David Schwimmer
Who is David Schwimmer?
Who turned down the role of Ross on Friends?
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David Schwimmer (born November 2, 1966, Queens, New York, U.S.) is an American actor and director who was perhaps best known for his role as Ross Geller on the television sitcom Friends (1994–2004).
- In full: David Lawrence Schwimmer
- Education: Northwestern University (1988)
- Occupation: Actor, director
- Notable TV series: Friends (1994–2004), Band of Brothers (2001), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2004), The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (2016), Intelligence (2020–23)
- Notable movies: Madagascar (2005), Big Nothing (2006), Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008), The Laundromat (2019)
Early life and education
Schwimmer was raised by his parents—both prominent attorneys—in Los Angeles. In 1984 he entered the theater department of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and subsequently found inspiration and success on the Chicago stage. In his junior year he mounted an off-campus production of Alice in Wonderland that eventually led to the launching of the Lookingglass Theatre Company, which Schwimmer cofounded with seven other Northwestern alumni following graduation in 1988.
Friends
After commuting between Chicago and Los Angeles for a time, Schwimmer decided to concentrate on achieving success in Hollywood. He landed several small parts on television shows such as The Wonder Years, Monty, and NYPD Blue before being cast as Ross Geller on Friends, a comedy about a group of six young adults who are either roommates or neighbors in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Friends first aired in 1994, and it quickly became a major hit, making stars out of Schwimmer and his costars—Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and Lisa Kudrow. By the last two seasons, Schwimmer and his costars earned $1 million per episode. The show’s 2004 finale drew an audience of more than 52 million viewers. The cast later returned for the TV special Friends: The Reunion (2021), in which they discussed the series.
Other film and TV credits
The popularity of Friends brought film roles for Schwimmer, but such movies as The Pallbearer (1995), Kissing a Fool (1998), and All the Rage (1999) were largely unsuccessful. In 2001 he appeared in the acclaimed World War II television miniseries Band of Brothers, portraying Capt. Herbert Sobel, a strict officer in Easy Company. That year he also starred in Uprising, a made-for-TV movie based on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Later roles included a mobster in the crime drama The Iceman (2012) and defense attorney Robert Kardashian in the television serial The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (2016).
Schwimmer then starred in the cable drama Feed the Beast (2016), about two friends struggling to open a restaurant in the Bronx. In 2019 he appeared in The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh’s farce about the Panama Papers scandal. He then starred in Intelligence (2020–23), a British comedy series revolving around the country’s cyber crimes unit. Schwimmer also provided the voice of a giraffe in the animated films Madagascar (2005), Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008), and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012). In 2026 he starred in the dramedy Junk, in which the main characters are struggling with drug addiction.
Directing and stage work
Schwimmer, who had directed a number of Friends episodes, made his big-screen directorial debut in 2007 with Run Fatboy Run, a romantic comedy about a man who decides to run a marathon in an attempt to win back his former fiancée.
In addition to his television and film work, Schwimmer continued to work in theatre, especially for Lookingglass, where he remained a company member. He made his debut on the London stage in Neil LaBute’s Some Girl(s) (2005) and on Broadway in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2006). Other roles included George Gibbs in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (2009) at Lookingglass and a recently laid-off loan officer in the zeitgeistian domestic drama Detroit (2012) at Playwrights Horizons in New York. In 2010 Schwimmer codirected for Lookingglass Trust, a drama he cowrote about a teenage girl who falls victim to an online sexual predator; later that year he directed its film adaptation. He also directed Dry Ice (2012), a monologue delivered by an exotic dancer, at the Bush Theatre in London; Big Lake Big City (2013), a dark comedy about Chicago crime, at Lookingglass; Sex with Strangers (2014), a drama about a budding relationship between two very different writers, at Second Stage Theatre in New York; and Plantation! (2018), a satirical comedy about a widow who offers her estate as reparations to the descendants of one of the slaves owned by her ancestors, at Lookingglass.
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