|
The following interviews are early interviews of Courteney Cox, some before her work on 'Friends' and some during. All are between or are the years 1989-1995. Enjoy!
'Till We Meet Again' Interview 1989
[from TV Guide, 11/89]
So far everything fits. This mock Tudor is a proper house for a rising star, and that blue BNW parked in the drivewayis the right car. It's what you'dexpect if you've pigeonholed Courteney Cox as a sweet young thing, a beauty-pageant-pretty young woman from the deep South who got her start as a model and then landed nice-girl roles as Lauren, Alex's college-student girlfriend on Family Ties, and a scientist who turns soft inside in "Cocoon: The Return." But what's that Honda Rebel doing there, parked at an angle under the tree? Is some guy over for a visit? The motorcycle's hers the first sign that Cox is hard to pigeonhole, So are the two big dogs who come bounding out to say hello, ready to paw and lick any intruder to death. A few minutes later, Cox pads down the stairs barefoot, in oversized jeans that look like they might belong to the same boyfriend who ought to own the motorcycle. Her dark hair tumbles to her shoulders, lustrous but lank, untamed by any hairstyling procedures. She wears no makeup-but then again, she has that fine-china skin and eyes so startlingly blue they seem almost synthetic. "Calm down, you guys," she scolds the dogs. The dogs bound off, unsubdued, and Cox takes a deep breath. She has just returned from England, where she weeks filming "Till We Meet Again," the CBS movie based on a Judith Krantz's novel. In this chronicle of three woman caught up in history between 1913 and 1956, she plays Freddy, the flame-haired tomboy daughter who flies planes during wartime. The fiery, independent Freddy is an easy-to-admire heroine. Coster Mia Sara-who become friends whit Cox in the course of filming-saw her buddy as a natural for the role. "She's very adventurous, open independent." But before she began work on this role-before Family Ties had even wrapped- Cox had slipped off to Florida to play the less admirable Jackie Kimberly, Roxanne Pulitzer's amoral best friend in NBC's "Roxanne: The Prize Pulitzer." "I did Jackie because she was completely different from Lauren (on Family Ties). I like change." She means it, If any one word sums up Courteney Cox, it is change. She changes constantly, sometime midthought. For example: chauffeurs a tour of the house, which she decorated herself in cheerful country style. "I bought everything at flea markets," she says, "except for the couch, which somebody gave me. American country is my favorite style," Then she pauses to reflect. "Actually, if I could afford it, I'd buy country French. That's really my favorite. No I think English." She curls up on the hand-me-down couch in a den that looks out over a canyon. "When I saw this house, I called my business manager and told him I had found my dream house," she says. This is her third residence in Los Angeles. her first was an apartment in town. "I bought all new laquered Italian modern furniture. I hated it. I lived there for a year, and when I moved I just left it behind whit the landlord. I moved to a cottage in Sherman Oaks, and thenthis house. I'llprobably sell this one in a few years." But didn't she just sayit was her dream house? "Well, yes," she says, unruffled. "But I'll probably find another dream house." She leans back and fingers her glossy, dark hair, whitch had been red until a few days ago-ruthlesslystripped down twice by powerful bleaches and colored and retouched every two weeks during the three months of filming. "It's nice to have my own hair color back, but actually I started to like myself as a redhead. It made me feel fiery and sort of bad," she muses, playing whit the idea. Her willingness to play whit ideas earned admiration on the set of "Till We Meet Again." Costar Barry Bostwick, who plays her first love (Bruce Boxleitner plays her "true love") had doubts about a scene in which his character-a burned-out stunt pilot who taught Freddy to fly-becomes upset at her daredevil flying. "How violent, how angry would he get?" Bostwick wondered. "What could have been a polite scene heated up in the rehearsal process and ended up whit our having the freedom to go as far as we wanted. The scene could play completely out of control. I literally yank her out of the plane and throw her on ground. It took great trust on Courteney's part. She was open, receptive, willing to experiment to find the right pitch." Her openness to change may have come from growing up whit options. Now 25, she is the youngest of four children in an outwardly conventional Birmingham, Ala, country-club