Courteney Cox joins our video call fresh from a tennis lesson. How did she play? “Today was a pretty rough day. It’s hit or miss,” she says, cheeks pink. Even from 5,000 miles away — she’s at her ocean-front beach house in Malibu, I’m in rain-lashed London — I get the sense of a high-energy, hobby-mad force of nature. Just as we start to talk work, Cox’s phone rings through her smartwatch. It’s her 17-year-old daughter, Coco, explaining that her school day is already finished after just one life-skills class. “Well, I hope that you graduate,” Cox sighs. “That’s a lot of no school.”
Having a beautiful, increasingly independent daughter is something that Cox has in common with Pat Phelps, her character in Shining Vale, a new comedy horror TV series: “She has a teenage daughter and that’s tough. I’m so happy I have a daughter that I can relate to and understand, but there are a lot of emotions flying around.”
Pat is an erotic novelist who is battling depression and has left New York to start afresh in rural Connecticut with her husband (Greg Kinnear) and two children. “It was exciting to play a character that was so flawed and real. The fact that she’s going through this midlife crisis slash menopause,” says Cox, before being interrupted by her Cavalier King Charles spaniels Lily and Bear barking. It’s their bath time. “They think they’re going on a walk and then they’re just getting washed. It’s a real letdown. They’re like, ‘Really? I don’t want to get wet.’ ”
Now 57, Cox has enjoyed the sort of wild success that is hard to fathom fully. In 1984, while pursuing modelling and acting after abandoning plans to become an architect, she was cast as a giddy fan in Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark music video (look it up, it’s a treat). After that the work trickled in until, aged 30, she won the part of the uber-competitive Monica Geller in Friends. “Every now and then I’ll see an episode and [think] this is still relevant and still funny. It doesn’t matter if our phones are this big,” she says, cradling an imaginary brick-sized mobile. Her other great triumph is playing Gale Weathers, the tenacious news reporter in the Scream franchise; the fifth film has just stormed the box office. “I have to close my eyes for a good 50 per cent of it,” she says of the horror slasher movies.
Thanks to Jeff Astrof, a writer on Friends, and Sharon Horgan, of Channel 4’s Catastrophe fame, Shining Vale has a zinging script, and Cox hired an acting coach to work through each scene. “I decided to give it my absolute A for effort,” she says, sounding very Monica. “I can obviously relate to being that age where you’re like, ‘Oh wow, I can’t believe I’m right here,’ and [asking] what makes you happy. I understand that midlife stuff completely.”
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Certainly she seems stunned that her 60th birthday is coming into view. “Oh God, it’s so hard to even hear or say. I can’t believe it. There’s nothing wrong with being 60, I just can’t believe it. Time goes so fast,” she says, wistfully. “There’s no question that I am more grounded, I’ve learnt so much in my life — what to enjoy, what to try to do more of and what to let go of.” After a struggle she has let go of trying to stay looking exactly as she did during the Friends era. “There was a time when you go, ‘Oh, I’m changing. I’m looking older.’ And I tried to chase that [youthfulness] for years,” she recalls. “And I didn’t realise that, oh shit, I’m actually looking really strange with injections and doing stuff to my face that I would never do now.” She muses about whether to post a selfie from that injections phase next to a current photo on Instagram. “I’d say, ‘The day you realise what your friends were talking about.’ Because people would talk about me, I think. But there was a period where I went, ‘I’ve got to stop. That’s just crazy.’ ” Unsurprisingly she is concerned that Coco, whom she co-parents with her ex-husband, David Arquette, has hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers: “I don’t like that she has them. It just feels weird to me. What are people attaching to?”
Nevertheless Cox is sanguine about the media’s relentless attention to actresses who dare to get older. “The scrutiny is intense, but I don’t know if it could be more intense than what I put on myself,” she says, adding that she is big into beauty products. “I’m a product whore. I will try anything.”
The actress grew up in Alabama, the youngest of four in a “looks orientated” family. Her parents, Courteney, an occasional shop worker, and Richard, a businessman, divorced when she was ten. “I didn’t realise how much that probably had an impact on me — it just was what it was,” she says, recalling how she’d travel alone as a young child to visit her dad in Florida. Her mother placed her own worth on being attractive — “a really sweet, beautiful woman who didn’t have a lot of drive” — which spurred Cox on to dream bigger and move to New York in the mid-1980s (voice coaching has removed all trace of a southern accent). Following small, bill-paying parts came Friends, global fame and unimaginable riches (by series nine the cast were each paid $1 million an episode).
The show ran from 1994 to 2004 and, like many people my age, I’ve seen every one of the 236 episodes twice or more, which means I’ve watched Cox as Monica for roughly 181 hours. It ended 18 years ago; does she ever tire of Central Perk chat? “No, that was such a huge part of my life. It was such a lucky situation that I fell into the show, and I went through so many things in those 10 years.” It was during this time that she met and married Arquette, her Scream co-star. The couple, who divorced in 2013, appear together in the new film; how was working with her ex again? “It was very comfortable,” Cox says, uncomfortably. “We’ve played these characters, so we kind of knew what we were doing. And we both also really took it seriously.”
