"I didn't think I had a shot in hell." Why Jennifer Coolidge's honesty about her failures is so valuable.

It's Saturday night and I find myself pressed into a stream of people, pouring through the doors of Sydney's Aware Super Theatre Stadium, overlooking the pulsating crowds in Darling Harbour. 

The sell-out event has drawn a 9,000-strong audience and it seems as though everybody I know – everybody I've ever met – has been drawn to this, the largest event ever held by Vivid, the city's annual festival of lights and culture. 

It's baffling that this many people would pay this much money ($60 a ticket – at least, in my section up the back of the stadium) to watch a talk. But really, this just speaks to the wild popularity of tonight's interviewees: Mike White, writer and creator of the global TV phenomenon The White Lotus, and Jennifer Coolidge, the comedic actor named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2023 – and whose performance became the beating, hilarious, and meme-able heart of the show (at least until her character's untimely death at the end of season two).

The talk is chaired by the wildly talented presenter and writer Benjamin Law, who manages to corral these two close friends, both of whom are easily distractible and have a tendency to wander off sideways into the unmapped streets of the interview, into an engaging conversation.

Mike White – otherwise known as the creator of early 2000s sensation School of Rock (he also played Ned Schneebly, the extremely put-upon housemate of Jack Black's main character) – speaks with a disarming level of frankness about his life as a screenwriter. He talks about how a project just before White Lotus was soundly rejected before he'd even made it to his car after a meeting, his general rejection of actors, and the sheer isolation that's required of screenwriters.

But it's Coolidge who steals the show again and again. While most would understand that she has some capacity to act in comedies (this is Stifler's mum from American Pie, after all; this is the hapless Paulette Bonafonté from Legally Blonde, who learnt the bend-and-snap before breaking the hot UPS guy's nose). 

What is genuinely unexpected is how deeply funny she is as a person.

She oozes charm and the audience – yes, many of whom are gay men – are hanging onto her every word with joyful anticipation. We've seen snippets of it before, of course – like when she was accepting her first Emmy for Supporting Actress back in late 2022, she kicked off her acceptance speech talking about taking a lavender bath that made her "swell up" inside her dress and was making it difficult to speak. It's that kind of delightful honesty that we're all drinking in now – bathing in, if you will.

Watch Jennifer Coolidge's appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show below. Article continues after video. 

When asked what the secret was behind her enduring sex appeal (she is now 61 years old), Coolidge replies that it is all bolstered by "pure denial" and the crowd howls with laughter. I'm laughing so hard that I'm gripping my boyfriend's thigh – again, at a talk.

She is earnestly delightful and not even in that slightly gross disingenuous Hollywood way; in a real-person way. 

Her comfort with ridiculous candour leads to Coolidge discussing her life pre-White Lotus and the fact that her acting career was actually not working out for a very long time there. 

Coolidge had enjoyed an okay career before HBO ever came knocking for the first season of White Lotus. She had captured attention in iconic comedy films, including Best in Show and the aforementioned American Pie and Legally Blonde. But her capacity to steal scenes and humanise the absurd had been routinely (criminally) overlooked.

Coolidge has spoken about her career before and how roles seemed to dry up for her over time, leaving her lurching from small job to small job in order to make ends meet. Accepting her Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series earlier this year, Coolidge said through tears that there were about five people in that room who had kept her going with those little roles.

"I just want you all to know that I had such big dreams and expectations as a younger person, but what happened was that, you know, they kind of fizzled."

During the Vivid speech, she reflects a little more on these years of her life and her experience with depression – which actually almost led to her declining the role of Tanya McQuoid in White Lotus altogether. Coolidge says her self-doubt was compounded by her refusal to leave her house for "years" and suggests to young actors that simply leaving the house to go and get coffee is hugely beneficial for a person's mental health, even when the phone isn't necessarily ringing.

She tells the audience that she wants everybody to know all of her "depressing stories" because she believes they will help people.

"I do feel like I am a good story for someone who had a very hard time. I had a very hard time functioning for many years, because I just didn't think I had a shot in hell."

Celebrities have, of course, spoken about struggles with mental health before. Selena Gomez has opened up about her diagnosis with bipolar disorder and Kirsten Dunst, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga are among an expansive list of famous people who have impressively chosen to speak openly about their experiences with depression. 

But there's something about admitting to all of the shit that comes with depression – loneliness, self-doubt, isolation, and abject failure – that makes Coolidge's approach truly unique. Also, she wasn't a famous person living with a diagnosis; she was a flailing actor living in a house on a hill where her neighbours didn't invite her to parties (as she described in her Golden Globes speech). She was a not-very-famous person stuck in a hole. 

Speaking to Vogue in 2021, Coolidge said that she had been depressed in her life and that she couldn't find a way to help herself. 

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud discuss The White Lotus and forced friendships below. Article continues after podcast. 

"I feel like that self-centred misery can be really hard to climb out of sometimes. You can meet someone doing even worse than you, but you can barely see it because you're clouded in your own dark cloak or whatever." 

Coolidge, as she recognises herself, is the perfect advocate for never giving up. She is a woman in her early 60s who has just finished the role of her lifetime and taken over the world. If anybody can speak with authority on the idea that darkness and struggle always come to an end, it's her. She might look deceptively like a cartoon of a hot woman you find at a Miami day club, but she is actually the light at the end of the tunnel.

Of course, she credits most of her career success now to White, who says that he almost had to drag her to Hawaii to film the first season of The White Lotus, but there's clear talent and passion at the core of her story. And, despite the fact that Tanya McQuoid slipped on somewhere off the coast of Sicily and cracked her head open on a boat, Coolidge has clearly opened up her narrative again. 

She has, despite Hollywood's ageism and clear intolerance of women who have the gall to turn 40, obviously opened up the gates to years of success to come.

It's not hard to see why Coolidge has become a pop culture icon. She's bursting with life, she's undeniably strange, but she's open, she has triumphed – and the gays love her.

Asked about her advice for how to pull yourself out of self-doubt, particularly for young artists, Coolidge responds with a story that brings the house down. 

"This is going to be something that I might regret saying, but I think one of the best things to cure self-doubt is just to go to really bad stuff. I'm talking about plays you hear about that are terrible. Go to them.

"I'll tell you how I got this idea. I was like, in college, and I just hated myself. And I was so full of self-doubt, and anyway, I went to this terrible production of Oliver..." 

Coolidge launches into a tone-deaf recital of an Oliver song to demonstrate and says, "Everyone was bad in it – the whole show – I mean, I felt like the seas had parted. I felt like I had a chance in this world."

Elfy Scott is an executive editor at Mamamia.