Best known for his role as Ross Geller on the sitcom Friends, David Schwimmer was born in 1966, Queens, New York.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in theater and speech in 1988, young Schwimmer formed the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago and tried to get some acting roles on television shows such as The Wonder Years, Monty, and NYPD Blue before being cast as Ross Geller on Friends.
Before Friends, Schwimmer had made a decision not to act in a comedy series after he was cast in a new sitcom called Monty but the show was canceled after only a few episodes.
“It was terrific but … the writers did not embrace my ideas. I felt I was basically told ‘just say the line, just do as we say’ … and I was so relieved when that show was cancelled after filming 12 episodes.” he said.
Friends was a massive hit, and it led to many opportunities on the big screen, such as The Pallbearer, Kissing a Fool and Six Days Seven Nights.
Friends ran on NBC for a total of 10 seasons and 236 episodes, and by the last two seasons, Schwimmer and all the other actors earned $1 million per episode.
Following Friends’, Schwimmer appeared in a variety of projects. He voiced the character of Melman the giraffe in Madagascar. He also directed feature films, Run Fatboy Run and Trust.
In 2025 during an interview on the Making a Scene podcast, Schwimmer said that the Friends theme song, exhausted and haunted him for years as he was hearing it constantly, until his young daughter started watching the show and made him love it again. He said, “I’ll be really honest, there was a time for quite a while that just hearing the theme song would really… you know what I mean? I just have that reaction. I mean, I just had heard it so many times and any time you would go on a show or talk show, they would always, that would be your intro song. So, I just didn’t have the greatest response to it for a period of time.”
Schwimmer’s latest work is in the anthology series Goosebumps: The Vanishing, he also continues his work as an executive committee member, actor and director with the Chicago-based Lookingglass Theatre Company.
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