Despite playing these beloved cult roles, Cox seemingly wrestles with insecurity: “When you’ve done Friends and then [the 2009-15 TV series] Cougar Town and a series before that, Dirt, I don’t want to go out again without the best shot of it being successful.” About five years ago she filmed a pilot for a TV series that wasn’t picked up by the studios. The actress had never endured such a blow: “It shook me for a little while. I mean for years in some weird way, like, I was scared to go back out.” She is also honest about her approach to reviews. “It’s best not to read them at all, but I do and sometimes I go straight for where my name is. Let me skip all the ‘What do you think about the film?’ Just, what did you say about me?” she laughs.
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We head down memory lane: last year’s nostalgia-fest Friends reunion. “It was fantastic to see everybody again, reminisce and realise how much fun we had,” Cox says, recalling the post-filming parties in the dressing rooms every Friday night. However, Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing and has openly battled addiction issues, appeared forlorn during The One Where They Get Back Together. “He’s just struggled for a while. I think he’s doing great now,” Cox says, cautiously.
During the one-off reunion the actor admitted how he had desperately fed off the live audience’s reaction during filming. “For me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn’t laugh,” he said, describing how he’d “freak out” if a line fell flat. “That was a lot of pressure he put on himself,” Cox says today. “That’s a lot to think how much he relied on that for his own self-worth.”
More happily, Cox sees Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow, aka Rachel and Phoebe, as sisters and the trio often meet at Aniston’s home. “We’re just really comfortable. We’ve shared so much history together and we laugh. Lisa’s laugh alone is the most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard. It’s adorable. We have deep conversations, we also have silly times,” she says, smiling.
Surprisingly frank, Cox is a joyful interviewee and she lights up talking about Britain. “I couldn’t be more English,” she says wryly. “I grew up in the Cots-Wolds. Well, not me, my family. I had some serious royal stuff going on, just so you know.” As well as English ancestry, she is friends with a varied roster of British celebs, including the comedian John Bishop, the rom-com king Richard Curtis, Jamie Oliver and Queer Eye’s Tan France. She met her Northern Irish boyfriend, Johnny McDaid, the Snow Patrol guitarist, more than eight years ago when her pal Ed Sheeran brought him round to her Malibu mansion for one of her regular music soirées (also attended by Taylor Swift and the band Haim). “I remember looking over and seeing Johnny playing the piano and I thought, ‘God, look at those eyes.’ They were piercing.”
The pair got engaged in 2014 but later broke up for six months. “It was a really important time for me to grow and look in, as opposed to blame,” Cox recalls, adding that everyone enters a relationship with their “own wounds, own baggage”.
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“You have to look at yourself and see why you’re affected by certain comments: ‘Ah, that makes sense because I do have an abandonment issue because my dad left when I was ten.’ But you have to work through that, so you don’t put the pressure on the other person. They can’t take on their own shit and yours. That’s too much.”
Long reunited, the couple now jet between homes on both sides of the Atlantic, and Cox seems sweetly giddy about McDaid: “I’ve never met someone who has such a regard for love. Love for his family, love for love, love for his relationship. He’s a poet, a writer.” For now a wedding isn’t part of the plan: “Marriage is a beautiful thing but it’s not in my brain.”
Cox seems drawn to younger men —McDaid is 45, Arquette is 50 — and surrounds herself with friends of all ages. “I feel like I’m young. I have a lot of friends in their thirties and I don’t think about it. To me we’re the same age until I actually study it,” she says, laughing. Sheeran, 31, stays with Cox when he’s in Malibu and pranks her by buying gimp masks through her Amazon Alexa. “I must have five. I forget they’re here,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I was trying to sell this piano that’s in the guest house where Ed stays and this older couple, they must have been almost 80, came to look at it and there was a gimp mask with this long beak lying on it. I was so embarrassed.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pair didn’t buy the piano.
Mirroring Monica (a chef, as you’ll remember), Cox is a keen cook — “I’m a perfectionist, if it’s not good I am really down on myself” — and posts recipe tutorials on Instagram (“best baked chicken”, “chicken parmesan”, “quick chicken bolognese”). “I like to stay home and invite people over,” she says, showing me the poolside oven that overlooks the Pacific. “I don’t like to go to parties outside. I don’t know why.”
I imagine that for a global superstar it’s probably simpler for friends to come to you. Of hosting she says: “It’s all types of people, every kind of career, a safe space. There’s nothing pretentious about it. It’s everyone having pizza and relaxing.” After almost three decades living under the glare of Friends fame, when she does go out Cox professes not to notice strangers noticing her. “I’m glad that [Friends] has gone through this many years and people still love it,” she says. “If they stopped caring I would feel worse.”
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Shining Vale is available to stream on Starzplay from March 6. Scream is out now
Styling: Maryam Malakpour. Hair: Chris McMillan at Solo Artists. Make-up: Genevieve Herr at Sally Harlor. Set design: Alexa Polanco. Local production: Jones MGMT
