Friends' monkey handler defends Marcel from David Schwimmer, calls human actor "jealous"
The handler adds that Schwimmer's disrespect for the deceased monkey actor is "despicable"
TV Features David Schwimmer
David Schwimmer is in a feud with two monkeys and the human who loves them, whether he likes it or not. After enduring years of shit-talking from Schwimmer about the pair of capuchin monkeys who portrayed Friends’ star-player, Marcel The Monkey, the guy responsible for training them has gone to The Sun in order to set the record straight and elevate the interspecies beef in the process.
Likely egged on by the fact that Marcel’s actors were not paid an exorbitant fee to chitter, scream, and hop up and down as the hosts of the Friends reunion, handler Mike Morris has responded to the latest instance of simian slander during the reunion special by—as The Sun puts it—“speaking out for the first time ever” about the long-standing feud.
Responding to Schwimmer’s accusations that Katie and the unimaginatively named Monkey, the capuchin thespians in question, would attempt to bite him, throw their shit around, leave half-eaten meal worms on him, and mess with his timing, Morris has said, “They didn’t do any of that. None of it is true.”
Morris says he only heard that the monkeys were further disparaged during the reunion secondhand since he has “never ever watched Friends because of Schwimmer’s comments about the monkeys” and he wasn’t about to start now. He says the first shoots were fine but that “people would laugh at the monkey and I think [Schwimmer] got jealous because it wasn’t him getting the laughs.”
“If anything,” Morris says, “He threw off their timing if we want to be truthful.” He adds that it was only natural that “the monkeys didn’t like working with [Schwimmer] after he turned on them,” that the human actor “seemed to get a little bitter” about sharing screen time with the capuchins, and he says that “[Schwimmer is] not the kind of actor who can improvise” with an animal. Unlike Friends’ Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc, who were apparently cool with Monkey and Katie.
“We worked on a scene with Jennifer where the monkey supposedly pooped in her shoe,” he says, “And she was a pleasure to work with.” Morris contrasts Schwimmer not just with Aniston and LeBlanc, but Katie The Monkey’s other co-stars, like the cast of Outbreak and Jerry Seinfeld, who didn’t have a problem with the distinguished capuchin.
Making matters worse, Monkey the Monkey died last year at 36 years old from cancer, “so Schwimmer was talking ill of the dead when he made those comments.” Morris concludes: “I find it despicable for him to still be speaking ill of her.”
That said, Morris offers Schwimmer an olive branch during his interview. “The monkeys definitely wouldn’t hold a grudge against David,” he says. “If Katie had to work with him again tomorrow she would do it no problem.” He gets a final dig in, saying, “They’re just good-natured animals and probably don’t even remember him,” but he leaves things there.
Your move, Schwimmer.
[via E! Online]
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102 Comments
This rules.
Is that Annie’s Boobs?
That was Crystal, who is still alive.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_the_Monkeyhttps://www.imdb.com/name/nm2640714/
No, those were on GLOW.
And how!
Sorry, what?!?!
Just go watch GLOW.
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I feel like the A.V. Club should get an expert’s opinion on this. I’m sure Mickey Dolenz and Mike Nesmith would be happy to give their professional and musical thoughts on this subject.
Now we know what Monkey was saying to Aniston behind the scenes!
I thought the monkey was still alive. Wasn’t there a big controversy because he was initially cast in Y: The Last Man?
It was, but then Twitter found out that Monkey took a job from a younger monkey who hasn’t had as many breaks as Monkey and they canceled Monkey, who sadly took his own life.
I hated the show when the stupid monkey was on. It was a dumb device that made the show measurably worse as long as they ran with it.
Seinfeld did it better:
Never work with children or animals.
I have a rule to never work with David Schwimmer.
Yeah, but he was brilliant in Band of Brothers.
It’s unfortunate that he keeps getting typecast as pompous boobs, but he does it well.
He was “good” in BoB, but man I wanted him to die slowly during a battle lol.
