Courteney Cox has, somewhat quietly, put together the kind of Hollywood career that 90 percent of working actors would do unspeakable horrors to have themselves — but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t had some wild regrets along the way.
The 58-year-old actress is perhaps best known for her role as Monica Geller on the smash hit sitcom series “Friends,” but her acting credits also include a recurring leading role in the popular “Scream” horror movie franchise (Cox stars in all of the “Scream” movies) and the raunchy drama-comedy “Cougar Town.”
For the unaware, “Friends” lasted for 10 seasons and was deeply embedded in the cultural zeitgeist at the time. “Scream” has spawned six total movies, and “Cougar Town” made it to the vaunted 100-episode mark for a television show (102 episodes, exactly).
That’s a lot of recurring, consistent work on some heavy-hitting franchises, and that doesn’t even factor in the numerous other smaller roles throughout Cox’s career.
What could there possibly be to regret?
When Cox was posited that same question in the context of her biggest “beauty regret” on the March 7 episode of the Gloss Angeles beauty podcast, she quickly identified two things:
View this post on Instagram
“Thinking I was getting older when I was really young,” Cox said in the clip posted by the show. Cox added that that mindset was “a bummer” and “a waste of time.”
Indeed, some level of obsession with vanity is to be expected in Hollywood, but there have been one too many examples of vanity gone utterly awry in Tinseltown.
In that sense, it’s almost refreshing to hear Cox speak in such a down-to-earth manner about the follies of her vain obsessions. It would do a ton of good for others in Hollywood, like Madonna, to have that same level of self-introspection.
“It’s a domino effect,” Cox continued in the clip. “You don’t realize that you look a little off, so then you keep doing more [because] you look normal to yourself. And you look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh, that looks good’… You think.
“And you don’t realize what it looks like to the outside person.”
As for that other “beauty regret”?
“Just doing too many fillers,” Cox added. “And then having to have them removed, which, thank God, they are removable.”
This is where the clip, and Cox, shift in tone, almost like she was relaying a pained admission.
“I think I’ve messed … I messed up a lot,” Cox said. “And now, luckily, I can, you know, I was able to reverse most of that.”
With a sheepish grin, Cox noted that, “Now, I’m actually just older.”
And truly, what’s wrong with that? Spoiler: Nothing!
There is absolutely nothing wrong with embracing age. Time only flows in one direction, which means that literally everything on God’s green Earth will age. It’s inevitable.
What Cox has shown here is that it’s just so much better to embrace that natural aging with grace and dignity, instead of continually changing your appearance to foolishly attempt to fight back against the natural progression of things.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
