Shining Vale Star Courteney Cox Says She Lived in a Real Haunted House
Shining Vale star Courteney Cox reveals that she thinks her former house was haunted. Shining Vale is a new horror-comedy series created by Jeff Astrof and Sharon Horgan that premieres on Starz on Sunday, March 6, 2022. In addition to the Friends star, the cast includes Greg Kinnear, Sherilyn Fenn, Gus Birney, Dylan Gage, Judith Light, and Mira Sorvino, who recently appeared with Cox's sitcom co-star Lisa Kudrow at the SAG Awards ceremony, dressed as an updated version of their characters from the '90s comedy classic Romy and Michele's High School Reunion.
In Shining Vale, Cox plays an erotic novelist whose career is on the skids after a scandal involving her cheating on her husband. When her family attempts to reset by moving to a small town, she quickly realizes that not all is as it seems in their new home. She keeps seeing visions of a ghost named Rosemary (played by Sorvino), who nobody else can see. The show combines classic horror tropes with a more traditional sitcom setup, asking Courteney Cox to take the skills she honed with her character Monica Geller to the next level.
While appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live this week to promote Shining Vale, Courteney Cox revealed that she's lived through her own real-life haunted house story. The home she was living in, which was formerly owned by both Gypsy Rose Lee and Carole King, was supposedly the site of a particularly ugly divorce as well as a haunting. While she "didn’t believe it at first," Cox describes a delivery person telling her "there is someone standing behind you," a terrifying event that caused her to sell the house and move out more or less immediately. Read her full quote below:
“I was at the house one day, not being a believer. And the doorbell rang. It was a UPS guy or something, and I opened the door and he said, ‘Do you know this house is haunted?’ And I go, 'Yeah, why? Why do you think that?' He goes, 'Because there is someone standing behind you.' And I was like, 'Let’s sell.' I couldn’t sleep there alone ever again.”
Cox has had plenty of experience in the horror genre, both comedy and otherwise. In addition to her upcoming tenure on Shining Vale, she has appeared in all five films in the Scream meta slasher franchise, including the newest film - also titled Scream - which knocked Spider-Man: No Way Home off its run of #1 weekends at the box office this January. However, decades of experience in horror fiction can't measure up to the kind of real-life experience she's describing.
There is some debate as to whether this is merely a story cooked up to promote Shining Vale. Regardless, it's a terrifying tale to hear, and will almost certainly have provided Cox with the right raw material to channel an incredibly grounded performance. The 8-episode season will require a delicate tonal balance as its story unfolds, and Cox, with her cross-genre experience that now crosses the lines of fiction and nonfiction, is certainly the right fit for the part.
Source: Jimmy Kimmel Live