family. But as she explains, "My parents were complete opposites, Mom was a conventional Southern belle-conservative, reserved. She liked security. Dad liked adventure, excitement. "Spend it now" was his philosophy.He could decide to fly us all to Florida for the weekend. He was a contractor, and we were always okay financially, but insecure," When she was 11, her parents divorced, and each has since remarried "to their own types. I'm a mix of both. I look like my mother, but I wish I had her full mouth and lips." In a recent article in Southern Style magazine, a friend of Cox's says "She wasn't the best-looking girl in high school or enything like that," It is hard to imagine a high school in which Courteney Cox isn't even anything like the best-looking girl, but Cox seemsz to understand the remark. "I wasn't the most popular girl, not by a long shot. I wasn't interested in high-school social life." She was out of school every day by noon so that she could get to her 40-hour-a-week job. "I wanted to make money. I wanted a car and clothes. I like things," she says frankly. She spent a year at Mount Vernon College, her mother's school, and then wnet to New York for the summer to earn money as a model. She liked it and decided not to go back to school. The modeling led to commercials, the commercials to acting. "I got really serious about acting. I took coaching at NYU to lose my Southern accent. Now directors keep telling me I have a New York accent." Then she got picked out of the crowd to be the girl Bruce Springsteen dances whit in his "Dancing in the dark" video. A role in the ill-fated series Misfits of Science brought her to L.A. And then she got picked out of another crowd of young actresses for the Family Ties role. "I enjoyed that show. I was worried at first about joining a little group that had been together for five years. I mean, we (semi-regulars) were B-team. But if you made the first move and showed you were willing to fool around, they were glad to have new faces." Now, having crammed two TV-movies plus her appearances on Family Ties into half a year, she explains that she longs to be at home whit her dogs and her flea-marked antiques. "I hate to go uot. When I'm in L.A., that is. On location, I go out every night. "She is a good cook, but her food is Southern and rich, stewed clean-to-regs in bacon fat. "My idea of a diet," she says "is I don't eat dinner for a week." She has no health or beauty regimens. "For exercise, I walk the dogs and go up and down the stairs. I've joined every gym in L.A., and I go for six weeks then forget about it. I hate having people watch me." She used to spend evenings at home whit Paul Brown, a man who works in the fashion industry, but now she is evasive when his name comes up. "I'm not in a relationship right now. He's my special friend, my friend for life. But I was gone for two months, and he's very involved whit his own work, and I'm involved whit mine. I'm not sure you ought to mention him. By the time this comes out. . ." By the time this comes out, she will probably have made a few more changes. She might be playing a nun, or maybe she'll be a redhead again.
Interview: 1995
[from In Style, 1/95]
On Thursday nights, Courteney Cox invites a gang of friends over to watch Friends, the new NBC hit in which she stars as Monica, a woman whose apartment, on any given episode, might be similarly overrun by a gang of friends. In fact, some of the friends and some of the Friends are the same people, making the occasion of Cox's Thursday night soirees something on the order of a sitcom verite. Which suits her fine. !I'm very similar to Monica," says Cox- "I love for people to come over and hang out. This Thursday I'm not working, so I'm going to cook." The bright, sunny kitchen of Cox's two-story, three-bedroom cottage in Santa Monica eschews the celebrity trend toward industrial range and Sub-Zero freezers. It's so homey that you'd never guess it's the fifth kitchen Cox-a habitual mover-has designed for herself in eight years. This one has the feel of a place your grandmother could bake a pie in. "I cook a great turkey dinner," Cox says. "I grew up in South, so, if anything, I cook with flavor. I would't know how to make swordfish with steamed vegetables and mango chutney. If, however, you want some garlic mashed potatoes, anything whit some fat in it...." Such country comforts notwithstanding, Cox's style today tends toward the lean. Friends, slotted as it is between two bona fide hits, Mad About You and Seinfeld, represent the actress's most promising career opportunity since Bruce Springsteen plucked her from the crowd in his "Dancing in the Dark" video. And Cox, newly focused and fit (from an inescapably new age-sounding exercise discipline called power yoga), is opting for change-if a little maniacally. "I've decided to give away everything I haven't worn in the last six months," she says, looking very classic in jeans and a crimson cashmere sweater set with pearl buttons. "It's interesting, because my possessions used to be really important to me. