Starz’s upcoming horror-comedy series, Shining Vale, spotlights not just the difficulties of living in a (potentially) haunted house but also depicts how tricky it is to raise teenagers. The series follows a creatively blocked writer, Pat Phelps (Courteney Cox), and her dysfunctional family. After the Phelps move into a creepy mansion in a small town, tensions escalate amongst them all — and especially between Pat and her teenagers Gaynor (Gus Birney) and Jake (Dylan Gage). In a press event attended by CBR’s Cass Clarke, Shining Vale stars Birney and Gage discussed what it was like to ratchet up the teenage angst to hysterical levels on the Starz series and delved into the joys of working with Scream‘s Courteney Cox.
When asked by CBR what it was like to star alongside Cox, Birney replied, “It’s funny, I never saw Scream so for me she was always Monica from Friends. That’s how I knew her, but Courteney is the fastest person. She truly has the best comebacks. She’s hilarious and she’s brilliant on-screen and off. So I think the more I got to know her and her sense of humor, she taught me so much as a human but also in the delivery of her lines — her comedic timing. She’s a pro. Just getting to act alongside her taught me so much. I grew up a lot meeting her.”
In Shining Vale, Birney’s Gaynor constantly challenges her mother Pat with snappy comebacks and one-liners. When asked what it was like to bring that aspect of her character alive on-screen, she replied, “I admired Gaynor so much because, at 16, I was not as outspoken and confident and edgy as she was. I was much more introverted, and I was really close with my mom, ironically, and was not screaming at her. I think she’s like this alter ego of myself that I never got to experience, so I learned a lot about myself through her. It’s such a blast to play her. She’s much more complicated than when you meet her at first glance.”
Unlike Gaynor, Shining Vale‘s Jake tends to keep to himself a lot more. Despite Pat pushing her son to open up to her, he’d much rather turn on a VR headset and disappear into the woods behind their creepy home. Gage shared how tricky it was to play a character on-screen that is almost entirely disengaged from the cast. When speaking about his tuned-out nature, Gage shared, “I definitely feel like it’s a little bit of a defense mechanism of Jake, like an, ‘I don’t really care or want to deal with anything that’s going on in my life. I’d much rather be playing video games.’ But I think that that would be the case even if his family was a picture-perfect, white picket fence, nuclear family… He is very oblivious, but some of it might just be a little bit more on purpose — or, at least, he doesn’t try to fix it.”
See just how much Pat has on her hands in Shining Vale, dropping its first two episodes on Starz on Sunday, March 6.
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