Courteney Cox Teams Up with Shark — and Remembers Monica’s Most Memorable Vacuuming Scene (Exclusive)

Courteney Cox’s latest collaboration is one Monica Geller would approve of.

The Friends alum, 60, is partnering with Shark on a campaign to highlight two new devices, the PowerDetect NeverTouch Pro 2-in-1 Robot Vacuum and Mop and Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Vacuum.

“Obviously, I am known as being a clean freak,” the actress tells PEOPLE, noting that her reputation comes from more than just her Friends character’s famous obsession with cleanliness. 

“Everyone that knows me, any friend I have, knows that I just love things that are organized, neat and clean, and I can’t help it,” she says. “I was born this way and it’s so important to me. One of the things that make me happy is to have a really clean surrounding.”

Cox, who will appear in a series of videos for the brand starting this month, shared some of her favorite features of the vacuums.

“The Shark actually cleans in reverse, and I think that’s incredible,” she says. “So you’re not just wasting extra manpower.”

“It almost drives itself. You just kind of go along for the ride, which I love, but it detects dirt, it finds it, it lets you know, ‘Oh, by the way, I found this dirt,’” adds Cox, who’s also a fan of their self-cleaning technology. 

While Cox says she’s never used a small vacuum to clean a larger one — the way Monica memorably did in a season 10 episode of Friends — she understands the urge to keep them spotless.

“I’ve never vacuumed my vacuum, but 1000% I would wipe down my vacuum,” she says. “As a matter of fact, when I was on the set of the [Shark] commercial, I said to the prop guy, ‘Can you just hand me your rag?’ And I just got a couple of spots that no one’s going to see like me. I always say I suffer from an acute awareness.”

As for Monica’s funniest clean-freak moments, Cox says two always come to mind.

One is a season 4 scene in which Monica takes a spin on a floor buffer. She also recalls her character preferring to tidy up when boyfriend-turned husband Chandler (played by the late Matthew Perry) was feeling amorous.

“He was trying to be romantic, and he’s like, ‘You just want to stay home and clean.’ I was like, ‘I do.’”

Cox says Monica’s tendencies may have been considered over the top by everybody else, but “seemed normal” to her.

However, while Monica was known to keep a secret messy closet, the actress says she doesn’t have a similarly disorganized space.

“I really don’t think I have a room that I feel comfortable saying, ‘Oh, that’s a junk drawer. I don’t mind,’” she says.

When it comes to messes, Cox says her biggest pet peeve is red wine on wallpaper. And she’s also obsessed with keeping her kitchen counter clean, using a spray from HomeCourt, the home-care line she launched in 2022.

“I’m pretty much the kind of person that I can fix anything,” she adds. “I’m a big entertainer, so the house is constantly messed up.” 

She recently debuted a new HomeCourt collection inspired by another important person in her life, 20-year-old daughter Coco Arquette. 

However, Cox says Coco “does not” share her passion for organization and cleaning.

“Every now and then, she’ll be like, ‘Mom, I cleaned out my room and I feel so good.’ And I go, ‘That’s a feeling you could have all the time,’ and it just doesn’t happen,” Cox says. “But she’s getting older and she does live on her own.”

“And she does take pride in that, which I think is good,” she adds. “But no, I don’t think she has my gene in the same way, and I don’t have hers. Listen, she’s a great singer. She’s a great writer. She’s so many qualities that I don’t have, so that’s okay.”

Shark’s PowerDetect NeverTouch Pro 2-in-1 Robot Vacuum and Mop and Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Vacuum are available now.