Looking back on the career of Jennifer Coolidge, she has had a hell of a run in Hollywood. A constant presence in film and television since the mid-1990s, she was once best known for playing Stifler’s Mom in the American Pie movies, but she experienced a renaissance in the last few years thanks to her role on The White Lotus – which ultimately earned her an Emmy. She is beloved by audiences everywhere… and what makes it all particularly funny is that all of her success can arguably be linked back to a few lies.
Audiences know Coolidge from a wide number of roles, but her on screen career began with a single-episode part on Seinfeld back in 1993 – and she admits that she told a few harmless fibs that led her to getting the part. For an oral history feature by GQ chronicling the many, many girlfriends Jerry Seinfeld had on the classic 1990s sitcom, Coolidge revealed that she severely padded her resume to get the role of Jodi on the show, which was her very first television gig. She recalled,
It was a weird day. I booked Seinfeld the same day that I booked this very short lived series called She TV, which was an all-women sketch show on ABC. I didn't really have any jobs before that. I only had lies on my resume. I'd gone to a school called American Academy of Dramatic Arts up in Pasadena, and I'd just named all these shows and all these different theaters at the school as if they played there. You have to do that if you have a blank resume, until you start getting jobs. Then you can slowly erase the lies. I'd love to get my hands on that resume now.
(If you’re curious: She TV did not exactly end up having the same legacy as Seinfeld, as the woman-fronted sketch show only lasted one season and six episodes).
For those who possibly don’t remember Coolidge’s time as one of Jerry’s girlfriends, she played the titular role in the Season 5 episode “The Masseuse.” Named Jodi, she starts dating the show’s main character but frustrates him to the extreme because she is unwilling to give him a professional rub down. She ends up expressing a deep disdain for George whenever he hangs out with Jerry, causing him to unwittingly fall in love with her, but she is best known for delivering the line, “I don't submit to forcible massage,” after Jerry tries to trick her into working on him.
The 1993 Seinfeld episode allowed Jennifer Coolidge to erase one lie off of her resume, and while her other earliest work isn’t nearly as memorable (movies like Plump Fiction and a short-lived SNL competitor called Saturday Night Special), she eventually started to land more significant roles in more significant productions. Fast forward 30-plus years, and she is now a beloved Hollywood figure.
Should you care you revisit her time on Seinfeld, the show is available to stream with a Netflix subscription, and if you want to check out her latest work, you can see her as Vice Principal Marlene in A Minecraft Movie (which is now available to stream with a HBO Max account).
