observerdavid2

Schwimmer was tall and lanky and hyperactive. 'I was always the class clown, I was the troublemaker in class. And I was always restless.' He got into a lot of fights. 'I was a bully,' he remembers. 'I was nearly expelled from junior high and elementary school before that.' One time, he faced expulsion after a brutal fight with a tomboy who was bigger than him, and his mother came to see the principal to ask why the girl was not getting the same punishment as her son. David was impressed because Arlene was a prominent force in the original women's liberation movement, founding the National Organisation for Women in California and the League of Women Voters. That day, she demonstrated something vitally important to him. 'She believed in equal rights.'
As his mother's career as a divorce lawyer became increasingly successful, thanks to high-profile clients including Elizabeth Taylor and Roseanne Barr, the Schwimmers moved to Beverly Hills and sent David to the famous high school, popularised in Beverly Hills 90210. Puberty played havoc with his looks; he became short and fat, he had a premature moustache and braces fastened by a device that he likens to 'a harness for a horse'. Feeling no kinship with most of his overprivileged classmates, he buried himself in studies. He was best at science and maths and thought he would become a doctor. He became popular within his clique - 'the dorky science and math guys' - because he also did drama. 'And within the acting group I was also kinda popular cos I was funny and also doing well in school. Somehow within those two cliques I found friends.'
But he was still an outsider. 'Within the cool cliques I was a complete outcast. There was this huge group of very beautiful people at high school: really gorgeous men and women who had the latest fashions, drove the new BMW or Porsche or Mercedes to school - the Volkswagen Rabbit convertible was really popular one year. Those were the kids who had parties after school in big mansions in Beverly Hills. My friends and I were never part of that.'
When Schwimmer finally got his driving licence in his last year at school, his parents bought him a car. 'They knew I was leaving for Chicago very soon, so they weren't going to buy me a new car. So my dad went shopping at used car lots and we found a 1976 Chevy Monte Carlo. It was literally shit brown.' One Saturday night, Schwimmer and his friends went out in this 'boat of a car' and drove passed a party that the cool people were throwing at one of their houses. 'Just driving by this incredible house, we heard people laughing and we recognised some of the beautiful people from school and we weren't invited and certainly weren't going to crash it - you know, peer pressure and everything - we just didn't want to be subjected to that kind of ridicule.'
Schwimmer realised he was always going to be the outsider. 'I definitely felt a class system in place.' He felt the same thing when he later started trying to find work and discovered his looks were considered 'too ethnic' for leading roles. He thinks Hollywood is rife with racism and anti-semitism, even though many of the producers and directors are Jewish. The only time he can recall Ross being defined by his race/religion in eight years of Friends was when he dressed up for his son as the 'Hanukkah armadillo'. Schwimmer was outraged when he watched the movie Star Wars: Episode 1 to see 'a racist stereotype: a small schmizerly pawnbroker with a huge nose - all the characteristics and traits of a Jew. I remember wondering whether anyone else had seen this and was feeling what I felt. I think it's damaging.'
Schwimmer believes that racism already 'saturates' America and worries that it is becoming legitimised since 11 September, a theme he wants to tackle in his stage adaptation of Race, a massive collection of testimonies on the subject compiled by the broadcaster, author and journalist Studs Terkel. 'I don't think there's a real concentrated effort to alleviate the problem of race in America,' Schwimmer says. Of equal concern to him are internet predators, about whom he is accumulating case histories before writing his script. 'I have stacks of cases and more than half of them are teachers, and two-thirds are married men with children,' he says with evident disgust. He has even logged on to chat sites, posing as a teenage girl, and was horrified to find 'she' was propositioned within minutes. His drama will also tackle the wider issue of how the internet has changed the family. 'The family dinner discussion around the table has disappeared. Kids run to their rooms now and spend hours either playing games on the computer or chatting with people.'
Clearly his dramatic interests are a far cry from the frivolity of Friends. And, although the sitcom has earned him Ross-like leading roles in comedy films such as The Pallbearer (with Gwyneth Paltrow) and Kissing a Fool, Schwimmer recently took a decision 'to make an effort to find roles that are as far away from the character of Ross as possible'. Television viewers have just seen him as a sadistic drill instructor who turns out to be an inept leader of men in Spielberg's Second World War epic Band of Brothers.
Schwimmer had five great-uncles who all fought for the US in the war and, unlike Private Ryan's siblings, all survived. 'For a lot of veterans, this was the highlight of their lives; they felt there was a value to their lives for the first time and it had an importance greater than themselves,' he says, admiringly. He believes it would be unwise to talk directly about the war on terrorism, but in a hypothetical draft he would answer his country's call 'without hesitation'. Things may be 'forlorn and fucked-up' in terms of education and racism and health care, he says, but you've still got to defend your freedoms. 'You have to inherently believe what the country stands for, or else you shouldn't live here.'
In the forthcoming Uprising, he plays a Jewish police officer working for the Polish police, who faces the stark choice of betraying his race or working for the freedom fighters. Next, he will be seen as 'a young, immoral, independent film producer' in Mike Figgis's experimental film Hotel, shot with a huge cast in Venice. It was, he says, 'the greatest experience ever'. He's seen it and it looks beautiful: full of 'really unforgettable images and moments'
When he was 12 or 13, Schwimmer went to a Shakespeare workshop given by Ian McKellen in Los Angeles. 'I was absolutely riveted,' he recalls. He started studying drama at Beverly Hills High. There was a local drama contest called the Southern California Shakespeare Festival. Schwimmer entered three years running. 'I won first place in a group scene and also first place in an individual dialogue, which I adapted from The Tempest. It was a scene with myself, basically; I played three characters simultaneously - Prospero, Ariel and Caliban.' He wanted to go straight into acting, but his parents insisted he go to college so he had something to fall back on in case the acting didn't work out. His exam results were so good that he had his pick of a dozen universities. He chose Northwestern because he had attended its summer drama course when he was 16 and felt it had the best undergraduate programme in the country.
After graduating in theatre and speech, his first TV role was in LA Law in 1986, followed by the comedy-drama series The Wonder Years. He had a recurring role as a lawyer-turned-vigilante in NYPD Blue and appeared briefly in ER in 1993, before auditioning, unsuccessfully, for a series pilot called Couples. He tried again when it was rewritten for a cast of singles, and retitled Friends. The rest is history. Soon, he hints, Friends really will be history. 'Our contract is up in April, we're not signed up to do another year and we are not even in talks,' he reveals. 'No one wants to call it quits, but I feel like there is so much other stuff I want to do - theatre and film and developing other television as well - that I'm ready for it to be over. I wouldn't mind if the show was over after this year.' It's clear that he's had enough.