David Schwimmer finds new friends

By HELEN BARLOW

Standing tall and looking sharp in a dark designer suit and shiny black shoes, David Schwimmer is starting to thin in the face as he grows out of his boyish looks, those looks that made him famous as the stuffy-nosed, nerdy Ross in Friends.

He's now 34 and he wants to take on more adult roles, the kind that his hero Peter Sellers played in Being There and Dr Strangelove, not the silly Inspector Clouseau stuff.

The shock: to do it, he will be leaving Friends soon. "This is the last year," Schwimmer announces, as if dropping a bomb about the end of the hit series.

"We've all decided that. I'll also be directing some episodes. I directed five in the last season and I'll do four more in this final season."

Of course this announcement is made all the more believable by the fact that Jennifer Aniston is pregnant and that Courtney Cox is ready to start a family, too. It's still a shock as we all hoped that perpetual share-household of buddies would go on forever.

Schwimmer was first attracted to the series because of his ensemble theatre background.

"I find strength through one voice, so I worked to try to bring the cast of Friends together as one as much as possible. Whether it's for publicity or a creative issue, we try to address it as a group first. The six of us discuss, vote, then take our one voice back to the situation."

They must feel like a rock group? "About a year after the show had been on air, we all went to Las Vegas for a function. The six of us together in public like that is very strange. So we try not to do that. It makes us feel like the Beatles or something."

Of his future after Friends he hopes to star in more projects like Band of Brothers.

Schwimmer is in Normandy, France for the world premiere of the series, the drama based on Stephen Ambrose's best-seller about the Second World War, which is being touted as the most expensive television series ever made, at $US120 million.

As with Friends, Schwimmer was the first actor cast. The series' executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks had wanted unrecognisable actors, so that this true story of an elite band of soldiers, the Easy Company, who parachuted into German-occupied France hours before the D-Day landing, could be told truthfully and without the encumbrance of stars.

It's a kind of Saving Private Ryan for real and told more fully. Yet when it came to casting the Jewish captain, Herbert Sobel, who masterminded the operation and was then replaced, they could not get beyond Schwimmer, who remains the most recognisable face in the series.

Band of Brothers in fact marks Schwimmer's second overtly Jewish role in a row, and the actor is increasingly wearing his Jewishness on his sleeve.

He has just returned from Slovakia where he appeared in the television movie, Uprising , co-starring Donald Sutherland and Leelee Sobieski, about an uprising among the Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942.

"It tells the story for the first time about Jewish resistance in the Second World War," he explains. And even on Friends his geeky Ross has been teaching his child about Jewish traditions.

In the case of Sobel, Schwimmer was intrigued that the heroic captain was only appreciated for what he did after his death, because anti-Semitism came into play.

"He was 28, and asked to train young guys of 18 or 20, to turn them from individuals into an elite Army unit of paratroopers and riflemen.

"He was under pressure from his superiors, he tried to do the best he could, but he was the only urban Jew and he met with anti-Semitism from the young guys. They hated him, but he managed to get things out of them.

"Later, the men recognised that he had done a great job. He in fact, made Easy Company.

"I was attracted to the character because I saw the human aspect of Sobel. I think in those circumstances he did all he could. I've seen Spielberg's films, but that is not the reason I wanted to do this project.

"It was because of my family — my grandmother had five brothers who were in the Second World War and all of them survived. In the evenings, they would tell stories about that.

"I was amazed by those stories and this was a way to honour them. The other reason I agreed to do this is Tom Hanks — he is so passionate, so inspirational."

Raised in Los Angeles, Schwimmer even attended the legendary Beverly Hills High School. Both of his parents are lawyers — his mother specialises in divorce and obviously made a fortune out of her most famous star client, Liz Taylor.

Perhaps going against the grain of his Los Angeles surroundings, Schwimmer developed a passion for theatre and with his best friend, actor Joey Slotnick, co-established Looking-glass Theatre company in Chicago, where he is directing a two-week workshop of Studs Turkle's book, Race. "It's about race and racial tension in the United States," he says.

Usually Schwimmer spends as much of his annual four-month break from Friends as he can with his theatre company. This year he will holiday in July, most likely with actress-girlfriend Mili Avital, whom he met on the 1998 romantic comedy, Kissing a Fool, and will return for the final season of Friends on August 6.