Courteney Cox admits she never watches the Scream movies: "I am a real scaredy cat"
Cox also talks with Faith Hill about getting spooked on set of Shining Vale
The Scream franchise is in a renaissance and a shambles: there’s a brand new set of films with a new generation of stars, but it’s also rankled the first generation and lost its original scream queen. And now, another Scream OG has admitted she hasn’t even watched the movies!
In a new installment of Variety’s Actors on Actors conversation with 1883’s Faith Hill, Courteney Cox–aka Gale Weathers, who has appeared in all six Scream films–admits that she does get spooked on the set of her horror projects. “Well, I am a real scaredy cat, and everything kind of scares me, so, yeah,” she says.
“That is hilarious, especially since the movies that you’ve done,” Hill says, to which Cox replies, “Yeah. I don’t watch them.”
“No, no. I don’t,” she continues after Hill expresses her disbelief. “Scream—I just go like this. [Covers her eyes.] There’s no way. I don’t care if I know what’s happening, who it was behind the mask.”
There you have it folks: Gale Weathers herself doesn’t even know who the killer is. And this is a woman in the middle of her own horror renaissance, starring in the creepy comedy Shining Vale. As it turns out, Cox, the actress, is just as freaked as her character: “I have a scene with Mira [Sorvino] in the window—the way she was lit was creepy. One of the things is it’s very easy to jump out and scare me,” she says.
Consummate professional that she is, the Friends alum is able to use the fear in her work. She explains, “So Greg [Kinnear] would sometimes scare me just on the set, and then I could re-create it because I’m a pretty quick screamer. I’m a quick study for scary.”
It’s all worth it, in the end, because Cox calls the role “the best character I’ve ever played”—high praise from a beloved television icon. Just don’t ask her to watch an episode.