David Arquette gets real about the 'arguments,' 'pain,' and 'ego' in his marriage to Courteney Cox amid her 'Friends' success.
More than a decade after filing for divorce, David Arquette is getting candid about how he reacted to ex Courteney Cox's meteoric Friends fame during their marriage.
During an interview on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live, host Andy Cohen asked the Mrs. Davis actor if he felt inferior to Cox "based on how successful" the NBC sitcom was when they were together.
"Yeah, absolutely. It's difficult," he said. "...I have some of the traditional male things where I want to like, you know, provide and pick up the check and, you know, be the breadwinner."
He also acknowledged the generally turbulent and unpredictable nature of the industry and how it can affect a relationship between two actors.
"In the acting world in general, you're always going on this rollercoaster of popularity and, you know, not able to get a job," he said, adding, "so it's like this weird thing. And then when you're, you know, comparing yourself to someone who's at the, you know, top of the television, iconic world, it's kinda hard to put yourself there, so there was definitely like learning and dealing with that and a lot of pain and, you know, arguments or, you know, ego, early on."
Asked how the A-list pair dealt with it, Arquette pointed out the importance of getting to the root of the issue.
"A lot of it has to do with, you know, the way you're taking things, the way you're saying things, the way you're responding to things, the way you're, you know, allowing other sort of outside influences affect how you feel about yourself, so I think like building confidence or just, you know, focusing on yourself, like working out some of the pain and trauma that I had so that I could open up like, you know, and own sort of what makes me happy, what my needs are, where my boundaries are," he shared.
After meeting as co-stars in the 1996 cult classic Scream, Cox and Arquette tied the knot in 1999 and welcomed their only child together, daughter Coco, in 2004 -- the same year Friends ended following a decade-long run. After announcing a trial separation in 2010, they officially filed for divorce two years later and the split was finalized in 2013. Arquette has since welcomed two children with wife Christina McLarty, who he married in 2015. Meanwhile, Cox has been dating Snow Patrol musician Johnny McDaid since 2013.
Despite ultimately parting ways, Arquette complimented how they handled their breakup.
"We had a really great thing at the end," he said. "I just think a lot of people end up, when relationships end and lawyers get involved, they really sort of battle a lot of the time and they end up really fighting and spending a lot of money to lawyers where they should be sort of splitting with each other, so I just encourage people to really try to work it out so that you have a healthy relationship for your child -- that's what it's really all about."
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