David Schwimmer is getting candid about living in the long shadow of Friends.

The Ross Geller actor, 58, admitted that he couldn’t listen to the iconic NBC sitcom’s theme tune, “I’ll Be There for You” by The Rembrandts, for a long time after the show ended in 2004.

“I’ll be really honest, there was a time for quite a while, just hearing the theme song would really …” he said with a sigh during an appearance on the Tuesday, April 1, episode of the “Making a Scene” podcast hosted by former Little Britain stars Matt Lucas and David Walliams.

“You know what I mean? I would just have that reaction,” he continued. “I just had heard it so many times. Anytime you’d go on a show, a talk show, that would be your intro song. I just didn’t have the greatest response to it for a period of time.”

On September 22, 1994, TV audiences got six new pals with the cast of the hit NBC series Friends. Now, decades later, we’ve watched Jennifer Aniston (Rachel Green), Courteney Cox (Monica Geller), Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe Buffay), Matt LeBlanc (Joey Tribbiani), Matthew Perry (Chandler Bing) and David Schwimmer (Ross Geller) take on numerous other roles through the years. The friend group went from aimless 20-somethings to grown-ups with […]

While Schwimmer said he hasn’t gone back and watched Friends, his daughter, Cleo, started watching it when she was around the age of 9. (Schwimmer shares Cleo, 13, with ex-wife Zoë Buckman.)

“I’d be making breakfast or whatever, and I’d hear my kid’s laughter. My whole relationship to that song and to the show changed again,” Schwimmer said.

Schwimmer starred on Friends from 1994 to 2004 alongside Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc and the late Matthew Perry. As well as playing on-screen best friends, the sitcom’s cast remains incredibly close 30 years after the show began.

However, despite their tight friendship, Kudrow, 61, recently revealed that the six stars only met up for dinner once in the time between the show’s conclusion in 2004 and their 2021 televised reunion.

“We only had dinner, the six of us, once before, since the show had ended,” Kudrow shared on a December 2024 episode of Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast.

According to Kudrow, the dinner took place around a decade after the hit NBC sitcom ended in 2004, and the stars “didn’t miss a beat.”

The cast of Friends has reminisced about the show — and their favorite episodes — multiple times since the series’ end in 2004. “Here’s what I love, is when I watch an episode, I’ll usually remember where we broke during the scene,” Jennifer Aniston told costar Lisa Kudrow during a joint Variety interview in June […]

“It was so great that it was like, ‘We should do this more,’” she added.

Alas, the next time the famous friends all got together was in 2021 to record HBO Max’s Friends: The Reunion, in which they revisited their famous characters and story lines.

Little did the cast — or fans — know that would be the last time we’d see all six stars together. Perry died at age 54 from the acute effects of ketamine in October 2023.

“It shook us up, I have to say,” Kudrow told Ferguson. “He said it won’t be a surprise, but it will be a shock, and that was exactly right. So smart, that is true — it wasn’t a surprise, but it was a shock.”