By the following year, his prophecy would have come true and then some, with all the cast members earning six-figure fees for a single Diet Coke endorsement, on top of their growing per-episode salaries. But that night in Vegas, Burrows said, “They didn’t have a pot to piss in.” They each wrote Burrows checks for a couple hundred dollars and he gave them some cash to go hit the casinos. “We were having so much fun, I didn’t care what was happening,” recalled Aniston. They had jobs and they had some pocket money and no idea of what was to come. Aniston, at least, also had no idea how to gamble. “I barely understood what cards were.”
But that night she learned, and in the months to come, poker would become a mainstay on the Friends set. Burrows let the cast borrow his dressing room (the largest on set) so they could play during rehearsal or shooting breaks. This would eventually become the basis for the Season One episode, “The One with All the Poker.”12 But that night in Las Vegas, it was Burrows’s way of bonding the cast off-screen—almost corralling them into real-life friendships. He knew—everyone knew—from the first read-through, that they clicked as actors. But chemistry would only go so far. If, and hopefully when, the show took off, he knew they’d have to like and support each other, as colleagues and collaborators. No one had successfully launched a comedy ensemble of this size. Burrows understood that if his ensemble was going to pull it off, they’d have to step into the spotlight as a team.
David Schwimmer was the first to be recruited. He was the only one, in fact, for whom a character had been written specifically, and the only one who was offered his role sight unseen. He said no.
Schwimmer was born in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, New York, in 1966, but moved with his parents (both lawyers) and older sister, Ellie, to Los Angeles at the age of two. From the start, he recognized himself as an outsider in this industry town, a feeling he would never shake, even when he became one of the most successful and recognizable people in it.
At Beverly Hills High School (the legendary high school that would become fodder for numerous film and television series, including Beverly Hills, 90210), Schwimmer was both a nerdy, metal-mouthed outcast and a bully, by his own admission. He joined the drama club, where he found his friends (including actor Jonathan Silverman, who would become the breakout star of Weekend at Bernie’s) as well as a passion for theater. One night, his parents took him to see Ian McKellen’s one-man show, Acting Shakespeare, and upon leaving the theater, Schwimmer knew without question that he wanted to be an actor himself. “I watched this guy without any props, or makeup, or changes of clothing, or anything—I watched him simply sit in a chair and stand occasionally, and transform into about twelve different lead characters from the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays. And I couldn’t believe it, it was like a magic trick,” he said. “I think that was the moment for me, really.”
But outside of that one extracurricular, he was miserable and itching to leave. His was a family of bone-deep New Yorkers, and while his parents’ careers flourished in Hollywood (his mother famously handled Roseanne Barr’s first divorce), they never let their children forget that there was a much bigger world outside the sunny bubble of LA. Arthur Schwimmer and Arlene Colman-Schwimmer were fun parents but not lax ones; Schwimmer later remembered his childhood household as one full of laughter and after-dinner card games, but also a constant focus on academic achievement. His mother, in particular, imbued in David a social conscience, particularly when it came to issues of gender equality13—an ethos that would later emerge at a pivotal point during Friends production.
But back then, Schwimmer was a theater kid, not an aspiring TV star. He loved his close-knit family, but not his hometown. “When I was there I always felt: this is not me. I’m surrounded by people with a different value system. And I just wanted to get out of California.” When he was a senior, producers from the hit Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s Brighton Beach Memoirs came to LA to audition replacements for the show. The Beverly Hills High drama teacher submitted both Schwimmer and his friend Silverman for the lead role of Eugene Jerome, originated by Matthew Broderick. But Schwimmer’s parents soon intervened. They were die-hard theater fans themselves, and supportive of their son’s ambitions—but not at the cost of higher education. “No, you’re not going to Broadway,” they told him. “You’re going to school.”
Silverman won the part, and Schwimmer went off to Northwestern University. Despite his initial disappointment, Schwimmer’s college experience became one of—if not the—most crucial points in his life as an actor. Just like Marta Kauffman and David Crane, Schwimmer made his closest friends and theatrical collaborators in college, and with them he founded the Lookingglass Theatre Company, shortly before graduating in 1988. Thirty years later, the nonprofit ensemble company continues to mount productions, often with Schwimmer at the helm as director or producer. From those early days, Schwimmer’s passion for American social-justice causes transferred to the stage, where he explored contemporary plays about race and economic inequality, alongside classics like The Odyssey and Our Town. The Chicago theater scene as we know it today was young (Steppenwolf, the influential theater company, having only been founded about a decade prior), but it was growing fast. Moments away from graduating one of the country’s most respected acting programs, Schwimmer found himself on the swell of a thrilling new wave of American theater. And, at last, he’d found a community of which he felt a part, blissfully removed from Hollywood in every sense of the word.
Then came the senior showcase, the traditional conclusion to every college theater program. As usual, a handful of agents and managers flew in from New York and Los Angeles to watch the graduating students perform and keep an eye out for fresh talent. Schwimmer performed a selection from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, after which one of the LA-based managers approached and gave him the I’m-gonna-make-you-a-star speech. In the grand tradition of earnest and perhaps slightly self-serious college theater majors, Schwimmer rebuffed the idea of movie stardom. For the most part. The manager pressed, assuring Schwimmer that if he just came back to LA, he’d be cast in a heartbeat, make buckets of money, no problem. “Mind you, I was incredibly naive, and I believed her when she said I would make a very good living, very quickly,” Schwimmer said. It is hard to imagine any twenty-two-year-old—even one who’d spent senior year securing 501(c)(3) status for his nonprofit theater company—not being drawn to the dazzling promise of instant, enormous fame. In the end, though, Schwimmer says he did it for the money. He had a plan.
As Schwimmer explained to his theater company, he would go to LA with this manager, make a quick million dollars, and bring it back to Chicago so they could use it to build their own theater. It would take, like, six months—maybe eight. “This is how naive—and also full of myself—I was,” Schwimmer recalled decades later. Back then, he and his classmates were the big fish in a small but prestigious pond. Again, as Kauffman and Crane had done just a few years earlier, Schwimmer took a sabbatical from the theater world—certain it would be a brief and lucrative one.
It was neither. In the end, only the manager turned out to be temporary. In those first eight months, Schwimmer did get a role in a television movie, as well as an agent, Leslie Siebert (who is now a senior managing partner at the Gersh Agency, and still reps Schwimmer today). But nothing else. Discouraged and humbled, Schwimmer went back to Chicago and joined his company at Lookingglass.
For years, Schwimmer hopped between Chicago and Los Angeles, where he’d pick up the occasional bit part on shows like NYPD Blue and Blossom. Mostly, though, he waited tables for half a decade. “I worked at nearly every Daily Grill in Los Angeles,” he said. His first real break was a small four-episode role on The Wonder Years. The night the first episode aired, Schwimmer was working the dinner shift at a Daily Grill on La Cienega Boulevard, which had a TV behind the bar. “Hey, Schwimmer, you’re on TV!” called his friend working the bar, and Schwimmer spent the next half hour giddily sneaking glimpses at the show while bouncing back and forth between dinner-rush