Courteney Cox in “Shining Valley”Photo: Starz
Courteney Cox has lived with two career-defining characters since the 90s. Monica Geller of Friends and Gale Weathers of the Scream franchise tower over her vast body of work and pop culture talk even today, especially since Cox has been revisiting both of them relatively recently. Last year, she was part of the HBO Max special Friends: Reunion, and in January, she reprized her assertive role as a journalist in the fifth film, Scream.
The actress is now set to draw attention to her new fictional character: Patricia “Pat” Phelps in Starz’s new horror comedy Shining Valley. The show uses Cox’s comedic rhythm and her experience of being repeatedly scared by Ghostface, while also bringing nuance to the genre. Shining Valley centers on Pat and Terry (Greg Kinnear), who move from Brooklyn to a 200-year-old Victorian mansion in Connecticut with their two children to start a new life. But they get more than they bargained for because their house may be haunted by the ghost of a 1950s housewife. Doesn’t Pat just imagine it’s all because of her medication?
Cox is returning to television as one of the most popular shows seven long years after Cougar Town ended in 2015. In a roundtable interview, she told The A.V. Club that she liked Pat because of the problems the character presented. “I was happy to play someone with so many layers. I’ve never played a character that had so many things,” she says. And that’s not even an understatement.
Courteney Cox and Mira Sorvino in Shining ValleyPhoto: Starz
Pat and Terri decide to ruin their lives, primarily to work on their marriage after she cheated on him. She hopes moving to a large, quiet place will improve her mental health and give her the strength to write again. Pat used to be a wild party girl who made her mark with a feminist erotic novel but hasn’t published anything in 17 years. Cox adds: “They’re going through family strife, she’s depressed, she’s having an affair, she’s having creative block, she’s raising a teenager, which is a challenge in itself. And then she becomes obsessed.”
That’s right: Pat begins to see and connect with a spirit named Rosemary (Mira Sorvino), dressed in standard 50s-style lace-up dresses. The more Rosemary gets involved in Pat’s personal and professional life, the weirder Shining Vale gets. It turns into a bizarre situational comedy at times, but also touches on the deep-rooted issues of a woman seeking to hold everything together for her family – all through the lens of horror and possessions.
Greg Kinnear and Courteney Cox in Shining ValleyPhoto: Starz
As Shining Vale’s main duo, Cox and Kinnear said in an interview that they spent a lot of time fleshing out Pat and Terry’s chemistry, including improvising scenes at supposedly creepy moments to add to the show’s frivolity. “The thing is, I like to be afraid, but I also hate it,” says Cox. Kinnear made wise use of this fact. In one episode, Terry surprises Pat when they are checking a creaky closet and causes her to briefly go insane.
“It worked!” Kinnear shows off his improvisation in this scene. “Courtney (and originally Pat) is a cute little funky butterfly. There were times when I felt that Terry would come back to scare her about it,” he says. Cox admits it was especially frightening because of the creepy real-life house in Pasadena they were filming in: “A guy died there in the 80s. His wife is confident in his presence there, and I believe in all this. What could be better than this?
Shining Valley isn’t a subversive slasher, but Cox credits her time with Scream director Wes Craven for learning to, well, scream and get scared on screen: “I’ve had experience with people jumping out and stuff like that. [Co-creator] Jeff Astroph was ready to listen to my thoughts, as if I said: “This will never happen in a horror movie.” All the training I went through on Scream and working on Friends set the perfect tone for me to play it and then add some drama to it. It was a good balance.”