David Arquette has a lot to celebrate — from a brand new film to making plans for daughter Coco’s upcoming 21st birthday.
“Oh my gosh. I just wanna see her. She’s been in New York with school,” Arquette, 53, exclusively told Us Weekly while discussing his new crime thriller, Mob Cops. “Just an opportunity to see her and celebrate her. She’s just such a wonderful human being.”
When he isn’t starring in hit film franchises like Scream, stretching his dramatic chops with movies like Mob Cops or dressing up as Bozo the Clown at Coachella (more on that in a minute), Arquette is just a proud dad. He shares 20-year-old Coco with ex-wife Courteney Cox, to whom he was married from 1999 to 2013. Arquette also shares two sons — Charlie, 8, and Augustus, 5 — with wife Christina McLarty, whom he wed in 2015.
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Arquette admits that all three of his kids are different. The actor recently performed at this year’s Coachella music festival as Bozo the Clown — he bought the rights to the character in 2021 — something that elicited various reactions from his brood.
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“So my daughter Coco, it’s like, she loves it, she gets it!” he said with a laugh. “[But] my sons are like, ‘Oh … like, I’m a clown? They have to deal with it a lot. It goes both ways for sure.”
Arquette has made no secret of what being Bozo means to him. The Never Been Kissed star has been candid about the character helping him battle his “anxiety and self doubt,” which he credits to the charity work that comes along with portraying the pop culture icon.
“A lot of the stuff I do as Bozo is for charity. I just did Vandy Days [for] Dick Van Dyke’s charity, so whenever I’m doing charity or in service of others, I just notice that my anxiety level doesn’t ramp up the way it does typically. So doing that and going for hikes really helps. Doing something creative really helps. When I get outta my head, I’m just kind of drawing or working on something. Those kinds of things are my hacks for it.”
Channeling creativity is easy in a career like Arquette’s, although some roles can induce more anxiety than others. Arquette portrays Sammy Canzano in Mob Cops, a retired Vietnam army vet and dirty NYPD detective who gets mixed up with the mob alongside partner Leo Benetti (Jeremy Luke). The story is loosely based on the careers of Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito, who were indicted by federal authorities on charges of racketeering conspiracy for a pattern of murders, kidnappings, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, money laundering and narcotics dealing with mobsters and mob associates from the 1980s to the early 2000s.
Portraying any type of law enforcement official can easily be anxiety-inducing – and Arquette was able to use his own experiences to help translate that on screen.
“The anxiety’s a part of it. And anxiety’s a part of policing, being a police officer,” he said. “They have a really amazing control of it, and they really roll with the punches. And one of my best friends is a police officer. My uncle used to be a cop. So I could see that the way they deal with high stress situations is different.”
While portraying the stress of Sammy’s job came easy for Arquette, the challenge was stepping into a flawed character’s shoes. Arquette told Us it was important for him to understand Sammy’s point of view and not perceive him as an antagonist of the story.
“The interesting thing about playing a villain is you try to find the humanity in it,” he explained. “As strange as that sounds, you find it, [and] try to figure out why he’s doing it the way he thinks. And for [Sammy], to me, for me, this character didn’t think he was doing anything really wrong. I mean, he was a Vietnam vet and experienced, he’d been a cop for years. He saw what he was doing was getting some bad people off the street, getting paid some money so he could take care of his family.”
Arquette noted that Sammy didn’t “see the wrong” in what he was doing, which, although admittedly “questionable,” also felt understandable for Arquette as a father of three.
“For me, it just made it like I knew where he was coming from,” he continued. “I think I even threw [a line in there] like, ‘We’re the good guys,’ you know what I mean? And he truly believed that.”
Arquette’s costar Luke was also an asset when it came to putting himself in Sammy’s shoes.
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“[Jeremy] grew up in the area in Staten Island and knew some of the family members and heard about the story his whole life,” Arquette explained. “So even talking to him and getting an idea of how the mob mentality works, [that] just opens your eyes makes you feel like, ‘Oh, well these are real people. They have real families. This is real.’”
That’s not to say that Arquette excuses any of his character’s decisions throughout the film, and he is well aware of the real life fallout that occurred from Caracappa and Eppolito’s actions. (Caracappa and Eppolito were convicted and sentenced to a lifetime of imprisonment in 2009. Caracappa died in 2017 after a battle with cancer, while Eppolito passed away in 2019.)
“There’s real victims, and we changed the name to protect the innocent of course,” he said. “But a lot of pain is still involved. You know, people that do stuff like that really cause a lot of trouble for others.”
Arquette is clearly proud of his work in the film, which is just one more item on his growing list of exciting things on the horizon. “Mob Cops comes out on April 25th — my wife’s birthday,” he told Us with a smile. “So I’m gonna celebrate with her!”
Mob Cops is in theaters now.
Us Weekly
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