David Schwimmer on the ‘Beauty’ of ‘Goosebumps’ and How ‘Friends’ Went From ‘Challenging’ and ‘Dark’ to the ‘Gift That Keeps on Giving’

In the two decades since wrapping up his 10-season run as neurotic paleontologist Ross Geller on the beloved NBC sitcom “Friends,” David Schwimmer has branched out across genres and mediums.

Following the series finale of “Friends” in 2004, Schwimmer, unlike his costars, decided to move from Los Angeles back to his native New York City, and briefly stepped away from the spotlight. He has spent the intervening years chasing his own creative pursuits: returning to his first love of theater and conquering the West End and Broadway stages; voicing Melman the giraffe in the “Madagascar” franchise; appearing in some niche indies (“Duane Hopwood,” “Big Nothing”); and parlaying his experience as an episodic director into helming his own features (“Run, Fatboy, Run,” “Trust”).

Since becoming a father in 2011, “I’ve really been enjoying being a parent and not really wanting to leave home that much, to be honest with you, so I guess I became a bit pickier in terms of what would take me away,” Schwimmer tells Variety on a recent video call.

Schwimmer has returned to the small screen sporadically over the years. He played himself in episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Entourage,” reunited onscreen with his former “Friends” costars Matt LeBlanc (in “Episodes”) and Lisa Kudrow (in “Web Therapy”) and teamed up with “Ted Lasso” star Nick Mohammed on the British sitcom “Intelligence.” Schwimmer’s acclaimed portrayal of lawyer Robert Kardashian in “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” — which Kim Kardashian recently said during Variety’s Actors on Actors series “was just done so well” — earned him his second Emmy nomination in 2016.

Now, Schwimmer is the lead of the second season of “Goosebumps: The Vanishing” the Disney+ supernatural horror anthology series based on R.L. Stine’s bestselling novels. Schwimmer plays Anthony Brewer, a divorced father of fraternal twins who has taken a sabbatical from his work as a botanist to care for his ailing mother. When Anthony’s twins, Devin (Sam McCarthy) and Cece (Jayden Bartels), agree to stay with their father at his childhood home for the summer, the teens and their new friends find themselves entangled in the chilling tale of four other teens who mysteriously vanished in 1994 — including their father’s older brother.

“One of the great gifts of this particular job is I’ve always been a fan of horror films, and I’ve never been offered the job before [in this genre]. I was really excited to try my hand at this,” Schwimmer says. “I love the ‘Goosebumps’ franchise. The whole genre is really unique — this young-adult, horror-comedy action, but also grounded in real character and real emotion.

“But the other great gift was that it was shot here in New York where I live, in Brooklyn and Queens,” he continues. “In a way, it was a no-brainer. I didn’t have to leave home. I love shooting in New York, and I think they really capture some wonderful cinematography of the city itself, and you get to see New York in a way that maybe you haven’t before over the course of the series.”

Below, Schwimmer opens up about his first foray into horror-comedy, his attraction to playing men who are often broken and in pain — and why, despite the intense scrutiny he and his castmates were forced to endure decades ago, he still considers “Friends” to be “the gift that keeps on giving.”

What kinds of conversations did you have with the creative team about building Anthony as a character?

I feel really grateful to [showrunners] Rob [Letterman] and Hilary [Winston], who created and wrote this whole show, obviously, based on these wonderful stories. We had a lot of Zoom meetings and chats about the character and the backstory, and really figuring out what the journey of the character is for the whole arc of the season. We all agreed that it was super important that in Episode 1, we really want to bring the audience into the emotional reality of these characters’ lives. We want them to invest in this family.

Yes, it’s a challenging summer for my character, having to take care of an ailing parent and move my mom into a home because she can’t live independently anymore. I’m trying to make the best of a summer where I’ve got the kids. None of us really want to be there, but we’re trying to make the best of it. I had to take a sabbatical from work, so I’m trying to do my research in the basement lab that I built.

It’s a lot, and it’s kind of heavy, but I think that it’s a good setup for where the show goes and the mystery that we eventually unravel that ties all the way back to something that happened 30 years prior to my brother in that same place that I lived when I was a kid. So I think that’s the beauty of it — it’s a big mislead for the audience. When we start, we’ve just moved back into my childhood home and we don’t fully understand yet until much later how important it is that I’m actually back in this city, in the home I grew up in, because all the events that are happening today tie back to what happened 30 years ago — this tragic disappearance and this death that happened.

Did you have any kind of relationship with the original R.L. Stine novels on which the show is based? Was there something particular about the sensibility of that kind of writing that drew you in?

