Jennifer Coolidge is giving a special shout out to Ariana Grande.
While chatting with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show on Jan. 20, The White Lotus star shared that the "7 Rings" singer helped spark her career revival after she impersonated Coolidge while on the show back in 2018.
"You should know that it was sort of the beginning of a lot of cool things that happened for me," Coolidge said of the imitation. "I was going through a dead zone. Not much was going on. And then Ariana did this imitation on your show and you encouraged her and then this ball got rolling."
After watching Grande's impersonation, a friend of Coolidge's recommended she slide into the singer's DMs—but Coolidge was doubtful she'd actually get a response from Grande.
"I was like, ‘No! She's got 260 million followers! Those are robots. The robots answer the DMs,'" she told Fallon. "I did it anyway and then this response came back and then the next thing you know, I was like going to her house getting a wardrobe fitting for ‘thank u, next.'"
Since the epic music video dropped in November 2018, Coolidge has gone on to portray a variety of roles including the wealthy and unstable Tanya McQuoid on the popular HBO series The White Lotus.
However, the Golden Globe-nominated actress admitted that she initially tried to think of a creative way to turn it down.
"I tried to figure out these ways to get out of it with like, medical excuses," she said. "I was just trying to think of something that sounded believable, like I had partial hip problems where I couldn't turn. I came up with all these weird things but then [show creator Mike White] just said in [a] text, ‘Are you afraid?' I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus, he's onto me!'"
These days, Coolidge is grateful for the little push that she needed to sign onto the show. "You know when you're actors, this big moment can happen sometimes and then you just blow it," she said. "Mike White is brilliant. He wrote a great show."
As for returning for season two? Well, she coyly deflected the question. "There's a rumor I'm coming back. There's a rumor that Legally Blonde 3's happening. There's a lot of rumors out there," she said. "I don't know!"
(E! and NBC are part of the NBCUniversal family.)