


#Actor bodybuilder william smith actor series
Unlike, for example, his latest project, Sky TV’s comedy series Intelligence. It would have to make sense creatively and nothing I’ve heard so far presented to us makes sense.” I think everyone feels the same: why mess with what felt like the right way to end the series? I don’t want to do anything for the money. “I just don’t think it’s possible, given everyone’s different career trajectories. Schwimmer would love to take part in a one-off chatshow reunion with his fellow actors, but is opposed to the idea of reviving their characters. I’m the only one that lives in New York.” Everyone drifts and everyone has families and gets on with it so there are different relationships among the cast, but I’m probably closest to LeBlanc on a regular basis. “We all had a little reunion dinner at Courteney’s house recently. Schwimmer is still in touch with his fellow cast members Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry. It was an amazing time professionally, but mostly creatively.” That 10-year run with that particular cast, that group of writers, those directors. Perhaps most memorably, there was his Emmy-nominated turn as Robert Kardashian in FX’s The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story.īut so what if Ross will always be his most famous role? “The older I get and the more my perspective shifts,” he says, “the more you realise just how good you had it. In more recent years, he has directed Trust, a film about a 14-year-old girl who is groomed online by a paedophile, and acted in the HBO war drama Band of Brothers, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial on Broadway and Neil LaBute’s Some Girls in London’s West End. Desire.”Īfter studying theatre and speech at Northwestern University, Illinois, Schwimmer co-founded the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago, played some meaty roles and directed more than 20 plays. I always felt quite envious and that’s a great motivator. Growing up in junior high school and high school, I never felt like I was in the cool crowd. “He’s a sociopath, but he’s a charming sociopath. “I’ve always wanted to play Iago,” Schwimmer says. That pre-Friends existence included a love of classical theatre nurtured at school in Los Angeles and turbocharged by seeing Ian McKellen’s one-man show about Shakespeare. So that was frustrating, as if it obliterated all the other training, all the other roles I had done.”

As far as the public was concerned, I came out of the womb doing sitcom. I got Friends when I was 27 but I had done all this work on stage. “There was a period that I was very, very frustrated by being pigeonholed in this one genre, this one idea. “I think I’m kind of over that,” says Schwimmer. If Ross, the slapstick-prone paleontologist, was once a burden for an actor and director trying to be taken seriously, it seems to have lifted. But he is also comfortable in his own skin. Now 53, Schwimmer has visibly hit middle age, changed utterly by fatherhood and a divorce he calls “heartbreaking”. Like William Shatner with Captain Kirk or Sarah Jessica Parker with Carrie Bradshaw, Schwimmer is synonymous with a single character: Ross Geller in Friends, the American sitcom about six flailing twentysomethings that aired between 19.