I didn’t have a huge relationship with the books when they came out. Unfortunately, I was too old to experience them as a teenager. Gosh, I wish I had discovered them at age 13 — I would’ve devoured them. But yeah, I guess the challenge for me was the tone. I think what’s so unusual about these books is R.L. Stine manages to capture the mundane, ordinary lives of people — and young people in particular — and then suddenly tap into some great mystery and adventure and thrills. So for me, I really gravitated to the tone of the series, and in particular this new iteration of the series. I’m still amazed at how they’re able to make so many things truly scary without using any gratuitous violence or sexual violence, without it being too gory. In other words, you always feel safe watching, you know what I mean? You still get scared and frightened, but you never feel unsafe in a way and you feel looked after, and I think that’s really hard to do.

At one point early on in the show, your character has to pull a carnivorous living organism out of his forearm — and the monsters only get stranger as the season progresses. What did you find most personally and creatively fulfilling about telling a self-contained mystery but with so many advanced special effects? Had you ever worked with this level of effects before?

No, not at this level. Now having seen a couple of episodes, I think there are a couple satisfying things. The first is when you’re shooting this stuff, you have to imagine everything that’s happening. It sounds pretty obvious to say, but that’s why actors became actors. We love that sense of play that we all had as a child, like, “Oh my God, there’s a giant T-Rex coming for me!” And we get to do that as adults. So when you’re shooting, you have to commit a hundred percent to what’s happening, and you have to really use your imagination and hope that later, the visual effects team will not make you look stupid. And also with all the stunts, you’re hoping that it’ll be edited in such a way that you look really cool doing it, even though the hardest stuff is done by someone else. And that, to me, is the most satisfying thing — watching the result of this creative team coming together and doing their job and making it look believable.

The second thing I would say is trying to find that tone that we talked about earlier — this balance of emotion, some drama, comedy, action, horror and figuring out how to be funny in this world. That, to me, was the challenge going into it. I thought, “OK, there’s so much going on, so much larger-than-life stuff. I think the funniest way to do stuff is to underplay everything, to totally throw a line away, just totally underplay it because everything else is so big around you that I think that’ll be funnier to just underplay everything. Just be real casual about it.” Now, that’s a risk you’re taking as an actor, right? Because you don’t know until it’s cut together. Of course, I had great directors and Rob was amazing, so I think we took a big swing, and I think it works, but I haven’t seen the whole show yet.

Looking at your body of work, you seem to have an affinity for playing characters who are struggling, broken, flawed and in pain — and that applies to both your comedic and dramatic performances. Where do you think that kind of attraction comes from?

I think it has to do with the kind of characters I was attracted to when I was a young person growing up and watching movies and TV shows. I was always attracted to characters that were in pain, like physical pain. If you fall down on the street, it’s not funny. But if someone else does, it’s funny, right? And the reason it’s funny is because we can relate to it. It’s happened to us, but not this time. It’s happening to someone else. So it’s almost a relief, and also we can really relate too: “Ooh, that must’ve really hurt, but God, that was funny how it happened.” I’ve always been attracted to characters that obviously get hurt, or there’s physical comedy — like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, all the greats from silent movies and beyond. And then when you watch some of the films I grew up with that predate you from the ’70s, ’80s, the characters that were also in emotional pain but placed in funny situations were the characters that I, for some reason, related to the most.

I don’t know if you ever saw the movie “Broadcast News.” Watching Albert Brooks get his first big shot on camera as a broadcast journalist, and he can’t stop sweating, so there’s sweat pouring down him. His body is having an involuntary fear response, and it is so painful to watch — and so funny to watch. You are feeling so, so sad for him, so sorry for him, but you can’t help but cry with laughter. That was just one example of characters and situations that I somehow related to because of my own life, my own childhood, and at times being bullied and at times being injured. By the way, I broke a lot of bones growing up. I was very physical, very active. I broke countless bones, so I was always getting hurt, but it never stopped me from taking more risks as an athlete or as an actor.

The qualities you just described — feeling so sad and so sorry for a character, and then finding humor in his struggles — is exactly how I felt watching Ross on “Friends.” 2024 marked the 30-year anniversary of the pilot and the 20-year anniversary of the series finale, and the show has clearly cemented its place in pop culture during the age of streaming. How has your relationship with Ross and “Friends” in general evolved as you have gotten older? What kind of relationship, if any, do you have with that character now?

