“Friends” was certainly David Schwimmer’s ticket to fame, but he earned it the hard way. He had to wait tables for nearly a decade, all while trying to make it big in the show business. “I would get small recurring roles — three episodes here, four episodes there. Working that way, you never make enough money to quit waiting tables,” he told the Financial Times of his years as a struggling actor. Luckily, he had colleagues who were kind enough to support his passion. “I got to a place with this one restaurant, the Daily Grill, where the management knew me so well, and knew I was reliable, that they would actually let me go off for auditions,” he shared with Salon. “And because of that I was able to pay the rent for seven years while I was auditioning—and working, by the way.”
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However, because of one bad experience in an unnamed show, he turned his back on television entirely and shifted his focus to theater. He told his agent to stop sending him potential TV jobs, but due to her persistence, he caved. “She said the magic words to me: ‘It’s an ensemble show. There’s no star. There are six people, all similar age.’ And I say, ‘O.K., I’ll read it, but I’m not going to do it,'” he recalled in an interview with Vanity Fair. The rest, as they say, is history.
