Friends star David Schwimmer’s message to Matthew Perry; New series Goosebumps: The Vanishing

David Schwimmer opens up on why Friends still means so much to him 30 years after it first aired, and why he was keen to try his hand at horror.

When the 30th anniversary of his beloved sitcom rolled around last September, David Schwimmer had a touching moment of reflection for his fellow Friends, both present and absent.

It had been less than a year since the sad death of his colleague Matthew Perry from the acute effects of ketamine use, so Schwimmer and the third male lead in the Emmy-winning comedy, Matt Le Blanc, got together to mark the milestone occasion of its first airing in 1994.

“I was actually in Los Angeles when the date of 30 years since we aired and I took LeBlanc out to dinner,” New Yorker Schwimmer reflects over Zoom call, while promoting his new supernatural horror series Goosebumps: The Vanishing. “We had a little toast to each other and toast to everyone – and a toast to Matthew.”

For Schwimmer, who played nerdy palaeontologist Ross Geller over ten seasons and 262 episodes, Friends has threatened to overshadow a distinguished and varied career that has also included stints on Broadway and the West End, voicing the neurotic giraffe Melman in the hit animated Madagascar series, an Emmy nomination for playing lawyer Robert Kardashian in The People vs OJ Simpson and directing for film and television.

But as the New York adventures in life and love of Ross, Joey (LeBlanc), Chandler (Perry), Monica (Courteney Cox), Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) and Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) continue to find legions of new fans – and provide hours of comfort viewing for old ones – thanks to re-runs and now streaming services, it’s clear that Friends still looms large in the now-58-year-old Schwimmer’s life.

Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer and Matt Leblanc will forever be remembered for their roles in Friends. Picture: Chris Delmas / AFP

“It’s incredibly moving to realise that something we did 30 years ago – I was 27 when I started that – and that still people are finding maybe comforting and funny,” he says. “I mean that’s really incredible, and I’m really grateful.”

For better or worse, Ross continues to be the role he is recognised and remembered for. In The Vanishing – the second season in the anthology series based on the books of US writer R.L Stine – he plays botanist and divorced father of two, Anthony. The character has a slightly familiar nervy energy – and one could certainly imagine an older version of Ross preparing information packs for his teenage twins when they come to spend the summer with him – but Schwimmer insists the similarities stop there.

“Obviously they’re both characters who have a passion for science and history,” he concedes, “but I think the comparison falls away after that.”

The action for Schwimmer’s character, coincidentally, kicks off in 1994 when his older brother disappears under mysterious circumstances in the sewers beneath Brooklyn. When his children come to visit in the present day, they and their new-found friends stumble on the same dark secret after ignoring their father’s warnings, unleashing a strange entity that adds to Anthony’s already considerable woes.

“As a boy he had this traumatic thing happen to his older brother, which we will find out in series, and he’s home taking care of his mum who has dementia,” explains Schwimmer. “So not exactly the greatest moment or chapter in the character’s life.

David Schwimmer as botanist Anthony in Goosebumps: The Vanishing.

“He’s struggling but what happens very quickly is you realise just how close and how much love there is in the family with him and his kids. And they’re off on some adventure and a mystery they’re trying to solve and at the same time my character is becoming unwittingly involved in some life form that is changing him, shall we say.

“I can’t give away too much but the mysteries kind of circle back in and are connected to what happened 30 years ago with his older brother. It’s a really ingenious kind of plot that unfolds over eight episodes and the through line of this family that starts really close, and then it’s kind of broken and pulled apart, and then comes back together at the end is very rewarding.”

Prior to signing on, Schwimmer admits he didn’t know too much about the spooky, young-adult Goosebumps books, which have sold more than 400 million copies in 35 languages since the first book was published in 1992, becoming the second-best selling book series behind the Harry Potter novels. They have also been adapted for the big screen with the well-received, Goosebumps, starring Jack Black, released in 2013 and a sequel, Haunted Halloween, in 2018. But after being sent the script for the first episode of The Vanishing, Schwimmer immediately dived into the first TV series, released in 2023, and was quickly convinced.

And although was his teen daughter Cleo wasn’t a mega-fan of the series, the wildly enthusiastic reaction of some of her friends convinced him he was on to a winner.

“When I was a kid, I was really into sci-fi/fantasy,” Schwimmer says. “But my kid is less interested in that genre and more into Greek history and Ancient Greek mythology. I know that when I mentioned this (Goosebumps), all of my kid’s friends were screaming. They can’t wait. They’re all like 13, 14, so they are chomping at the bit for January 10th.”

Sam McCarthy, Jayden Bartel and David Schwimmer in Goosebumps: The Vanishing.

Jayden Bartel and Sam McCarthy, who play Anthony’s teenage twins Cece and Devin were more familiar with the source material. Influencer, singer and social media star Bartel proclaims herself to be a horror fan – “my birthday is the day after Halloween so horror is a big part of my life” – and had read several of the books. And McCarthy, the son of actors Andrew McCarthy (of St Elmo’s Fire and Pretty In Pink fame) and Carol Schneider also had a personal connection.

“My mother narrates audio books and she narrated Night of the Living Dummy so I was introduced to that book when I was young,” he says. “I do like horror – I like anything where I can connect to it and it’s something that makes me think about my own life.”

Despite growing up in a showbiz family, McCarthy admits he’d never seen Friends, which he thinks held him good stead when it came to working with Schwimmer.

“If I had watched it – because my sister’s a huge fan and everybody is a huge fan – I would have been like ‘whoa – it’s Ross’,” he says with a laugh. “So luckily I could build a relationship with him that was of the now. It was great to work with him and he’s such a pro and a comforting and fatherly presence on set. In terms of making sure everything’s okay it was like ‘David’s in the scene, he’s working today, we’re good’.”

Goosebumps streams on Disney+ from January 10.