Ariana Grande didn’t just dress up for Halloween, she created a short film inspired by the 2000 comedy Best In Show starring Jennifer Coolidge and Eugene Levy. She was helped her friend and former Victorious co-star Elizabeth Gillies, and claimed in her caption that they created the piece way back in May. They really wanted to be ready this October.
Grande has an incredible Coolidge impression, and she and Gillies made a great pair doing some of the best scenes from the improvised movie, with Hillies standing in for actress Jane lynch. Grande perfectly recreated Coolidge’s fits from the film, in which she plays a trophy wife with a secret dog trainer girlfriend.
On the post, Coolidge commented, “This is f***ing great. I was gonna go as the young boy’s pet weasel from ‘The Watcher’ but now I think I’m gonna go as @arianagrande’s dog Toulouse.”
Grande breaks out her Coolidge impression whenever she can, and Coolidge herself has said that it helped revitalize her career, landing her in shows like HBO’s White Lotus and the recent Netflix hit The Watcher. She first revealed the impression on a 2018 impression on The Tonight Show.
“You should know that it was sort of the beginning of a lot of cool things that happened for me,” the actress told Jimmy Fallon in January of this year. “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.”
She was told by a friend to DM Grande, but was hesitant to do so.
“I was like, ‘No! She’s got 260 million followers! Those are robots. The robots answer the DMs,’” she said. “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.’”
Coolidge made an appearance in Grande’s music video for her hit song, appearing as her character from Legally Blonde while Grande played Elle Woods. Years later, Coolidge is clearly still on Grande’s mind.
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.