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but now I know it's all replaceable. Careers, clothes, furniture-everting except family and friends ... and boyfriends." A sly, bemused smile creeps over Cox's face. Her beau of five years has been the actor Michael Keaton, and the nature of their commitment, given the time invested, might lead to speculation by gossips. "Well, boyfriends, maybe," she says, reconsidering. "They're not exactly replaceable, but say it any other way and you sound like a hopeless case." Not like. An hour at home with Cox leads to suspect that Keaton's influence is of no particular importance here. Make no mistake: This is her house. There may be an extra toothbrush hidden somewhere, but it's not in evidence. It's even conceivable that she makes him take it home. Born the youngest of four in Birmingham, Alabama, Cox dreamed of being an architect, not an actor, and her personal quirks are more those of a master builder than an attention-hungry exhibitionist. Her Southern accent may be gone, but Cox shares Scarlet O'Hara's passion for real estate-she has bought, renovated and sold four properties in her eight years in Hollywood. This furious serial nesting is either a neurotic compulsion or a great way for an ambitious soul to compensate for the vagaries of the actor's life. "As soon as I don't have the drama and angst of trying to fix a place up, I move. I like to keep myself busy 24 hours a day. Maybe it's healthy, maybe it's not. I can't decide," she says with perfect equanimity. When Cox speaks of her checkered decorating past, it is with the confessional zeal of a recovering design-aholic: "My first place was very modern, clean-lined, lots of black lacquer and Italian furniture. I got over the modern and I went right into American country, just anything from the flea market so long as it had unusual nails and was old and rustic. Then I got into gothic. Every time I sold a house I changed my style." It took the divine of her recent 30th birthday, Friends and the California earthquake of 1994 to slow Cox down. She had barely finished the remodeling of her fifth and last home when the quake hit, causing heavy structural damage, valuable emotional reckoning, the dramatic reassessment of things material-and, of course, the need for yet another total makeover. This time, her approach was different in that it reflected no particular theme, but a growing sense of self-awareness and an emergence of what can only be called, in the good old-fashioned sense, taste. Today, it's a grown-up house, not a theme park. It's warm without being sentimental, judiciously furnished with overstuffed chairs, down-filled sofas, big cushions, potted palms, lots of glass and iron, and the occasional well-placed vase. Gone are the textured paint jobs. instead here are many, many shades of white, upstairs and down, with names like Cottage White and Swiss Coffee. "I wanted open and bright," Cox says. And she's got it. Her bedroom is a white-on-white oasis of clam and quiet, guarded by an expanse of pristine white carpet that would frighten away all but the very best of friends. "I'm a perfectionist," she explains," so the white carpet is not good. But I like it, so it's OK-as long as people wipe their feet when they come in." She pauses, looking at the tender ecru under foot. "Or maybe take off their shoes." The style is something of a milestone in that Cox can't think of what to call it. "I don't know," she says. "It used to be so clear to me. It was country or it was modern. Now I'm into cleaner lines, a little more sophistication..." Cox gives up trying to figure it out. "I just don't want to see anymore dried flowers in my house!" The question is, Will any of it stick? On that, Cox is ruefully philosophical. "Well, the longest I've lived in a house is two years and this is my second here, but since I've had to redo it I've earned another two years!" Cox laughs with relief-and in subtle acknowledgment of her exceedingly nomadic ways. "Hopefully, I won't be that way when I have a baby," she says. Surprised, herself, by the comment, a fleeting shadow darkens her brow. Clearly the thought of a live-in design consultant-of any shape or size-gives Courteney Cox tremors as much as it tempts.
