A familiar name will be written in The White Lotus‘guest book next season.
Jennifer Coolidge will reprise her Season 1 role as socialite Tanya McQuoid in the upcoming Season 2 of the HBO drama, TVLine has confirmed.
Season 2 will be set in Sicily, at another White Lotus resort and featuring a whole new set of guests, apart from Tanya. (Michael Imperioli, Aubrey Plaza and F. Murray Abraham are among the actors joining the cast for Season 2.) TVLine first reported in October that Coolidge would be returning for Season 2, but it wasn’t clear at the time if she’d be playing Tanya or a new character.
“I do think people will like [Season 2], based on the scenes that I’ve witnessed of other people,” Coolidge told TVLine in a recent interview. “I think people are really going to be riveted.”
Coolidge first played Tanya McQuoid — a loopy socialite who went to Hawaii to scatter the ashes of her recently deceased mother — in The White Lotus‘freshman season, which debuted on HBO last July. Series creator Mike White hinted at the time that he could potentially bring back a few Season 1 favorites for the second season. “I don’t think you can credibly have [all the Season 1 guests] on the same vacation again,” he explained. “But maybe it could be a Marvel Universe type thing, where some of them would come back.”
News that Coolidge would be reprising her Season 1 role was first revealed back in March when a TV Academy spokesperson told our sister pub variety that The White Lotus would be eligible to compete in the limited series race despite the “reappearance in a subsequent season of one character” — ie, Tanya — “from a large ensemble.”
Are you happy to hear Tanya will be checking back into The White Lotus? (And is she still with that guy Greg, ya think?) Hit the comments below to share your thoughts.