He was actually perfectly cast in that role. Schwimmer has an unlikable quality to him that makes him a great incompetent villain. He’d be great as Snidely Whiplash if they ever decide to do another live-action Dudley Do-Right movie.
I wonder if he had to audition, or if the creators read about the real-life absolute arsehole this guy was and said, “You know who’s perfect for this? David Schwimmer.”
Is there any indication of him being an asshole besides the monkey thing?
No, the Internet is once again confusing the people they see on their little screens with the actors who play them.
Schwimmer has campaigned and donated to anti-child abuse charities, sits on the board of the Rape Foundation (and has spoken about the need for men to be allies in the anti-sexual assault fight) and directed a film, Trust, which called attention to online predators.
But yeah, Ross was a dick to someone once, so Schwimmer must suck
They really never did get a handle on Schwimmer’s character, did they? “He’s a 25-year-old paleontologist? And his wife left him for a woman? And he’s kind of a neurotic sad sack? And he’s in love with Rachel? Man, you’d think that would be enough, wouldn’t you? And uh…ummm…I guess we could…give him a monkey?”Any rate, capuchins creep me the fuck out, and professional animal trainers have a vested interest in convincing people that their charges emphatically do not shit everywhere and leave mealworms in your hair, so I’m taking Schwimmer’s side on this.
Then there was what felt like a whole season where he had serious anger management issues. I think it started off with him flipping out because his boss ate his sandwich and he was placed on leave, then they just kept it going for several more episodes, blowing up at everybody and for some reason it was supposed to be funny.
Imma stand by Ross yelling about the sandwich. I tried Monica trick of taking a piece of bread and soaking it in gravy and then sticking it in the middle of the sandwich and it was glorious.
Oh, I’d be angry, too. I just meant that they took what seemed like a one-or-two-episode story arc about Ross’s reaction to the sandwich and turned it into one of his central character traits for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time.
The Moistmaker
After they break him and Rachel up and thus lose any motivation to give him redeeming qualities Ross becomes a full-on psychopath.
I made a similar comment to my wife the other night, that Ross is really an incredibly shallow self-centered jerk. He never really gets that the reason all the women in his life dump him is, well, HIM. He only seems to care about how they make him feel and he couldn’t really care less how they feel.
“For some reason it was supposed to be funny” could be the tagline of ‘Friends’.
Remember, Laddie, there’s two kinds of people in this world: shit throwers and shit throwees; and the throwees have damn little to recommend them.
– Jim Lahey
He was 25?!
Thereabouts. They’re all supposed to be in their mid-twenties at the beginning of the show.
Funny that he was supposed to be older then Monica. Cox is older then Shimmer in real life.
Plus the writers seemed to think Ross was like 5’5 and 95 lbs.
Remember when he was a professor and dated one of his students and it was supposed to be fine!?
He thought it was fine, until one of his colleagues said something like, “Oh good God! That’ll get you fired Ross!”
No it wasn’t fine; they explored all that was wrong with it constantly.
Oh, fuck this guy. The monkey was a stupid idea and he should be glad he earned a paycheck.
Seriously. There are precisely zero Friends fans who look back on the show and say, “Remember the monkey? That was hilarious!”
No, they are to busy saying “Wow this show is really homophobic and where the hell are all the black people?”
You mean the show that put a lesbian wedding on TV in 1995?
Yep one Lesbian wedding and about a thousand gay panic jokes
Citation needed.
Quite a few examples, but there’s a whole B-plot in one episode where Joey and Ross fall asleep together on a couch and then spend the rest of the episode freaking out over whether that made them gay. It’s okay to enjoy Friends but it was very much a product of its time.
https://www.them.us/story/friends-is-transphobichttps://www.out.com/television/2019/10/01/heres-your-reminder-friends-was-really-really-homophobichttps://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2018/01/friends-showed-being-gay-threatening-and-i-m-not-buying-excusesOther then the gay panic stuff, the show also was shitty towards fat people and showed very very very few people of color. I mean if you like it then enjoy, I enjoy plenty of classic shows and movies that are problematic in hindsight but acting like they are not there is silly
Counterpoint: “Just how many cameras are on you?” is a classic line.