|
 |
Interview 2: 1995
[from People, 5/95]
Considered cute and frequently been called pretty. But not until she was cast as the overly orderly Monica opposite five goofballs and a monkey on the hit NBC sitcom Friends did Courteney Cox make the leap to gorgeous. "She has amazing eyes and a dazzling, killer smile," says costar David Schwimmer, who plays her brother Ross. "Also, grat arms and hands-strong but feminine." She's tough beyond her 5'5, 108-lb. frame. "I have a little face and a lot of teeth, and that makes me look like a waif," says Cox, 30. "But I'm not fragile." Born in Birmingham, Ala., to Richard, a contractor, and Courteney, a homemaker, Cox moved to New York City after a year of college and says she looked "like a little tomboy" when Bruce Springsteen plucked her out of the audience in his 1984 "Dancing in the Dark" video. She followed up her first leading man with Michael J. Fox (Family Ties), Jim Carry (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective) and Michael Keaton, her real-life boyfriend of four years. Now, as one of the top-rated Friends, Cox enjoys star perks such as Courteney's Cabinet, an on-set box brimming with her favorite Bit-O-Honey candy bars. "I love reading about nutrition," says the yoga enthusiast. "I just don't always follow what I read." Concerned about crow's-feet ("they're there, believe me"), Cox says she is "the kind of person who tries every new facial product. I have 150 cleansers in my bathroom." Not that she needs much of anything. "I only have to do three things to look halfway decent." she says. "Curl my eyelashes, fill in my eyebrows and put some lipstick on." Halfway decent? Who's she kidding?
from People, 11/27/95]
It is a Tuesday afternoon in late fall, and Courteney Cox has arrived in Hell. Actually she's in a New York City taxi. But the car, tangled in traffic, has a faulty transmission, and for Cox, 31, that's close enough. Like chef Monica Geller, the character she plays on Friends, Cox is an avid problem solver, just this side of compulsive. "Do you hear that?" she asks her fellow passenger as the cab whines in protest.
Sure, Cox is a star pulling in around ,000 per season. But she is also a dedicated if - you - want - it - done - right - you - gotta - do - it - yourselfer. If her ,000 silver Porsche Carrera back home in Santa Monica had this defect, Cox might dive into her well-stocked toolbox and tinker with the differential. Here in the cab, all she can do is lean forward and whisper the words that have broken so many men's hearts: "Your transmission is slipping."
Listen to the woman, buddy. For years, Cox's career inched along (a Noxzema ad), lurched forward (her two-year run on Family Ties in 1987-89), only to stall out in unmemorable Hollywood duds. But these days, Cox is in high gear. She was in New York filming Commandments, a dark comedy in which she plays a troubled housewife opposite Aidan Quinn, due for release in 1996. That's on top of Friends, a gold-plated hit that has been in the Nielsen Top 10 the entire season.
Friends execs and cast members give Cox a lot of credit for helping the program thrive. "Courteney centers the whole show," says Friends executive producer and co-creator Marta Kauffman. "There's this real human earthiness to her that [balances out] the silliness we do." Kauffman originally envisioned Cox as Rachel, Jennifer Aniston's role. But at her audition in April of 1994, Cox convinced everyone that she was Monica. Cox's sister Dottie Pickett says, "I don't think they know how close they got it. The character's neat, capable, controlling." "And a little sarcastic," adds Cox. "So I'm like Monica. Big whoop."
It is a big whoop to the cast, who see her, in Aniston's words, as "the mother of the group." Says Aniston:"She's explained that we have to watch out for each other. She knew the pressures of being on a hit might drive us all apart." Friends cast members tend to use Cox's dressing room as a kind of student union, where they hang out, gossip and abuse each other in a comradely way. "Hey, freak show," Matthew Perry says, dropping by after a recent rehearsal. "Hi, freak face," Cox retorts.
Lately, Cox has needed the company and the support. Four months ago she and Batman star Michael Keaton, 44, ended their 5-year relationship. Cox says it was a joint decision. "It's the most important relationship I've ever had, and I think he's the most wonderful person I've ever met," she says, as tears well in her eyes. "We still love each other." They were an intensely private couple who rarely appeared together in public. "The things we liked to do were all in the neighborhood," Cox says--window-shopping on Montana Avenue near her Santa Monica home, going to the movies, cooking at Cox's place (her specialties are pasta primavera, garlic chicken and shepherd's pie) on the six-burner commercial stove Keaton gave her as a housewarming gift in 1992.
Throughout their relationship, Cox and Keaton practiced their movie scripts together. "He always came up with the most clever ways of making a line funny," she says. "No matter how upset or pissed off I was, Michael could make a little face and crack me up."
Still, they never made enough of a commitment to move in together. Cox's half-carat diamond ring is actually "my grandmother's," she explains. Although she and Keaton split last July, she's not sure what finally drove them apart. "Nothing about our relationship was ever simple," she says.
