David Schwimmer: ‘I knew I needed to shift gears creatively’
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Before David Schwimmer’s acting career took off, he did a series of jobs to make ends meet. He worked in a shop where his main task was chopping up huge bricks of ice cream and mixing sweets and cookie dough into it. Then there was the call centre job selling toner ink for photocopiers where, one day, he got to work and found the place boarded up. “It turned out they had been raided,” he says. “My parents were, like: ‘Well, I guess what you were doing there wasn’t legal.’”
For seven years in his twenties, he worked as a waiter at a restaurant where his managers would give him time off for acting jobs. “I would get small recurring roles — three episodes here, four episodes there. Working that way, you never make enough money to quit waiting tables.”
Looking back now at 54, he is glad of the slow start. In 1994, aged 27, he landed a role that would change his life. Friends, the wildly popular sitcom in which he played palaeontologist Ross Geller, propelled him to a level of stardom that he could never have imagined. “So I am grateful that I knew who I was and that I had the perspective of having really worked,” he says. “It helped me navigate some really tricky waters.”
He recalls, early on, standing in line at Starbucks when a barista spotted him and waved at him to come to the front of the queue. “I realised instinctively not to take him up on it. There were six other people in front of me and I knew they would look at me and think I was a dick. I worked really hard, against a lot of forces, to retain some normalcy.”
Schwimmer is talking from his home in New York’s East Village, which he is relieved to see slowly opening up after lockdown. “The energy of the city, especially where I am, is really something,” he says. We are meant to be talking about the second series of Intelligence, the Sky comedy set in the murky world of British national security, but first there’s another TV event on the horizon.
This week, Friends: The Reunion, a special subtitled “The One Where They Get Back Together”, will air on HBO in the US and Sky in the UK. Filming wrapped the week before we speak, and while the specifics remain secret, Schwimmer describes the show as “a get-together in which we talk about our memories and experiences”. Rumours have abounded over the years of a proper scripted reunion but the actor insists it was never on the cards.
“The creators of the show are of the same mind as we are, which is that they loved the way it ended,” he says. “Also, the whole show was about a time in those characters’ lives when your friends were your family. At our age, a lot of people have their own families, so there’s really no interest in trying to [recreate] that.” In the event, he says, the cast had a great time. “And it was moving for us to be on that sound stage again, with all the original sets. It was quite emotional for everyone. I think the fans will be happy.”
Schwimmer is also returning to our screens in Intelligence, in which he plays Jerry Bernstein, a buffoonish spook parachuted in from the US’s National Security Agency to lend his questionable expertise to the new cyber crime unit at Britain’s GCHQ. Nick Mohammed, who wrote the series, plays Joseph Harries, an inept tech analyst and Jerry’s sidekick with whom he gets into assorted scrapes. Schwimmer and Mohammed initially met during the production of Morning Has Broken, a sitcom about a narcissistic daytime TV host written by Mohammed and Julia Davis, and instantly hit it off. Schwimmer had been lined up to play an American producer, but the series was never picked up.
A year later, Mohammed emailed Schwimmer. “He said: ‘I have an idea for a show’ and explained it in two paragraphs. And I said: ‘That’s really funny. I’m in. Let’s go.’” Both Schwimmer and Mohammed are big fans of The Office, flavours of which can be found in Intelligence, in the mundanity of their working lives despite being in the high-stakes world of cyber security, and in the David Brent-like Jerry. During the rehearsals for Morning Has Broken, the pair found an odd-couple chemistry that had them in stitches and which they deliberately carried over into their new series. “In a way, the two characters complete each other,” Schwimmer says.
Production for the latest series was complicated by filming being scheduled for last autumn. After the first lockdown, and with a second Covid wave predicted, Schwimmer, who is also an executive producer, says they were left “trying to figure out first if we could shoot at all, and then how to do it safely”. In the end, the entire crew made a joint decision that they wanted to go ahead.
“People had been out of work for six months. The crew was dying to do it and I thought it was worth it as long as we followed the protocols of testing several times a week and temperature checks every morning. To everyone’s credit, we didn’t have to stop production at all and we found a way to be funny and enjoy ourselves, in spite of everything.”
When Schwimmer began acting, he had a career in serious drama in mind. His mother was passionate about theatre when he was a child; when visiting New York, they would see anything up to seven shows in four days. Back home in Los Angeles, Schwimmer recalls going to see Ian McKellen in a one-man show of Shakespeare monologues. “I was 13 years old and I sat stupefied, just watching the greatest magic trick of all time. It was McKellen without any costume changes and without any props — just him standing in front of us and transforming himself into 25 of the greatest Shakespearean roles. I thought: ‘I have to learn how to do that.’”
Schwimmer trained at Northwestern University in Chicago and, on graduating, founded the Lookingglass Theatre Company, through which he took on serious roles in plays by Ibsen, Chekhov and Shakespeare. “By the time Friends hit, it was ironic to me that, after 10 years of working and refining my dramatic chops, I was suddenly only known as this funny guy.”
When Friends came to an end in 2004, he was keen for a change. “I knew I needed to shift gears, creatively,” he says. First he took to the stage, appearing in Neil LaBute’s Some Girl(s) in the West End and in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial on Broadway. He also directed films including the 2007 comedy Run Fatboy Run, with Simon Pegg and Dylan Moran, and the harrowing child abuse drama Trust (2010), before returning to acting, variously playing Melman, the neurotic giraffe in the Madagascar franchise, and defence lawyer Robert Kardashian in The People v OJ Simpson, for which he was nominated for an Emmy in 2016.
Ten years working on Friends meant Schwimmer would never have to worry about money again, which he says has been liberating. “What every artist really wants is to be able to follow their passion, and you can get derailed or beaten down when you have to pay the bills. My closest friends are struggling actors and directors — I see it and I have lived it.”
If he is irked by being known first and foremost as Ross from Friends, he’s far too decent to say so. He thinks its enduring appeal — it is still one of the most watched series on Netflix in the UK and HBO Max in the US — is to do with its portrayal of a more innocent time when friends sat around and really talked “rather than being on their cell phones”.
Now his daughter, Cleo, who is 10, has got into the series. “I’ve never pushed it,” he says. “Her peers have been watching it and I’m like: ‘How is this still translating?’ But, I’ve got to say, hearing her laugh watching it is one of the greatest things I’ve ever experienced.”
‘Friends: The Reunion’ will be shown on Sky One and NOW in the UK, and HBO in the US, on May 27. Series two of ‘Intelligence’ will be on Sky One and NOW from June 8
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