(1996 edition, Issue 2)

When the 1994 fall television season began, NBC’s Friends quickly became one of the breakout success stories of the new lineup, and David Schwimmer quickly became its breakout male sex symbol. As Ross Geller, the nerdy but attractive paleontologist whose wife left him for another woman, Schwimmer was immediately pegged as the perfect man for the 1990s: he was sweet and sensitive. With his personality not so far removed from his character’s, Schwimmer has sheepishly accepted all the praise and accolades that come with his newfound super-stardom.

Born in Queens, New York, Schwimmer grew up in Los Angeles with his prominent attorney parents Arlene and Arthur Schwimmer and an older sister. “Even as a kid I knew I would be an actor or an ophthalmic surgeon,” he mused to Rolling Stone. “I’d lose myself in all kinds of wild roles or perform laser eye surgery.” He insister in People, “I was a fat, ugly geek.” When friends from his alma mater Beverly Hills High read that Schwimmer considered himself a nerd, he told US, they call and say “You were not - we all looked up to you!”

But Schwimmer never felt anything like so many of the beautiful people that went to this famously wealthy high school. As he told Janice Dunn in Us, “The popular clique was the good-looking rich kids with the brand-new BMWs when they were 16. They were doing drugs, they had boob jobs. Everything was getting fixed.” Schwimmer was the good kid who often had to wear his orthodontic head gear to school. He was the boy with the prepubescent mustache at 13 that his parents wouldn’t let him shave. All he can remember is the time he used his sister’s hair removal cream and left it on too long. The red burn was mortifying. “I’m sure no one remembers this, but it scarred me,” he told Dunn.

Schwimmer toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer like his parents, but high school drama won him over. In 1984, he entered Northwestern University, outside of Chicago, where he studied theater. During his junior year, Schwimmer mounted an off-campus production of Alice in Wonderland. He told People, “The play was a real bonding experience, and we thought, ‘We just gotta keep doing this.’” From this production came the Looking Glass Theater Company, which Schwimmer cofounded upon graduation in 1988 with seven other Northwestern alumni.

Looking Glass was a success. in addition to acting in many of their productions, including the American premiere of West, by Steven Berkoff, Schwimmer wrote and directed The Jungle, adapted from the Upton Sinclair novel. The production earned six Joseph Jefferson Awards. His success there was so great that he was scouted Los Angeles casting agents for guest starring roles in television’s Blossom, LA Law, a recurring spot on The Wonder Years, and a memorable role on NYPD Blues in which he played a nerdy apartment dweller who shoots a mugger in his laundry room.

For a while Schwimmer commuted between Looking Glass productions and work in Los Angeles. Although they told him he looked “too ethnic” - he eventually garnered enough success to commit to Los Angeles entirely. In late 1993 Schwimmer was cast in Fox Television’s short-lived Monty in which he played the son of the ultra right-wing Monty, played by longtime television actor Henry Winkler. He also had roles in the feature films Twenty Bucks, Crossing the Bridge, and director Mike Nichols’s Wolf, in addition to some less than spectacular TV movies.

Schwimmer’s big break came when producers David Crane and Marta Kauffman auditioned him for a series that never made. While creating Friends, they remembered Schwimmer and wrote the role of Ross with him in mind. When Newsweek’s Rick Marin asked them why, Kauffman responded, “Vulnerability.” Crane added, “In other hands it could be neurotic and whiny. He’s emotional and smart.” And with that was born a male icon for the 90s.

Taking its cue from the young fashionable New York lives led by the characters on such successful shows as Mad About You and Seinfeld, Friends centered around six twenty-something New Yorkers who spend virtually all their time together, chatting wittily and intelligently in their apartments and favorite cafe. All six were impossibly good-looking, clean-living, funny, and nice. The show created an appealingly wholesome sexual tension with all these handsome healthy men and women thrown together, much in the quiet way The Brady Bunch had created that tension decades earlier.

Schwimmer would not have been the immediate choice for the show’s sex symbol, especially with former Levi’s model Matt LeBlanc in the lineup. But of these six generation Xers in search of a life, tall awkward Ross was the most tentative and the most conflicted. In one example Marin called him “Hamlet-like in his agonizing over whether it’s manly for a guy to use fabric softener. ‘What’s wrong with my Snuggles?’ he protested in one episode. ‘It says I’m a sensitive, warm guy. Kind of like a fuzzy bear.’” Which he was, and it did. Add to that Ross’s crush and potential romance with the show’s other outbreak sex symbol, Rachel, played by Jennifer Aniston. The entire Friends cast, and often Schwimmer alone, were plastered on magazine covers and tabloids everywhere. The exposure was huge, including a major Superbowl Diet Coke ad campaign tied in with the show, for which the actors each earned a rumored sum of somewhere between $200,000 and $500,000.

Surprisingly, the backlash against Friends fame was quiet. More annoying were the tabloid speculations about possible romances among the cast members. Although they had actually developed extremely strong ties, the young actors remained just friends, most having other love interest. Schwimmer himself happily jetted to New Orleans once a month to visit his girlfriend, who was clerking for a federal judge there before joining Schwimmer in Los Angeles.

In addition to the total of at least five years promised to Friends, Schwimmer signed a four-picture deal with Miramax, one of which he plans to direct was well as probably cowrite. His first starring role came opposite Barbara Hershey and Gwyneth Paltrow in The Pallbearer in 196. The film’s director, Matt Reeves, told Rolling Stone, “I really think he’s going to be huge. More than a TV star. A movie star. He has the most amazing face you can imagine.”

A far as the extreme and sudden fame goes, Schwimmer has taken it all in stride. Although he can’t walk down the street without dozens of people coming up and talking to him, he deals with it as best as he can. In fact, he considers himself a kind of servant of the people, as he told Rolling Stone: “It’s cool when fans come up to me on the street. I feel like they’re all my employers.”