So far, Cox says, she has not tried to fill the breach in her love life. "I'm not even thinking about that stuff now," she says. "I don't live a soap opera life. I sleep on the edge of a king-size bed. I don't snore. I don't even turn over." She laughs at tabloid reports that had her rebounding into the arms of actor Christian Slater. "Christian and I have been friends for eight years," she says. The gossip started, she says, when both attended a book party in September for Gore Vidal and had dinner together later that night.
The 5'5", 110-lb. Cox also denies persistent tabloid rumors that she has an eating disorder. "I don't have any skeletons in my closet!" she says in mock outrage. Although she's a size 2, she claims to love junk food, and on a recent afternoon at the Friends soundstage she surveyed the snack table--overflowing with doughnuts, cold cuts, cookies and chips--and tilted a package of raw chocolate-chip cookie dough to her mouth. "You've got to be kidding," groaned Aniston. But Cox wasn't done. "Chips or Cheetos?" Finally she took one of each and moved on.
Cox blames her frequent noshing on her hectic schedule and laughs at talk of bulimia. "I couldn't make myself throw up if I tried," she says. Her mother, Courteney Copeland, 61, a housewife in Cox's hometown of Birmingham, Ala., agrees: "She's thin, but she's healthy. Courteney's just little-boned."
And dedicated to exercise. Cox stays in shape by working out on a treadmill at the studio gym during shooting breaks, and each week takes three hour-long Pilates classes--a strengthening rout
[1995]
I met Courteney Cox about a year and a half ago, before she charmed her way past Roseanne, Grace, Ellen and Helen to become belle of the sitcom ball on the hit NBC series Friends. She was shooting a film at an abandoned hospital in Los Angeles, and she was the talk of our set,not for her acting ability, charm, beauty or her potential to become the 1995 Babe of the Year, but for the ,000 silver Porsche Carrera crouched behind her dressing trailer. As the writer of the film; a Showtime weeper called Sketch Artist II: Hands That See; I ate lunch with the crew and respectfully averted my eyes when an actor would pass. So I was surprised when Cox took the empty seat next to me. More important, I was thankful: I had had a dark premonition about the spaghetti (which is never easy to eat among strangers) and chosen the fish instead. I noticed her incredible eyes flashing in the direction of my plate. She had the fish too, so I took it as a sign to engage, as Picard would say.
"How fast have you gone in it?" I said, pointing to the Porsche. Everyone stopped chewing to listen. When she answered "90" the entire table roundly booed her. Playing along, Cox hung her head in shame, the sin of forbearance conflicting with a body, as the saying goes, built for speed. Her disfavor lasted about as long as it takes for Steven Seagal to snap off someone's arm at the elbow. Three people hugged her in quick succession while a fourth gave her a comforting peck on the top of her head. Even back then Cox was playing Monica; vulnerable, open, cuddly and self-conscious. Sure, Monica would never drive a Porsche, especially one the color of Johnny Carson's hair. But like Cox, Monica would certainly have no qualms about eating with the help.
Eighteen months and 24 Friends episodes later, we meet in a Brentwood deli for break-fast. I am prepared to accept that Courteney Cox and Monica are one and the same, like Clint and Dirty Harry, Melanie Griffith and Minnie Mouse. She may be just a shade over 5' 5", but as she approaches my booth she has the shamble of a tall woman, that clunky blitheness of models who get up late and never stay in one place long. Because most of the action in Friends involves walking into a room full of people and sitting down, she's had plenty of practice. It shows as she slides into the booth with the grace of a trapeze artist. After ordering a breakfast of grand-slam proportions, Courteney plucks my sunglasses from the table and slips them on. One wall of the deli is mirrors (we are in Brentwood, after all), and she checks herself out.
"Oh, see, these are way too cool for me," she insists, bobbing from side to side to catch her profile.
"Here," she remarks as she returns the sunglasses. "For my taste, I have to go simple."
"But you're wearing three earrings in each ear," I point out.
"Hmmm," she considers, touching her earlobe, "maybe I'm a little hipper than I thought."
