Jennifer Coolidge Was Too Seasick To Realize Her Most Memorable The White Lotus Season 2 Line Would Become A Meme

This post contains spoilers for the second season finale of "The White Lotus."

This week's "The White Lotus" finale had everything fans could possibly ask for: danger, sexual intrigue, comedy, social commentary, and a baker's dozen of more perfect line readings by Jennifer Coolidge. That last bullet point is especially vital now that we know that the finale marked the end of the line for Tanya McQuoid, Coolidge's naive and wealthy fan-favorite character.

Tanya met her fate this week after a days-long vacation from her vacation aboard a yacht full of classy gay men went south. It turns out, she realized too late, her new husband Greg (Jon Gries) was trying to kill her for her money, in a roundabout execution plot that led to Tanya uttering one of the best lines of the show: "These gays, they're trying to murder me!"

The line became an almost-instantaneous meme after "Arrivederci" aired, which tracks with Coolidge's long-standing status as a gay icon. It's a great meme in part because it's versatile (i.e. when infighting occurs in queer fandom spaces, or when someone gay is being especially vexing and/or dangerously sexy), but it's also even funnier because the image instantly calls to mind Coolidge's perfect delivery. But according to the actress, she had no clue the line would go viral.

Jennifer Coolidge debriefed with Variety post-finale and told the outlet she was too seasick while filming the yacht scenes to think about anything as far in the future as what might be popular online. "[When filming], you're not thinking memes down the line for some reason," she says. "Maybe other people on the show were, but I wasn't savvy enough to spot them." To be fair, pretty much every Tanya line from the finale could be a meme, and the actress who gave us great moments like the "Legally Blonde" 'bend and snap' is probably used to being meme material by now. The actress says she's especially fond of a similarly dry observation about her gay companions from an earlier episode, telling the outlet, "One of my favorite lines, which Mike [White] came up with, is "These are some high-end gays."

Alas, though, the "American Pie" star was plagued by seasickness for much of her shoot involving Tom Hollander's Quentin and his stylish, ultimately dangerous gay friends. "I told [series writer-creator Mike White] I didn't want to be on a boat ever again after 'White Lotus' season 1," Coolidge tells Variety, "and of course, there were two yachts I had to be on. I was so nauseous." She says she was even seasick during the filming of one of the last scenes she shot, the now-memed scene in which Tanya tries to confide in the boat's Italian-speaking captain ("Do you know these gays?!") only to discover — hilariously — that he, too, might be gay.

As a fellow motion sickness-prone traveler, I can't imagine acting my way through a bout of seasickness, but Jennifer Coolidge's performance betrays no sense of her apparent discomfort. The actress is brilliantly funny during Tanya's final hour, as she makes off with her paramour's execution bag, blindly shoots and kills nearly every man on board, and then still manages to meet her maker when she looks past a set of stairs and instead attempts to leap — in heels — to a getaway boat. 

It's no wonder that Coolidge didn't realize the "murder gays" line would quickly become internet famous because every single thing Coolidge does in this role feels like comedy history in the making. Yes, including knocking herself out with a comically loud "bonk" sound and drowning in the ocean. Plus, in the end, Tanya simply spoke the truth: those gays really were trying to murder her!