Friends star David Schwimmer’s shock confession: ‘Quite scary’

David Schwimmer – best known as Ross from the beloved series – has revealed a harrowing detail about his time on the show.

The one with the fame.

David Schwimmer’s stint as Ross Geller on Friends launched his career and earned him a staggering US$1 million an episode in its final seasons. But, there is one aspect of the Central Perk experience he would change looking back.

“Advice I’d give my younger self … I would maybe say enjoy it more,” he exclusively told The Post while promoting his new series, Goosebumps: The Vanishing.

“Enjoy the ride a little more. The thing about being a public figure at a young age is, for me, it was quite scary actually at that time of my life,” he explained. “All of us were kind of constantly followed by three or four cars at a time. Anywhere we went, you had no privacy anymore. And that to me, my response to it, I would just give my advice to my younger self to also just enjoy the whole thing more. Because that was scary at the time to younger actors.”

Schwimmer, now 58, was just 27 when he started filming the beloved comedy, which ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004. The New York-based series, which was shot at Warner Bros. Studios lot in LA, also starred Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and the late Matthew Perry, who died at age 54 from the acute effects of ketamine on October 28, 2023.

The cast of Friends: David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, Mathew Perry, Courteney Cox Arquette, Jennifer Aniston, and Matt LeBlanc. Picture: Lee Celano/AFP

In 2016, Schwimmer recalled how becoming a household name nearly overnight also affected his personal life.

“It was pretty jarring and it messed with my relationship to other people in a way that took years, I think, for me to kind of adjust to and become comfortable with,” he told the Hollywood Reporter at the time. “As an actor, the way I was trained, my job was to observe life and to observe other people, and so I used to walk around with my head up, and really engaged and watching people. The effect of celebrity was the absolute opposite: It made me want to hide under a baseball cap, not be seen. And I realised after a while that I was no longer watching people; I was trying to hide. So I was trying to figure out: How do I be an actor in this new world, in this new situation? How do I do my job? So that was tricky.”

Schwimmer has revealed the "scary" side of his Friends success.

The cast reunited in honour of the show’s 20th anniversary for an HBO Max special in 2021. Since saying goodbye to Friends, Schwimmer notably portrayed Robert Kardashian in Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story and can now be seen in the series Goosebumps: The Vanishing.

Season two shows Schwimmer as a recently divorced dad, Anthony Brewer, to fraternal twins Devin and Cece. Advice to his young cast would be to “put in the work.”

“Don’t get lazy,” he told The Post.

“Luckily these young actors on this show — they’re just so naturally talented, great instincts. They did the work. They knew their stuff. So I didn’t really have to give them much advice,” he went on. “I would say if they start to become really, really famous or whatever, if they wanted advice, I would talk to them then. But mostly I would just say focus on the work. Feel good about what you do.”

Schwimmer, who has also appeared in Six Days Seven Nights, Band of Brothers and voiced Melman in Madagascar, noted joining Goosebumps: The Vanishing was “an opportunity to challenge” himself “and to grow as an actor and try something new.”

“I would say the thing that is most impelling to me is when I’m presented with something that I’ve never done before. And this was one of those things. I’ve never been able to be in an action comedy or horror series. And I’m a genuine fan of the genre and I love horror films.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as Friends star David Schwimmer’s shock confession: ‘Quite scary’