She's certainly hipper than Monica, den mother to an ensemble of young turks engaged in a weekly marathon of crises management. Monica makes the fewest gaffes, rights the most wrongs and serves up more fat pitches (in the form of straight lines) than a batting practice pitcher. But Courteney's dark side is at worst partly cloudy; what you see is what you get: niceness. She sits before me devouring an appetizer of bagel chips and ranch dressing, hair still damp from the shower, peasant shirt so baggy it could conceal a shoplifted rump roast. Is this really Monica I see or, to borrow a phrase from one of Cox' dance partners, just a brilliant disguise?
"I'm more complex than Monica," she says, "but it would be more interesting for you to come up with the reasons than for me to tell you them."
As she builds a big, sloppy sandwich out of her bacon, eggs, potatoes and toast, she finds time between bites to talk about growing up in a tony suburb of Birmingham, Alabama.
Her father owned a construction company, her mother maintained the household and raised four children. Cox' parents divorced when she was ten, and they both remarried partners with children, providing her with nine new siblings. Through the magic of marital mitosis, Cox and former Police drummer Stewart Copeland are cousins. She got her first job when she was 15, as a salesperson in a swimming pool store. When I ask her if there's anybody back in Birmingham she would like to see again, she carefully sets down her jumbo sandwich.
"If I wanted to see them, I would have," she says, grinning and extracting a poppy seed from between her front teeth with a swipe of her tongue. "I'll say this about Los Angeles: I don't like it that much and I feel a little empty being here. But it's so spread out that, in a way, you can't really become a regular. Not everybody knows you when you walk into a place. Obviously, it's totally different where I'm from. If you walk into a grocery store there, forget it. Everybody knows you, and I can't stand that. 'C.C., I'm so proud of ya,'" she says, laying on a thick Southern accent. "'Why, dawlin, you're no bigger than a minute, but you're so . . . big. Tell us how you doin'. What's goin' on with y'all?"'
I compliment her on her accent, and 136 she cocks an eyebrow. "I got my poise from cotillions. Acting, now that's another story. In Birmingham acting is not a viable option, believe me."
Cox started modeling in New York the year after high school, dropping her plans for a career in architecture. Like Fabio, she posed for book covers and illustrations. There were print ads for Noxema and Maybelline that aptly branded her as having "scrubbed good looks." Nynex cast her in one of its commercials; her first television appearance. With the money she earned, she hired a speech coach. Those of us who turn into sweet potato pie when any woman (other than Brett Butler) drawls have Madison Avenue to blame for the absence of Southern accents. Once Cox successfully eliminated her drawl she began to acquire speaking roles.
"You look really . . . hot," she announces, and I feel my posture (and prospects) radically improving. Then she adds, "That was my first real speaking line, when I was on As the World Turns. I think I was 19. I played a debutante, and I had to say it to this guy. 'You look really . . . sizzling.' That was it. Sizzling. Whatever it was, it was pretty embarrassing."
If there was a defining moment in the early part of Cox' career, it was when Bruce Springsteen reached out and touched her. Director Brian De Palma picked her to play the adoring fan whom Springsteen beckons on-stage for a little New Jersey two-step in his Dancing in the Dark video. "We did the shoot over two days," says Cox, who describes herself as anything but a dancer. "We did the close-ups the first day, all that stuff with my eyes widening, my speechless look; then we shot it live, in concert. I thought we had it, but Bruce grabbed the microphone and yelled to the audience, 'What do you do if you like something a lot? You do it again!' So we shot it twice. Same song."
Although she was 20 at the time, Cox looked much younger. "I had that little-boy haircut, and my sleeveless T-shirt helped. I think I got paid less than . It was a buyout. That video has been on for more than ten years, and I don't get residuals."
Nonetheless, the exposure she got for doing an uncredited rump shake with the Boss enabled her to enter the marathon dance contest of sitcoms. Her first effort, NBC's Misfits of Science, got the hook after less than one season. Fortunately, though, the producers of Family Ties liked her enough to cast her as Michael J. Fox' girlfriend for the show's last two seasons. "When I started acting, I didn't know what I was doing," Cox admits. "I studied, but no matter how much you study acting, you still don't know until you do it."
