David Schwimmer says Friends fans still yell at him to pivot

The one where David can’t escape Ross Geller.

David Schwimmer looked back on the sitcom’s enduring legacy Friends during a recent appearance on Good morning America to promote its new Goosebumps series Disappearanceand reveals the one iconic Ross Geller line he still encounters on a daily basis.

“Lots of random people yelling ‘pivot’ at me,” the actor said, referencing the memorable Season 5 episode (Season 5’s “The One with the Cop”) in which his character tries to lift a new sofa into his narrow New York. City apartment staircase with friends Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) and Chandler (Matthew Perry).

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“Sometimes it’s startling,” Schwimmer said. “But it’s also just a reminder that the series lives on.” When co-host Robin Roberts praised the actor for being willing to revisit his former role years later, the actor called the sitcom “the gift that keeps on giving.”

“When I meet people on the street from another country and they say, ‘I just have to say, I learned English from watching your show,’ or a father stops me and says, ‘My child was really, really sick and the one thing that kept them going in the hospital was just watching Friends,’ you feel really grateful and blessed to have done something that people find fun,” Schwimmer said.

The sitcom, which aired for 10 seasons on NBC between 1994 and 2004, followed the lives of six close friends in New York. talking with Weekly entertainment for the sitcom’s 25th anniversary in 2019, series co-creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman said they did not expect the pivotal scene to be such a defining moment in the show’s zeitgeist.

“I remember in the writers’ room there was a discussion about, ‘Can we do a story as simple as getting a couch up a flight of stairs?'” Crane recalled. “Even on stage it was great fun,” he says. “The three of them were just brilliant and it was all they could do to get through it.”

“You never expect that kind of thing,” Crane added of the “pivot!” becomes a signature catchphrase among fans of the show. “You just try to tell funny stories and make it work. There was never an eye for, ‘Wow, this is an iconic moment.'”