The actor and director on divorce, fatherhood, controversy – and whether he will ever return to Ross Geller

David Schwimmer has finished a late lunch of salmon and brussels sprouts and is sipping a beer in an Italian restaurant in New York’s Lower East Side when the stranger approaches. “Friends are like family, so you always look familiar,” the man says. “It’s a good thing, I guess. You’re happy when they recognise you.”

Schwimmer proves sporting. “Yes, yes, of course!” he smiles. “Thank you so much.”

He must get this a lot. 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 1994 and 2004.

Now 53, Schwimmer has visibly hit middle age, changed utterly by fatherhood and a divorce he calls “heartbreaking”. But he is also comfortable in his own skin. 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.

“I think I’m kind of over that,” says Schwimmer. “There was a period that I was very, very frustrated by being pigeonholed in this one genre, this one idea. I got Friends when I was 27 but I had done all this work on stage. But all that was just eradicated. As far as the public was concerned, I came out of the womb doing sitcom. So that was frustrating, as if it obliterated all the other training, all the other roles I had done.”

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. “I’ve always wanted to play Iago,” Schwimmer says. “He’s a sociopath, but he’s a charming sociopath. Growing up in junior high school and high school, I never felt like I was in the cool crowd. I always felt quite envious and that’s a great motivator. Envy and jealousy. Desire.”

After 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. 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. Perhaps most memorably, there was his Emmy-nominated turn as Robert Kardashian in FX’s The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story.

But 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. That 10-year run with that particular cast, that group of writers, those directors. It was an amazing time professionally, but mostly creatively.”

Schwimmer is still in touch with his fellow cast members Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry. “We all had a little reunion dinner at Courteney’s house recently. 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. I’m the only one that lives in New York.”

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 just don’t think it’s possible, given everyone’s different career trajectories. 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. It would have to make sense creatively and nothing I’ve heard so far presented to us makes sense.”

Unlike, for example, his latest project, Sky TV’s comedy series Intelligence. Schwimmer, who also executive produced, plays a power-hungry US National Security Agency (NSA) agent who teams up with a bungling computer analyst played by Nick Mohammed, who wrote the script, to set up a cybercrimes unit at GCHQ.

Years after the NSA’s Edward Snowden blew the whistle on state surveillance, it is a subject ripe for satire. You have to be “really naive” not to worry about possible abuses of power, Schwimmer says. “I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist or paranoid, but I’ve got a healthy amount of concern given the history of people who have power to gain certain intelligence to use it and possibly abuse it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The One Where They All Turn 30 ... Friends in 2001. Photograph: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

Friends has had a remarkable afterlife. More than a decade after its final episode, the show became available on Netflix in 2015, and was one of its biggest draws. Soon New York magazine pondered: “Is Friends still the most popular show on TV?” Netflix paid $100m (£75m) to keep it on tap throughout 2019.

Why does Friends still strike a chord? Schwimmer believes the answer is that it was made in the pre-smartphone, pre-social media era.

He recalls seeing five young women in a London restaurant, sitting together but not talking to each other. “They all were on their phones and then sharing what they were writing or watching on their phone. So they were leaning in occasionally to each other, but all of their focus was in their device. That’s why Friends is nostalgic, because it was a time right before the world profoundly changed in terms of social media and where our focus was. It was six people who actually sat and talked to each other.”

But Friends’ renaissance came with a sting. Awkward questions suggest it has not aged well. “Millennials watching Friends on Netflix shocked by storylines,” ran a headline in the Independent two years ago, noting criticisms of sexism, homophobia and transphobia. It cited, for example, Chandler worrying about being perceived as a gay man, Ross asking a male nanny if he is gay, and jokes about Monica’s weight.

It is the only moment of the interview where Schwimmer appears a little defensive. “I don’t care,” he says, dismissively. “The truth is also that show was groundbreaking in its time for the way in which it handled so casually sex, protected sex, gay marriage and relationships. The pilot of the show was my character’s wife left him for a woman and there was a gay wedding, of my ex and her wife, that I attended.

“I feel that a lot of the problem today in so many areas is that so little is taken in context. You have to look at it from the point of view of what the show was trying to do at the time. I’m the first person to say that maybe something was inappropriate or insensitive, but I feel like my barometer was pretty good at that time. I was already really attuned to social issues and issues of equality.”