After Family Ties, Cox took on work with the abandon of a dog-track bettor. Features included Mr. Destiny, Blue Desert, The Opposite Sex, Shaking the Tree and the TV movie It It's Tuesday, This Still Must Be Belgium. That's Cox as a marine biologist in Cocoon: The Return, and that's her playing Roxanne Pulitzer's best friend, Jackie Kimberly, in NBC's Prize Pulitzer. There were spots on Murder She Wrote and Dream On and a TV pilot, Topper, with John Landis.
"The idea back then was if I was doing it and it was OK, then I was doing the right thing," Cox explains, referring to her prodigious (and sometimes lackluster) output. "You see, it's easy for me to live in denial. I forget my problems. I'm a putterer. I keep busy. I can get the worst news in the world and not even think about it. Maybe it'll all come down on me one day. But I'm good at keeping in motion.
"Oh my God, you're bored!" she suddenly blurts out. "I saw you look over my shoulder. You're bored." I am instead imagining that somewhere, buzzing across the horizon of her life, a little plane is towing a sign that reads: SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE. DO NOT BACK UP. She accepts my explanation with cordial skepticism and then adds, "I'm very perceptive, and I see a lot. By watching people I learn a lot about them."
Cox's success playing straight man for the flurry of one-liners on Friends can probably be traced to her part in a film for which Warner Bros. expected modest acceptance at best, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective went on to gross well over million and transformed Jim Carrey into an offshore bank (Carrey was paid ,000 for Ace Ventura; Columbia will pay him million to star in The Cable Guy). Capitalizing on both the success of Ace Ventura and the likability of Cox' character, CBS promptly offered her a starring role (her first in a sitcom) in The Trouble With Larry, with Bronson Pinchot. Larry's problems never had a chance to be aired, let alone resolved; the network pulled the show after six episodes.
"The Trouble With Larry was not a success by any means," says Cox, "but I liked the character, and playing that part is what got the producers of Friends interested in me."
Warner Bros. Television had this sit-com concept about six close friends who gather at a coffeehouse called Central Perk to reveal their insecurities and shepherd one another through the vagaries of life on the cusp of maturity. After signing on in 1994, Cox had some time to kill before shooting started in late July. Brad Krevoy, whose independent company MPCA produced Dumb and Dumber, offered Cox the female lead in the aforementioned Sketch Artist II after watching her come out of the water near his home in Malibu.
"You have not seen Courteney Cox in the proper light until you’ve seen her walking across the sand in a bikini. She makes Bo Derek look like a five," says Krevoy. "We all knew she could act, and we knew that the camera would lover her, too."
Cox’ character in Sketch Artist II is raped by a serial killer. She survives the assault and offers to give a description of her attacker to a police artist, despite the fact that she has been blind since the age of ten.
"I’ve never played a character whose entire life is pretty much a tragedy," says Cox. To prepare for the role, she sought the advice of a sightless person and spent time at the Braille Institute of Los Angeles. "My character is raped, chased, followed. I mean, there were no light moments in the film for her. So I stayed on this moribund level. And I kind of took it home with me, which I don’t usually do."
She had a different challenge on the set of the low-budget film The Opposite Sex. According to someone who worked on the film, Courteney was easy to work with, except in one way: She couldn’t say the word nipple. "In the script, every other word she had was fuck or shit, but when she had to say nipple, she couldn’t do it. In one scene, Courteney is at the beach with some friends, and one of the guys is sculpting breasts out of sand. When he uses stones or something for the nipples, she’s supposed to say, "Nah, I think you should use Hershey’s Kisses for the nipples.’ She would get to that point and then gesture at the nipple region. This was a movie about sex, and she would not say the word nipple."
"That’s my hair, isn’t it?" Cox points at her plate and we both see the hair there, like a prop in a Seinfeld episode. "If there’s a hair on my food, I’m one of those people who will eat the food anyway. I don’t know why it doesn’t bother me."
Success helps one deal with minor annoyances. With the enormous appeal of Friends, Cox wouldn’t be bothered if Burt Reynold’s rug were on her plate. The freshman sitcom spent most of 1995 in the top ten and shot as high as number one. MTV chose Cox to co-host its movie awards with John Lovitz where, incidentally, she proved to be a better drummer (jamming with the house band) than a straight man to Lovitz' comic haughtiness.
