“It was a brutal decision”: the million-dollar rejection that cost David Schwimmer a movie career
Thanks to the residual checks that have come in for Friends, David Schwimmer has never been lacking in capital, but he did lose out on the opportunity to be part of one of the biggest hits of the 1990s.
Friends was such a cultural juggernaut that it actually became challenging for the show’s stars to find work outside of the series, especially because they wanted to avoid being typecast. Jennifer Aniston eventually made a career for herself in comedies, getting back on television with The Morning Show, and Lisa Kudrow had a similar arc, where she would eventually find her footing with HBO’s The Comeback, but Courtney Cox may have had the most consistent post-Friends run because of her continuous role in the Scream franchise.
It was far more difficult for the male stars of Friends, as it was only Matthew Perry who became a legitimate movie star prior to his tragic death, and although Matt LeBlanc essentially returned to television full-time after 1998’s Lost in Space became a heavily lampooned disaster, David Schwimmer actually carved out an impressive run of smaller, independent films such as The Pallbearer.
It was right after The Pallbearer that Schwimmer declared he was trying to focus on his theatre work, but starting his own acting company was “a brutal decision” because it meant that he had to turn down the role of Agent J in Men in Black.
“Miramax wanted to lock me into a three-picture deal at a fixed price, and I said I would do that if I got to direct my first movie,” Schwimmer said, “So after months of negotiations, they finally said that I would act in three more movies for them, but I got to direct my entire theatre company in the first film. All these unknown actors, but I was going to put them on the map, basically. I was going to let everyone discover the talent of this amazing company.”
According to him, the opportunity to join Men in Black came at the exact moment when he knew he couldn’t leave his theatre company, explaining, “We’re in pre-production, hired the whole crew, everything’s going, and that’s when I was offered Men in Black. It was a direct conflict with this. My summer window from Friends was four months. 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.”
Given that Men in Black went on to become one of the most successful blockbusters of the ‘90s, spawning a franchise in the promise, it’s safe to say that Schwimmer had a few regrets about his decision. “Of course, it was an amazing opportunity,” he said, “However, my theatre company and that relationship with all those people would probably have ended”.
While he asserted that he could have been a movie star had he accepted the role, the film worked specifically because of the chemistry between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, where the former was coming off the success of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and had just previously starred in Independence Day the previous summer, making it a natural next step for him to do another alien movie.
Given how brilliant the script for Men in Black was, it probably would have been successful had it starred Schwimmer and Jones; that said, it’s hard to imagine that it would have become a cultural phenomenon had it not been for Smith.
