household name, with a breakout role in American Pie in 1999 before starring in Legally Blonde in 2001 alongside Reese Witherspoon.
Impostor syndrome
Coolidge isn’t alone in her impostor syndrome—defined as doubting your abilities or feeling like a fraud, especially characteristic of high-achieving people—which plagues workers outside Hollywood and across industries. Research finds that women, those of color in particular, are more likely to experience impostor syndrome in the workplace or environments that esteem values like “brilliance.”
Sarah-Jane Leslie, a philosophy professor at Princeton University who coauthored the study published in July 2022, told Science: “It’s much harder to come up with examples in popular culture of women, particularly women of color, who, like a Sherlock Holmes or a Dr. House, have that kind of special raw brilliance.”
And this lack of representation hints at a wider cultural issue than merely individual struggles—with Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey writing in the Harvard Business Review that “systemic racism, classism, xenophobia, and other biases” weren’t taken into consideration during the development of impostor syndrome as a concept.
Although Coolidge is a white woman, she is still forging her way in a hugely male-dominated industry. According to research from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, in 2022 females occupied 40% of speaking character roles. This figure falls even further behind the scenes, with just 26% of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers identifying as women.
This issue is compounded by age. Holding on to a high-flying career gets increasingly difficult for women as they grow older, with research from Time finding that the number of roles women are offered begins to decline from the age of 30.
So it’s no wonder that Coolidge, now 61, was nervous about returning to the limelight. She’s been candid about the professional years leading up to The White Lotus airing: During her Golden Globes speech earlier this year, the Boston native said that as she got older she began to lose hope of landing another big role.
She explained: “I had such big dreams and expectations as a younger person, but what happened is they get sort of fizzled by life. And then you get older and think, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen?’”
‘Are you afraid?’
During that speech Coolidge thanked The White Lotus creator Mike White, and it seems that between the writer and Coolidge’s best friend, there was no way the star wouldn’t have made it to the HBO series.
Speaking to actors including Jennifer Garner and Claire Danes in the interview released last week, Coolidge explained that White called her out on her resistance to join the project.
“[I hear] that little ping in my bedroom in New Orleans at, like, 2 a.m., and I look down at my phone and it said, ‘Are you afraid?’ It was from Mike. He knew.
“You sit around and bitch your whole life that you’ve never been given the role of your dreams, and then when it comes, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I can’t do it. I ate a bunch of pizza.’”
And although it may be incredibly difficult, experts actually suggest the best way to get over impostor syndrome is to put yourself out there.
Speaking to Harvard Business Review, life coach and founder of Confident and Killing It, Tiwalola Ogunlesi said: “By reframing self-promotion as an exchange of value and self-enthusiasm, you can inspire others while mitigating your internal fears.”
For Coolidge, her reframe came from an outside source, she explained: “I have a bestie that just caught on to my bullcr-p. She knew exactly what I was doing, and she was like, ‘You are an idiot. I’m not going to let you do this.’
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know, it was self-hate and not being prepared.”