The star of Cougar Town on looking youthful, life after Friends and how she’s coped with her marriage breakdown.
Courteney Cox is talking so fast into her phone as she arrives that the previously quiet Los Angeles restaurant she’s chosen for our interview suddenly seems to come to life. It’s as if a tornado has swept in – a vortex of wincingly high heels and shiny hair.
For someone so petite, the energy comes XXXL. ‘Sorry, don’t let me pass on my stress,’ the tornado apologises, holding two conversations at the same time. ‘I won’t be a minute. It’s just it’s been an incredible day…’ She pauses and leans away from the phone’s mouthpiece to whisper conspiratorially, ‘I’ll tell you all about it.’
It’s an unexpected gesture, the kind that you might expect of a really good girl friend perhaps, such as Cox’s most famous alter ego, Monica Geller on Friends, rather than one of the most highly paid actresses in television history. Hollywood types are usually a little more private.
Talking a mile a minute, Cox is open, funny and frank. ‘Oh, I do get lonely, yes. But it’s to be expected,’ she says of her separation in 2010 from the actor David Arquette to whom she was married for 11 years. ‘But for God’s sake, don’t talk to me about dating. That whole thing starts to give me anxiety. Really? Dating? Must I? I just don’t want to hear the words “blind date”. Oh, God,’ she exclaims and feigns a comic shiver of distaste.
Instead she’d rather hear the words ‘television hit’. In Cougar Town, now in its third series, Cox plays a divorced mother, Jules Cobb, who is as practised at dating as the real-life Cox claims not to be. What’s important to note, she insists, is that it’s not a show about ‘cougars’ – older women dating younger men. Confused?

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