Jennifer Coolidge Once Had a Job She Couldn’t Get Fired From: ‘It Was Sort of 50/50 Whether I Made the Shift or Not’

The White Lotus’ Emmy-winning star Jennifer Coolidge said she once had a job in the ’80s that she “couldn’t get fired from,” even though she confessed to behaving in ways that could have led to it.

For instance, “it was sort of 50/50” whether or not she would even show up for her scheduled shifts. But the people in charge were very “forgiving” of Coolidge’s antics, which included lying about having a cigarette put out in her eye to get out of a shift.

Jennifer Coolidge has an impressive acting resume

Like many actors, Coolidge began her career with minor sitcom roles, like playing one of Jerry’s girlfriends on Seinfeld. She landed her breakout role as Jeanine Stifler in American Pie, a character that became better known as Stifler’s mom.

But Coolidge said 2022 was her year. She won her first Emmy for her role as Tanya McQuoid in the first season of The White Lotus, and she was named one of Entertainment Weekly‘s Entertainers of the Year.

“I feel like I just peaked,” she told Ariana Grande during an interview for the latter honor. “This is my peaking moment right now. Just happening.”

She also dished on her favorite roles, sharing, “I think my favorite stuff is all of the recent stuff, just because I got to play more complicated people.”

Jennifer Coolidge ‘couldn’t get fired’ from a job she had before succeeding as an actor

Before Coolidge was an actor, she worked as an ’80s cocktail waitress. She recalled on Jimmy Kimmel Live how she didn’t excel in the position because she was “partying” pretty hard back then. “It was sort of 50/50 whether I made the shift or not,” she said, adding that she “couldn’t get fired, for some reason.”

“There was this very forgiving maitre d’, Moreno,” she noted. “All of us wanted to be actresses.”

So, it wasn’t her first job choice, and it might have shown. “We all had these little white coats, and my coat was always kind of stained,” Coolidge said. Still, it seemingly wasn’t an offense worth firing her over.

Coolidge recalled the lengths she would go to to get off work. “I tried to get Fourth of July off. It was one of those nights you really couldn’t pull a no-show,” The Watcher star shared. “I went to Roosevelt Hospital and found an ambulance driver and he strapped a patch and a white thing around my head.”

She went on, “I called the restaurant, and I got Moreno and told him, ‘You’re not gonna believe this, but I was at a party last night, and someone put a cigarette out in my eye.’”

Moreno’s response? Coolidge said he told her, “That’s too bad,” but added, “you’ll have to come to work anyway.”

Jennifer Coolidge kept her job as a cocktail waitress ‘right up until’ she got her role in ‘American Pie’

Coolidge told CNN that she stayed in that line of work until she got her breakthrough role. “I was a cocktail waitress right up until my 30s,” she said, adding, “right up until I got Stifler’s Mom.”

“I’m just really glad the Weitz brothers didn’t cast a supermodel for that role because I think they wanted a woman who might be in the neighborhood,” the Legally Blonde actor explained. “I’m really glad they went with someone normal — if I can pull that off! She was just a normal woman who some kid might have a crush on. “