Courteney Cox’s Meet Cute With Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid Involved Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles and Sacha Baron Cohen
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Talk about a meet super cute. On Wednesday morning (March 2) Courteney Cox dropped in to promote her new series Shining Vale on pal Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show and in the midst of their conversation the actress revealed the star-studded, hard-to-believe origin of her love story with boyfriend Johnny McDaid of Snow Patrol.
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Cox, 57, who spent much of the pandemic lockdown honing her piano skills in a series of popular Instagram videos, told Stern that she first learned how to play when she was 10 and her sister’s hippie boyfriend taught her Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Then, three years ago she started taking lessons and during her regular Sunday gatherings with friends she would sometimes sit at her piano with one of her many musician friends, including Ed Sheeran, a frequent house guest.
After a mutual friend invited Sheeran over to one of the Sunday salons, Cox said she became friendly with the singer — who didn’t appear to know who she was at first — and he then introduced her to his writing partner McDaid. But the way it all went down is an only-in-Hollywood tale.
“Ed said, ‘can I have some friends over this week?’ and I said of course,” Cox explained. “He invited Johnny, Gary Lightbody, both of them from Snow Patrol, Taylor Swift… some great musicians and they all came over and I had a fun group anyway: Sacha Baron Cohen, Isla Fisher, Jennifer [Aniston] was there, it was just one of these fun weekends.”
Some of the guests slept over and traded phone numbers and when they woke up the next morning Cox was disappointed when nobody asked for her digits. “This is worse than not getting nominated [for an Emmy for Friends]… and I remember seeing Johnny and going, ‘Oh wow, he’s really intense, he’s got those eyes and he was playing the piano and I thought, ‘he’s really, really handsome.'” Though she didn’t act on her feelings at the time, Cox said she later had a screening of a movie she directed in 2013 and she heard Fisher tell a mutual friend — Cox’s then-single Cougar Town co-star Christa Miller — that she should go flirt with McDaid.
“And I went, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, Isla what are you doing? If anybody’s gonna try to flirt with Johnny what’s wrong with me?,'” she said. So Fisher went up to her hubby, Borat star Cohen and told him that their host wanted to go on a date with McDaid, which prompted the never-shy prankster to approach his fellow Brits and say, “hey, Courteney wants to f–k one of you from Snow Patrol and it’s not you, Gary.”
She, of course, did not say that and was mortified, but to crank the story up 10 more notches, Cox told Stern that another guest, Harry Styles, overheard the conversation and told McDaid, “‘if you don’t ask her out’… I think he threatened to do something crazy like… I don’t remember but it was pretty bad,” Cox said.
McDaid called her the next day and a week later they went on a date and have been together ever since.
The actress also talked about a Laurel Canyon, California house she moved into before her Friends fame that she swears was inhabited by ghosts, prompting her to eventually sell it. But not before she had another musical meeting of the minds to try and drive the demon out. And while the story seems pretty convenient given her role as a mom who has runs-ins with a not-nice ghost on her new Starz horror comedy Shining Vale, Cox told a skeptical Stern that she was dead serious about her spectral encounter.
Cox said she called the home’s former owner, legendary singer/songwriter Carole King, to have a seance to rid the home of ghoulies. “She came over before that and I didn’t really believe… that we did have a seance, we held hands we sat around and I just wasn’t really connected to it,” she said. “I just kept looking at her like, ‘This is Carole King, who cares about ghosts?'”
Watch Cox on Stern below.
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