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Friends is also a product of the pre-“woke” era when it comes to race. “Maybe there should be an all-black Friends or an all-Asian Friends,” Schwimmer says. “But I was well aware of the lack of diversity and I campaigned for years to have Ross date women of colour. One of the first girlfriends I had on the show was an Asian American woman, and later I dated African American women. That was a very conscious push on my part.

“It’s interesting also how the show handled the Judaism of the characters,” he continues. “I don’t think that was earth-shattering or groundbreaking at all, but I for one was glad that we had at least one episode where it wasn’t just about Christmas. It was also Hanukkah and, even though I played the Hanukkah armadillo” – Ross wore an armadillo costume – “I was glad that we at least acknowledged the differences in religious observation.”

Schwimmer’s social activism started with his parents. “My mom was a very vocal, groundbreaking feminist activist lawyer [and occasional actor]. So my earliest memories of theatre were watching these feminist productions that my mom was in and being on the picket line with my parents and fighting for women’s rights and gay rights.

“That’s the environment I grew up in. I’m very aware of my own privilege as a heterosexual white male whose parents were able to pay for a private education for me. I’ve always felt a sense of responsibility to give back and to call things out if I see an abuse of power.”

For more than two decades Schwimmer has worked to raise public consciousness about rape and sexual harassment. In 2018 he made a series of short videos called #ThatsHarassment and he serves on the board of directors of the Rape Foundation in Santa Monica, California. How did he feel when the #MeToo movement caught fire?

“Primarily I felt like: ‘Ah, finally! Yes, yes!’ My mom has been telling my sister and me stories since she was a young lawyer being sexually harassed by judges, clients, other lawyers. I don’t know a woman in my life that has not been harassed in some way.”

All the same, he says, he was saddened by the “atmosphere of terror” that struck “all men ... Some people called it a ‘witch hunt’,” he says. “I disagree with that, but … there was a lot of over-reacting, I think. Some of the more complex situations were lumped in with the more egregious and criminal.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Schwimmer with Nick Mohammed in Intelligence. Photograph: Sky

Schwimmer once directed a film for Harvey Weinstein and found him “an aggressive individual used to getting what he wanted”. The producer is currently standing on trial in New York on five charges of sexual assault. But justice is arbitrary and uneven. Donald Trump, another rich and powerful New Yorker accused of sexual assault by multiple women, occupies the White House with impunity.

“I was shocked and really dismayed when it was revealed that he’s got so many women accusing him of sexual assault and that he boasts on tape of grabbing women by the genitals,” says Schwimmer, who otherwise steers clear of party politics. “Most people decided that it didn’t matter. I would argue to those same people that if he had done that to their daughter or their wife or their sister, it probably would matter. I didn’t know how to explain to my daughter how the country elected someone who was boasting of committing sexual assault.”

Schwimmer’s daughter is Cleo, aged eight, from his marriage to the British artist Zoë Buckman, which ended in divorce a couple of years ago. “Anyone would say the same thing, but of course it’s heartbreaking. You feel somewhat responsible and a sense of failure – and you grieve. I certainly didn’t get married with the idea that it wouldn’t last. I really believed it would.

“The first year and a half, it was really my daughter’s adjustment that I was most concerned about. I knew I’d be fine, I’d be OK, and I knew she would be OK, the mom. We’re still great friends and, touch wood” – he bangs the table – “we’ve worked out a way to be really respectful and loving and caring and flexible in terms of our co-parenting.

“Just making sure Cleo was going to be OK and feel supported and loved was quite painful for everyone, obviously, but I can say now that she feels really safe and happy. And all three of us try to do things together.”

In a Guardian interview in 2007, Schwimmer was asked what single thing would most improve the quality of his life. He replied then with a single word: children. “That’s absolutely true,” he says now. “Hundred per cent life-changing and in every way the most joyous and fulfilling and meaningful thing. Period. Hands down.

“I don’t think I’ve ever loved unconditionally before – even with partners, lovers. I think there was always a part of me that would hold back in some way. Now I realise that it’s like a part of me kind of cracked open and: ‘Oh, my heart’s bigger than I ever thought it was.’”

Intelligence will be on Sky One and Now TV from 21 February.