“Friends” was an instant hit, garnering a staggering 22 million viewers for its pilot episode alone. Once it hit the airwaves, David Schwimmer and his co-stars shot to fame overnight, forever changing the trajectory of their lives. Schwimmer, for his part, is eternally grateful for achieving success, but he never quite figured out how to deal with all the attention on him. “I had to learn how to be invisible when I go out,” he shared in an interview with Female First. “Getting used to the attention was not easy.”
But stealthily dodging fans in public was just the tip of the iceberg. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, he said that his popularity also had a negative toll on his personal life. “It was pretty jarring and it messed with my relationship to other people in a way that took years,” he said. After “Friends,” he also had to take a step back and navigate the uncertainty of his future. “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?”
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Schwimmer also struggled with being typecast as Ross Geller. Prior to “Friends,” he had quite a diverse acting portfolio, but the show eclipsed everything he had worked for. “There was a period that I was very, very frustrated by being pigeonholed in this one genre, this one idea. I got ‘Friends’ when I was 27 but I had done all this work on stage. But all that was just eradicated,” he told The Guardian in 2020. “As far as the public was concerned, I came out of the womb doing sitcoms.”
