April 28, 1996
Toronto Sun
NEW
YORK -- David Schwimmer's 15 minutes aren't up. In fact, his fame clock has
barely started ticking.
With his TV series Friends hotter than ever, Schwimmer seems to be the face
that everybody knows -- on the street, in a store, outside a restaurant
bathroom.
The good and bad news is that the attention is about to intensify with the
release Friday of the much-anticipated comedy The Pallbearer, co-starring
Gwyneth Paltrow.
So, how do you like fame so far?
"Ah, fame," deadpans 29-year-old Schwimmer, decked out in a fancy
tan-colored, silk-blend Calvin Klein suit. "Now is that Fame, the movie
musical or Fame, the TV show?"
It's fame, the David Schwimmer story, and he knows it well because he's been
living it the last year whether he wants to or not.
"Yeah, I know," he confesses just a little more seriously. "But
I don't want fame as much as recognition, financial success, and a career in
TV, movies and theatre -- all of that."
Coincidentally, all of that is what he has. Some of what goes with it, he
doesn't need.
"The fame thing is like a jacket that doesn't quite fit," admits
Schwimmer. "To go along with the metaphor, I'm still having it altered,
mostly because the privacy issue is huge for me. I'm fiercely private."
At least he tries to be, but his personal life has been treated in a very
impersonal way by the multi-media outlets that saw an opportunity and took it
way past the limit.
Other Friends folk have endured that sort of exposing glare. Indeed, Courteney
Cox, Jennifer Aniston, and Matthew Perry seem to take turns with Schwimmer as
the lead item or latest headline.
As he warms up to the privacy issue, Schwimmer gets very Ross Geller-like,
which is his nebbish-like character on Friends. Which is to say the previously
solemn actor becomes puppy-dog angry at his misfortune of being way too popular
for his own good.
Word is his performance in The Pallbearer will intensify the popularity, not to
mention the media focus. Some have even compared Schwimmer's performance in The
Pallbearer with Dustin Hoffman's in The Graduate.
"Oh I don't know," he says tentatively. "I've always admired
Dustin Hoffman. But I don't know. I'm sure there will be comparisons only
because we do the older-woman-younger-man thing in the movie."
What he can't deny is the fact that The Pallbearer will elevate his headline
potential. That eventuality makes him groan just a little.
"I really don't like that a newspaper will say that I'm engaged when I've
never been engaged," he says. "People come up to me on the street,
and say, 'Hey, so are you still engaged?' Drives me crazy.
"When my girlfriend and I broke up over Christmas the story was, we broke
off the engagement." Drove him even crazier.
Since then, the story goes like this -- let the party begin. Schwimmer,
according to insider reports on TV and in tabs, has become a, y'know,
womanizer.
"Ah my gawd," he says. "I know that's what they say. But hey, I
can see where that's coming from.
"I've had half a dozen dates since Christmas and the implication is, 'You
go out to dinner with the person, you are sleeping with that person.'"
He smiles like a sheepish Ross Geller. "And I wish it were true," he
adds.
He's joking, of course, but he realizes there is a serious side effect to this.
He grew up in Beverly Hills, went to Beverly Hills High. So the six-foot-two TV
star knows about these things better than most. He is, he says, painfully aware
of the famous-by-association factor.
"Yes," he says, "the downside. The downside is I never used to
question anybody's intentions, and now I have to think twice about it, and
that's going to make a relationship twice as much work. That's a bummer."
It is, especially when, "I want to have a successful marriage and a
family."
A girlfriend would be a start. "I'm looking," he says, pretending to
be agitated.
"But it's tough. Y'know, at the worst moments of being followed by
paparazzi in a car with a video camera, I just want to say goodbye to all of
this and teach and do my theatre group."
That would be his Lookingglass Theatre Company, formed during his time at
Northwestern University. "Actually, I'm directing my theatre company guys
in a romantic comedy about a high school reunion," he says of the movie
that starts shooting next week.
In August, Friends begins its shooting schedule, which reminds him that he has
four more years left on his contract.
In some ways, he's anxious to leave the series behind, he reports, but in other
ways he feels insecure about the inevitability of it all.
"It's strange," Schwimmer says. "I have mixed feelings. The good
thing about the cast is that all five actors are going through the same thing.
We trade stories about everything that happens outside the show. And we bond
because of it."
But not all the time and not with everybody. Schwimmer snickers.
"I did ask Jennifer if she would mind if I wore a wig and did that naked
bum pose on Rolling Stone magazine," he says, referring to Aniston's
bare-bottom cover recently.
"She said, 'Don't you dare.'"
Dare seems like the wrong phrase to throw at David Schwimmer. Most of the time
it is. This time. "I think I'll make an exception, and not take up the
challenge."
What, after all, are friends for.
