Imagine it: David Schwimmer, blockbuster action star.
While we may think of Schwimmer now as a sitcom savant, not just from his legendary 10-season run on Friends, but for memorable guest spots on shows like Will & Grace and 30 Rock, his career might have taken a very different route, had he made one decision differently.
“David, I also read that you turned down another role while you were doing Friends, which was Men in Black,” Cush Jumbo asked the actor on a recent episode of her Origins podcast. “It would have been a big decision because the filming schedule would have been completely different to do a film and do Friends.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “[but] that’s not why I turned it down.”
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Scwimmer went on to explain that after shooting the film The Pallbearer with Gwyneth Paltrow, Miramax locked him into a “three-picture deal at a fixed price” provided they meet one demand: “I got to direct my first movie.”
The company agreed, and Schwimmer planned to “direct my entire theatre company,” Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater Company, “in my first film.”
“We started pre-production,” he explained. “All my best friends in the world in my theatre company quit their jobs so they could be in this film over the summer, which was going to be a six-week shoot in Chicago. Budget set, we’re in pre-production, hired the whole crew, everything’s going, and that’s when I was offered Men in Black.”
The offer couldn’t have come at a worse time. “My summer window from Friends was four months,” he said. “I had a four-month hiatus and Men in Black was going to shoot exactly when I was going to direct this film with my company.”
Schwimmer called it a “brutal decision,” pitting his loyalty to his theater group and a lucrative relationship with Miramax against a potentially career-altering role. “I’m really aware — whatever, 20 years later,” Schwimmer said, that the Men in Black role “would have made me a movie star. If you look at the success of that film and that franchise, my career would have taken a very different trajectory.”
To say Men in Black smashed the box office to pieces in the summer of 1997 would be an understatement. The sci-fi/action/comedy romp about government agents (Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones) who thwart a full-scale alien takeover became had one of the three biggest-ever opening weekends at that point, and remains one of the most profitable films in recent history.
Schwimmer appeared in five films the following year: The Thin Pink Line; Kissing a Fool; Six Days, Seven Nights; Apt Pupil; and TV movie Since You’ve Been Gone, which is the only one Schwimmer directed and features a few Lookingglass ensemble players like Larry DiStasi and David Catlin, in addition to stars Rachel Griffiths, Jon Stewart, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Teri Hatcher.
Melinda Sue Gordon
“I don’t know if I made the right choice,” Schwimmer reflected to Jumbo, who reminded him, “I don’t know if it would have recovered” — “it” being his relationship with longtime friends at the theater company that meant so much to him. “That relationship with all those people would probably have ended,” Schwimmer concurred.
Schwimmer doesn’t have too much to feel bad about, having starred for a decade on one of the most successful (and lucrative) television series of all time. He still acts regularly, appearing this year in the Darren Aronofsky-produced dramedy Little Death opposite Gaby Hoffman and Euphoria‘s Dominic Fike.
Listen to Jumbo’s full conversation with Schwimmer above.
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