I mean, I don’t have any relationship to him as a character today. The relationship with the show itself is kind of the gift that keeps on giving. And what I mean by that is obviously it was life-changing at the time — professionally, personally, everything. It was a game changer. So that chapter of doing the show is one chapter in my mind, and there was a cost to it as well in terms of the loss of privacy and the backlash the show got at one point.

So over the years, and it’s been 30 years now, there’s been different chapters of my relationship to the show. And for many years, I kind of felt a distance from it. I never watched it. I was trying to intentionally do other work. I was directing. I was doing other stuff. And then having a kid, and my own kid discovering the show — when I never sat my kid down and said, “Guess what we’re going to watch?!” — that was a whole new chapter for me of returning to watching something I did 20 years ago. And that’s why I’m saying it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

I was just in Japan for the first time in my life, just a month ago or so, and the tour guide who was helping my buddy and I was saying that she learned English watching the show. And I’m like, “What?!” It just blows my mind. And this has happened to me, and I’m sure the rest of the cast and other actors a lot, where you meet people who learned the language because of a job you got 30 years ago. The most meaningful thing is — and this happens more often than I would like, unfortunately — I’ll meet a parent who says their kid is in the hospital fighting cancer, and the one thing that brings them any joy is watching the show. It’s such a profound realization, and I think you can’t help but feel honored. I’m genuinely moved when I hear that and grateful that from some job I did 30 years ago, I’m still able to have some effect and bring some kind of joy to people. It’s kind of — I mean, it’s indescribable, right?

Your daughter is 13 now, around the same age when a lot of younger people, myself included, watch “Friends” for the first time. Have you watched the show with her recently?

Well, that phase is over.

That’s so funny. I think she’ll come back to it when she’s a little older; her love and appreciation for the show will probably come in waves.

It’s interesting, because I don’t watch it, but every now and then something will happen [online] or a buddy of mine will send me a clip, like, he’ll be on a flight and the person in front of him is watching it on whatever. So I’ll be reminded of it, but it’s not something I’m conscious of in an everyday way.

So much of what an actor is taught to do is to examine human behavior, but those who achieve a certain level of fame will inevitably find that they go from observing other people to being observed themselves. Looking back, how did you process your experience of rising to fame and losing your anonymity in the ’90s? How did you navigate the public spotlight?

Yeah, I am not going to lie: There was a chapter in there that was really challenging for me, and I would say dark. My job was always to be an observer, be open and be the one watching others — watching people, watching interactions. And I went from that to feeling the need to hide. That was my response. Every actor is different, but my personal response was that I retreated into a baseball cap, and there was a certain amount of — not paranoia, but this feeling as if you’re being followed and watched all the time. And by the way, we were literally being followed by three cars everywhere we went at one point. I don’t how one navigates that. I think I’m lucky that I had a really strong foundation of family and friends to keep me in check, to keep me grounded, to support me, to ride that out.

I was lucky I was 27 when I got “Friends,” but I kept thinking, oh my gosh, if I were 16 when this was happening … I don’t know how young actors survive it — I really don’t — because it’s so jarring, and your whole worldview is rocked. But having said all that, I got through that phase, and as soon as the show was over, I moved to New York. I have to say that was part of my path to a healthier way of living for me, because it’s a different experience living in New York. It feels for me like more of a real way of living because in L.A., as you may have heard or know, everyone lives in a bubble. You go from where you live into a car, and you stay in your car until you go where you need to go — and then you’re back in your car. Everyone’s in a car all the time. And in New York, you’re not. You’re on the street, you’re on the subway, you’re up against people and usually not people in the entertainment industry, which is different. So it was a conscious choice to move to New York where I was born — to come back to New York — and to live a life that I prefer.

At this stage of your career, what do you still want to accomplish? How do you go about defining success when you’ve already reached what many would consider the pinnacle in your line of work?

I have so much more to learn, and I think you learn by working with really talented people. And I have to just say that I feel blessed that I even have the choice to work. That show, “Friends,” gave us all the financial freedom to choose. Most actors and my dearest friends in the world are struggling actors, writers, directors. So first of all, I just want to acknowledge that I’m, again, really grateful. But for me, it’s kind of a combination of, who are the creative people behind the project? Are they people I feel like are going to challenge me? Am I going to grow from doing this thing? Am I going to have fun?

I have to say, at this stage in my life, life’s too short to deal with out-of-control egos. I’m just not here for it. So I also need to know who else is acting in it or who else is involved, because I’m just not going to waste my time. It really is about quality of life and creating meaningful, challenging, fun work — and a story that’s going to contribute something to [the world]. Even if it’s just these books and “Goosebumps,” I think adding something positive to the world is part of the hope as well.

This interview has been edited and condensed.