I came from a family where I felt great pressure to be financially successful, and I felt that staying in Chicago and doing theater, I was, in all likelihood, not going to find financial success.

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote "Fans of the sitcom Friends may be surprised by David Schwimmer in Kissing a Fool. He played a hopeless-romantic paleontologist who works at a museum and later becomes a professor at a university. Critics dismissed The Pallbearer as a poor imitation of the 1967 film The Graduate.

A. The following year he made his Off-Broadway directorial debut in the 2008 production Fault Lines. For much of the late-1980s he lived in Los Angeles as a struggling unemployed actor.