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Friends in high places
Being Ross in Friends has made him a household name and earns him $750,000 an episode. But after eight years, there's talk of the hit sitcom coming to an end, and David Schwimmer's ready to try something new. Tim Cooper hears why he's going back to school.
Sunday November 25, 2001 The Observer
It's been a big day for Ross. He, along with some 20m other Americans, has just found out that he's the father of Rachel's baby. I feel I should buy David Schwimmer a drink to celebrate. Instead, he offers to buy me a hot dog. We are in Chicago, where Schwimmer - whiny, neurotic Ross Geller in Friends - studied drama and founded a theatre company. It's his week off from Friends and he's helping raise funds for the Looking Glass Theatre's new home. They have been peripatetic for the last 12 years, and they are about to move into a big stone castle that serves as the city's water pumping station.
Last night, Schwimmer hosted a 'cultivation' evening to attract potential investors and schmooze the city's business interests. The opportunity to meet 'Ross from Friends' makes it a hot ticket, but Schwimmer is more than a front man for the theatre. It's very much a labour of love and, in addition to giving them financial support, he writes, directs and stars in their productions. Unlike his five sitcom co-stars, Schwimmer has a theatrical background - and a keen interest in social issues. Right now, he's writing scripts on the subjects of race and internet paedophilia. In real life, he is a very active director of the Rape Foundation in Los Angeles, lecturing about date-rape drugs at colleges in the city.
It's swiftly clear that Schwimmer is no pampered Hollywood star, despite the $750,000-an-episode pay cheque from Friends and the obligatory multi-million-pound mansion in Los Angeles to go with his Chicago loft. He makes his own schedule for our interview, leaving his home number on my hotel voicemail even before we've spoken; he wears clothes so nondescript that I can't even remember what they were, he drives me around in his eight-year-old car and he invites me to play volleyball with him and his friends. We don't go to stylish, exclusive places; he suggests a hot-dog place before settling on a neighbourhood restaurant called Toast, moving on later to cheeseburgers at his local bar. He has no minders or assistants, his publicist is a childhood friend (who is miles away in New York) and he turns off his cellphone while we're talking. I'd like to tell you something bad about him just for the sake of balance: he says he sometimes steals parking places while other drivers are about to reverse into them, and he carries a big, heavy torch behind his car seat in case they get violent. But he has yet to use it in anger. And he wouldn't sign an autograph on the way to lunch. But only because he didn't have a pen. And he was very sorry.
'There's nothing negative to tell about David,' says British actor Andy Nyman, who has just spent several weeks working with Schwimmer on Uprising, a film about Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, shot in Bratislava. I'd called Nyman in search of some balance, but failed to find any. 'I can see that when you are as rich and famous [as Schwimmer] it's very easy to be difficult. But he's a proper actor: diligent, hard-working, and truly a lovely man. He's great at dealing with his celebrity, too.'
After eight years in what quickly became the most popular sitcom in America, David Schwimmer is one of the most recognisable faces in show business. But, while he may be adept at dealing with his fame, he is still uncomfortable with it. 'One of the ways I stay grounded, I like to think, is by having little mini-battles every day,' he says. When the staff at Starbucks recognise him, for example, and tell him to jump the queue, he insists on waiting his turn. 'Sometimes,' he tells me, 'if I'm in a bar, guys will want to buy me shots. I'm not a big drinker but if I say no, it's like I've insulted them. They're like, "Ooooh, think you're too good to drink with me, do ya?" And then I'm an asshole.'
But it's worst when he's with someone else. 'Whoever I'm with just becomes invisible,' he explains. 'Literally invisible. People push them out of the way to get to me. Sometimes they grab my arm and start yelling, "Ross, Ross!"' He's really very agitated now; he grabs my arm to demonstrate, and knocks it right off the table. 'I'm sorry,' he says, mortified by his display of anger. 'Did I hurt you?'
At almost 6ft 2in, and with an athletic physique honed by daily workouts, yoga and weekly volleyball games, Schwimmer can deal with day-to-day hassle without too much difficulty. But he despairs of celebrity culture, of people becoming famous for being on Jerry Springer and taking part in 'reality' TV shows. 'I find it sad that everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame and, in America, we are so consumed by it. It has never been comfortable to me. I don't hang with a lot of celebrities. And I don't go to Hollywood parties. I hear about these parties at big directors' and stars' and producers' homes and I guess I'm not really interested.' He admits: 'To be honest, in some respects it has probably hurt my career because I don't kiss ass. I don't show up and get my face out there all the time.'
Despite being brought up in Los Angeles, Schwimmer has always been an outsider there, just as his parents were when they emigrated from New York with their two young children. At school, he was the outsider, too. He confesses to having been a troublemaker and a bully in his younger days. Nor did he fit in when he was sent to the ultra-glamorous Beverly Hills High School. 'When I was there I always felt: this is not me, I'm surrounded by people with a different value system. And I just wanted to get out of California.' He left to study drama at Chicago's Northwestern University and his friends today are the people he's known from school and college, his theatre friends; his publicist, Ina, went to infant school with him.
Until recently, Schwimmer used to live in Hollywood, but he couldn't stand it. 'It was too noisy, too busy,' he says, elaborating with a really Ross-like inflection. 'Too many cool people trying to be really cool.' Now he lives, alone, in a big house in Hancock Park. 'It's a mixed ethnic community, which is rare in LA, and although there are a few celebrities in the area, it doesn't feel like an industry town,' he says. 'It's like a regular neighbourhood where you see kids playing in the street.' He lives there because it reminds him a lot of Chicago, where he has had a home for the past 15 years, and he often has his Chicago friends to stay at his big, barely furnished '1924 Spanish' home, which he is slowly restoring.
David Schwimmer was born, a year after his sister Ellie, in the New York borough of Queens in November 1966. Two years later, his parents, Arthur and Arlene - both lawyers - moved to Los Angeles, where his mother became a leading light in the fledgling feminist movement. 'I have unusual parents,' he explains. 'They were always involved in issues. My dad has just retired and the first thing he did is join this organisation called Habitat for Humanity, which Jimmy Carter started years ago. Basically, my dad was a lawyer sitting behind a desk for many, many years, and the first thing he did on retiring was throw on a tool belt and go into the outside of the communities and build for those in need. You gotta see him - he looks like he should be buried in books, but he was so excited to be actually physically giving back when before he could only give back either monetarily or intellectually. That's the kind of family I come from.'
They were, he says, a very warm family. 'I always remember just a lot of love, playing catch with my dad, going to plays and movies. It was a fun family, always card games after dinner and stuff like that. But at the same time it was really rigorous and there was a lot of pressure on academic achievement.'