David Schwimmer Explains the Difficulty He Had Listening to the ‘Friends’ Theme Song

Actor David Schwimmer has admitted the theme song to Friends haunted him for years due to its overuse.

Schwimmer, who began his acting career in 1989, rose to widespread fame five years later for his role as Ross Geller in the NBC sitcom Friends. A monumental hit and a cultural phenomenon across its ten-year run, the show’s ubiquity in the pop culture zeitgeist led to its theme song (The Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You”) becoming just as recognizable as its lead actors. For Schwimmer though, the omnipresence of the theme left a lasting negative effect on him that continued far beyond the show’s completion in 2004.

Appearing on the Making the Scene podcast with hosts Matt Lucas and David Walliams, Schwimmer admitted that the overuse of the song became a little too much. ”I’ll be really honest, there was a time for quite a while that just hearing the theme song would really…” he explained, letting out a sigh to reflect his exhaustion. “I just had that reaction, I just had heard it so many times.”

“Anytime you would go on a show, a talk show, or an interview, that would be your intro song. I just didn’t have the greatest response to it,” he said.

Written by Friends producers David Crane and Marta Kauffman, with songwriter Allee Willis and The Rembrandts’ Danny Wilde and Phil Sōlem, “I’ll Be There for You” was used as the theme song to the show after R.E.M. had rejected the use of their song “Shiny Happy People” as the opener. The track also became a commercial success off the back of its use in the series, reaching No. 17 on the Hot 100 and topping the Adult Contemporary, Radio Songs, and Pop Airplay charts.

Largely in part to the song’s constant presence in pop culture, Schwimmer admits that he didn’t manage to change his attitude toward the song until the last few years, when his daughter Cleo began to discover the series.

“At about age nine, my kid discovered it and started watching it,” he explained. “I’d be making breakfast or whatever, and I’d hear my kid’s laughter. My whole relationship to that song and that show changed again.”