Then, in 1993, Schwimmer once again found himself up against his high-school friend Jonathan Silverman, when both were called to audition for the same part on a new pilot. The show was Kauffman and Crane’s ill-fated Couples, and again, Silverman got the part. But Kauffman and Crane loved Schwimmer’s audition, and when Couples fizzled and they began sketching out characters for the Insomnia Café pitch, it was his performance that inspired the character of Ross. “David had this wonderful hangdog vulnerability,” recalled Kauffman. “And he just stuck in our minds.”
In the meantime, Schwimmer had landed a role on Monty, a new Fox sitcom starring Henry Winkler, about a conservative, Rush Limbaugh–esque radio host and his left-wing liberal family. It was, without question, the biggest job he’d ever gotten. He was a series regular with a five-year contract, and money in the bank for the first time. And it was a nightmare. “As beautiful a guy as Henry Winkler was, the experience wasn’t very empowering for me,” Schwimmer later explained. “I’m a very collaborative person, and if you’re going to work with me as an actor then I want to bring something to it.” He’d try to throw out ideas and discuss with the writers, but nobody wanted to hear it from an actor (maybe Winkler, but not this kid). Naively, he’d expected television would be like ensemble theater, with everyone pitching in creatively and working as a team. Instead, he was just an actor working alongside—not with—everyone else. They shot thirteen episodes, but to Schwimmer’s great relief, Monty was canceled after the first six aired. The LA experiment was over. Schwimmer went straight back to Chicago, telling his agent not to send him anything, and certainly no more TV jobs. After Monty, he was done. The Lookingglass company mounted an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Stalin-era novel, The Master and Margarita, at Steppenwolf, with Schwimmer in the role of Pontius Pilate. Having gotten as far away from network television as possible, Schwimmer got a call from Siebert. Yes, she knew he didn’t want to do any more sitcoms, but there was this new script he just had to read.
No.
But these were the writers from that great pilot Couples. And they wrote this part for him.
Incredibly flattering, but no. Thank you.
And it’s an ensemble.
At this, Schwimmer paused. His only real priority was working with a true ensemble. Knowing that, and the fact that this part had been written just for him, it seemed absurd and disrespectful not to at least consider it. He agreed to read the script, but nothing more. Kauffman and Crane were friends with Robby Benson, an actor/director14 who Schwimmer greatly admired. The writers asked Benson to give Schwimmer a call and see what he might do to persuade him to come back and meet with them—just a meeting! It wasn’t as if this show would actually go anywhere. It was just a pilot, come on! Still, he hedged a bit. Finally, they brought in the biggest gun possible, and asked Burrows to call. Schwimmer got on the plane.
Matthew Perry was broke. While Schwimmer was being wooed via telephone, hemming and hawing over the role that had been tailor-made for him, Matthew Perry was frantically calling his agents, begging them to get him a gig. Didn’t matter what kind of gig as long as it was shooting now. His business manager had just called to inform him that he had no money. No, he wasn’t running low on money—he was out. He needed a job, ideally today.
At twenty-three, Perry had been a working actor for almost ten years. Though born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he was raised in Ottawa, Ontario, primarily by his mother, Suzanne Langford, a journalist and one-time press secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Perry attended the same grade school as the PM’s son, and future Canadian leader/beloved political dreamboat, Justin Trudeau. (In 2017, Perry famously confessed on a late-night talk show that in fifth grade, he and his friend Chris Murray beat up Trudeau because they were jealous of his athletic ability.15) His mother later married journalist Keith Morrison (best known to Americans as a longtime correspondent on Dateline NBC). As for his father, Perry said, he mostly saw him on TV.
While Perry spent most of his youth in a community far removed from show business, his father was one of the most recognizable faces on television at the time. John Bennett Perry was the iconic “Old Spice Man,” appearing in ads throughout the 1970s and ’80s. He notched small roles in numerous films and television episodes of the era, as well, but to this day he remains famous as the dashing but rugged symbol of commercial masculinity. At fifteen, Perry went to live with his father, and was none too thrilled to find himself the son of a sex symbol. “I would never bring a girl home, because all the girls would just go, ‘Who’s that guy?’ ‘That’s my dad. I know. When you guys are done, I’ll be in therapy.’”
Perry had moved to the States to further his tennis career. In Canada, he’d become a nationally ranked player among boys under fourteen. When he got to LA, however, he discovered that being one of the best tennis players in Ottawa was about as impressive as being one of the top-ranked ice hockey players in Southern California. He was a natural athlete, but simply couldn’t compete, so he shifted his focus on his second favorite extracurricular activity: acting. It was a natural move for an LA teenager, especially one with built-in connections. And as he himself would readily acknowledge, Perry was always a performer, a competitive or even desperate seeker of the spotlight. “I was a guy who wanted to become famous,” he told the New York Times in 2002. “There was steam coming out of my ears, I wanted to be famous so badly.”
With his father’s agent representing him, Perry booked one-off roles here and there, on shows like Charles in Charge and Silver Spoons. In 1987, he landed the lead in a long-forgotten Second Chance, a Fox comedy about a man who dies in a hovercraft accident in 2011,16 meets Saint Peter, is deemed not bad enough for hell but not good enough for heaven, and so instead is sent back to earth in the 1980s in order to help his teenage self make better decisions. How’s that for a log line? The show was briefly pulled off the air after poor ratings (astonishing, I know!), retooled slightly, and brought back under the title Boys Will Be Boys. The new version still didn’t work, and today, the show is best known simply for featuring one of Matthew Perry’s first lead roles.17
After that, Perry continued to bounce between guest spots, appearing once or twice on dozens of the most popular series of the 1980s and ’90s, including one episode of Dream On, where he met Kauffman, Bright, and Crane. He wasn’t famous but he was visible and busy and making a decent living. At least he thought he was, until his phone rang one day and he found out he was broke.
But at least he was broke during pilot season. Shortly after calling his agents, Perry got an offer to do the pilot of yet another Fox sitcom with a premise that sounds more like an ill-advised audience prompt at an improv comedy show. LAX 2194 was about airport baggage handlers working at Los Angeles International Airport, in the year 2194. “I was the head baggage handler,” Perry recalled. “And my job, in the show, was to sort out aliens’ luggage.” Ryan Stiles and Kelly Hu costarred as futuristic US customs agents,18 and for reasons I cannot begin to imagine, the producers decided to cast little people as the aliens.
Despite the bright red flags, Perry said yes to the role. He had to. Sure, it might complicate things in the long term; if the pilot turned into a series, then Perry would be locked into playing a twenty-second-century baggage handler. But that seemed extremely improbable to everyone except, presumably, the network executives who’d greenlit the pilot. LAX 2194 would keep Perry out of the running for other roles, but only for one pilot season. What he didn’t know was that, over on the Warner Bros. lot, his name was on a list of actors to be brought in for another show. And it was close to the top.
Perry did know about the pilot itself, though—everyone did. “It was the script that everybody was talking about,” he recalled. He knew, too, that he was perfect for it. All his friends were being brought in to read for it, and Perry kept getting calls from them