You wouldn’t think it by watching his goofy, happy-go-lucky persona on the hit show Friends, but David Schwimmer says acting in the show nearly ruined him.
The actor revealed his brush with the dark side of his fame during a podcast interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
The 49-year-old actor revealed to the publication that the fame associated with the role really hit him hard.
“It was pretty jarring and it messed with my relationship to other people in a way that took years, I think, for me to kind of adjust to and become comfortable with,” he confessed.
David didn’t cope well with the sudden onset of massive fame.
He explained that it also impacted upon his ability to act and create new characters.
“As an actor, the way I was trained, my job was to observe life and to observe other people, and so I used to walk around with my head up, and really engaged and watching people,” he said.
“The effect of celebrity was the absolute opposite,” he continued. “It made me want to hide under a baseball cap, not be seen.”
The Friends cast reunited for a special occasion and it was glorious. Watch the best bits in the video below.
He continued: “And I realized after a while that I was no longer watching people; I was trying to hide.
“So I was trying to figure out: How do I be an actor in this new world, in this new situation? How do I do my job? So that was tricky.”
Even after the show finished, he was still concerned that his image as the lovable, goofy Ross would follow him everywhere.
The actor initially found it hard to escape his Ross character.
The actor says he did a number of theatre productions and smaller movies to try to escape it all.
But even after his star turn in the award-winning series Band of Brothers, David said he still thought some people “will just see Ross in World War II”.
Meanwhile the actor recently starred as Robert Kardashian in the TV movie The People vs O.J. Simpson and says he had no idea who Robert was before playing him!
He had to speak to Robert’s former wife Kris to get some insights.
He says having long chats with the man’s former wife Kris Jenner “was the single most helpful thing” in preparing him for the role.
“There were a couple of clues she gave me,” David said. “[Kardashian] had a crisis of faith.”
Watch David share his secrets about how he became a Kardashian in the clip below.
