Jennifer Coolidge‘s first day of filming The White Lotus got off to a shaky start when an allergic reaction to her own spray tan sent the actress straight from the plane to the emergency room.
The actress explained to Allure in a recent interview that as she prepared for her first day on set, “I didn’t want to look like a big, white marshmallow on the beach in Hawaii, so I got a spray tan.” And it was all downhill from there. Coolidge continued, “I got on the plane, and I started to feel really weird. By the time I got off the flight, I had to go to the emergency room.”
Her allergic reaction also didn’t end there, she added that while shooting the TV show, “I think we ended up using regular makeup. The minute we stopped filming, I would shower. I have such a quick reaction to stuff.” But Coolidge notes that this extreme sensitivity is also a relatively new phenomenon for her. “I was never someone who cared very much about ingredients,” she said. “Then, I’d say the last five or six years, I started getting allergic. My eyes would always be tearing up, but it never occurred to me that it was my makeup.”
Last week, Coolidge won her first Emmy for her role as Tanya McQuoid on the HBO series and it seems that in the lead up to that huge career milestone she had yet another negative reaction to a beauty product ingredient. But thankfully, this time it didn’t send her to the hospital, it just made her gown for the big evening a little bit more uncomfortable. During her acceptance speech, Coolidge confessed to the audience, “I took a lavender bath tonight right before the show, and it made me swell up inside my dress.”
In an interview with Variety last month, she also told the outlet just how grateful she is that she got to be a part of such an outstanding program. “Some jobs, I’m sort of going, ‘Wow, this isn’t worth working for.’ What [the show’s creator] Mike [White] wrote, I was staying up late every night,” she said. “I have done one thing really right in my life. I’ve picked great friends. If Mike was never successful, and we just did White Lotus as a play in a little theater where everyone paid $10 bucks to see it, it would still be one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. Because it was a killer job that no one else thought I could do.”