Friends, like Mad About You and Seinfeld, features enough pop philosophizing by the first commercial break to eclipse the oeuvre of Dr. Joyce Brothers. Add the show's ensemble approach, and the result is an Algonquin roundtable of 20-something angst. In real life, you could more easily find Casper than six perfectly coiffed, attractively neurotic, facile white people who happen to be bosom buddies.
And at the center is Cox's Monica, one part Florence Nightingale, one part Florence Henderson, nursing wounds and planning togetherness events. Monica is earnest, supportive, communal. I am able to witness a glimmer of these qualities in Courteney when our waitress presents her with a petition to save the deli, which had recently lost its lease.
"I love this place," Courteney tells me as she signs the petition. "There was a big town meeting to discuss the lease Monday night. I was going to go, but a friend flew in from New York."
Were it not for Cox, the Friends equation might be entirely different. Director Jim Burrows (whose credits include Taxi and Cheers) initially wanted her for the role of Rachel.
"It's like lightning in a bottle," says Burrows, who directed the pilot and ten of the show's 24 episodes. "You don't know what will work until you try it. When Courteney read for the show I thought she would be great as Rachel. But she wanted to play Monica, and she was right."
"Obviously, it's nice to be right, but it's more important for me to be understood," Cox maintains. "That's probably the most important thing in my life. And I think I got it from my big family. When you're a kid trying to speak at the dinner table, or trying to get your point across, you're not always heard. I remember pulling each person aside and asking, 'Do you at least understand what I'm trying to say?"'
To Burrows, it translates into "the ability to be the center of a show. She has an ability, through her eyes, to let an audience into the show. When we read the pilot, it wasn't so much about six people as it was about Monica's children. It's her apartment, it's her brother, and she just welcomes you in. You want to hug her. Or you want her to hug you. That's a rare quality on television."
"I kind of watch the show and don't notice the mother thing," Cox hedges, finishing the last of her hair McMuffin. She defines her character more by what she isn't: "I'm not the rich girl who is trying to make it. I'm not the vulnerable guy you want to hug. I'm not the one who can only get close to someone by being funny. I'm not the womanizer, and I'm not the ethereal kook."
"There are many avenues to take with her," says Burrows, "but she does appear clean-cut, which is great. It helps because a lot of the discussions on that show are sexual."
The ability to project conscientiously objecting sex appeal, to be both the voice of reason and the whisper of temptation, is central to Cox' success.
"I think I'm a sexual person, especially when I'm in love. Sex is a wonderful part of a relationship. I like to dress up and look as good as I can, but it doesn't really go past that. I don't think about it all the time. I don't think of the opposite sex in purely sexual terms, I guess. I hope that doesn't make me sound like I'm not a sexual human being.
"There are things that are more important than sex, but I have to be physically attracted to stay in a relationship. There's something very chemical about being with somebody. I believe in fate. Otherwise, why am I attracted to only a certain number of people in my lifetime? There could be a hundred gorgeous men in a room, but I may be chemically attracted to only one of them."
Over the past five years, that one man occasionally has worn a mask and a cape. While reluctant to discuss her rumored on-again, off-again relationship with Michael Keaton, Cox does surrender this much: "Anything is possible with Michael and me. The thing is, if you talk to the press about your lover or your relationship, it's out there. It's way too much for both parties to live up to."
As Monica, Cox is once again playing young (she'll be 32 next June), but in this case the Cox mechanism of denial is not a consideration. "In this business, people find out everything about you. There's no point in lying."
It should surprise no one that Cox' sights are set on feature films. Burrows sees her departure as sad but inevitable. "She has a great face, great eyes, and I'll tell you what; she's funny," he says, assessing Cox' chances as a big-screen leading lady. "It's rare to find good-looking women who are funny. The audience does not expect good-looking people to be funny."
We are in the parking lot admiring the sexy bulges of the silver Porsche, which is parked haphazardly with the rear wheel sitting on top of the yellow line.
"So, how fast have you gone in it now?" I ask.
"Well, the other night I was going over the 405 bypass and I just sort of stepped on it. Then I got distracted by something, and when I looked at the speedometer, I was doing 150."
Beep, beep. Out of the way, mister: Courteney Cox is coming at you.
|
 |
|