I’m fat. There are fat jokes that are funny. Mostly they are ones that are not shaming. (Most things people think are funny are making fun of people who are fat wearing certain types of clothing and such. I’ve never had an issue with fat Monica.)
It was very much a progressive-for-1995 show. Definitely more progressive than, say, Home Improvement or Married with Children, but it still had its mid-1990s hang-ups. Culture evolves. “We’re going to show a lesbian wedding!…But everyone’s going to wear gender-appropriate clothes and the brides are going to be walked down the aisle by men and good lord no of course they aren’t going to kiss…”
Lol.
The show that constantly joked about how Ross’s wife leaving him for a woman was humiliating and emasculating?
When? It showed the pain of being cheated on and your marriage ending. And then, whoa, he actually talked his ex into going through with the marriage to the woman she cheated on him with when she was waffling after her parents disowned her; walked his ex down the aisle of her wedding to the woman she left him for and then danced with the woman she left him for and later co-parented, mostly amiably, with the two women.
That fucking monster.
Yeah? He encouraged his ex-wife to remarry, but that doesn’t change the fact that, both before and after the wedding, Ross was very much the butt of the joke for being left for a woman. That was a conscious narrative choice. Some of it was to call attention to and make fun of Ross’s own latent homophobia, sure, but most of it was convey to the audience how much of an abject sad sack Ross is at the beginning of the show. Your wife left you for another man? That’s embarrassing. Your wife left you for another woman? That’s humiliating. The writers are telling the audience that Ross is at the lowest of low points, romantically speaking.
Also the whole thing with Chandler’s Transgender Dad hasn’t age well.
Was it ever established he was transgender or was he a gay transvestite?If I recall, Chandler was 7 or 8 when his dad ran off with the pool boy – literally. You don’t automatically get a good relationship with your kid when you fo that.
You keep doing this thing where you talk about events from the show divorced from all context as if it’s impossible for the show to have presented those things badly because you can write a sentence about them that doesn’t -sound- bad.“You don’t automatically get a good relationship with your kid when you do that” is immaterial to the fact that they presented his father’s gender identity as the butt of the joke, an extreme embarrassment, and something we should be laughing at. Chandler could have had a bad relationship with his father that -wasn’t- centered on mockery of a very specific trait, and they chose not to do that.Ask yourself why you’re so invested in defending this stuff. Did you like the show at the time and think it was funny? Fine, so did a lot of people. You’re not a bad person for that. But you don’t have to justify it by pretending that there weren’t problems in hindsight. Even if the show was relatively progressive in its time, things age, and people become more aware.Also: It’s important not to turn a blind eye to the fact that “progressive in it’s time” is pretty much only comforting to the people who weren’t being hurt by the shitty attitudes of that time. “It was a different time” is often used as a handwave, but there -were- gay people and transgender people at that time. They existed. It was as wrong to treat them badly then as it is now, and the fact that not enough people realized that isn’t really an excuse.
If you’re trying this hard, you should probably use a different word than transvestite.
Not transgender, just a drag queen. Although Kathleen Turner was great in the part, they probably should have given it to an actual drag queen. Most of the laughs from it come from them making jokes themselves, “Queens I like.” Or from Chandler’s mom, but that’s typical sniping between people who can’t get past their divorce.
Nilus, you and recognitions are like satires of professional woke scolds. I often have trouble believing your whole shtick isn’t intentionally designed to make you look ridiculous at every turn.
Schwimmer is going to have a hard time in the court of public opinion unless he can…PIVOT! PIVOT! PIVOT!
I predict he’s going to make things worse by giving someone the finger without giving them the finger.
I dunno, man. Let’s not act like Ross having a monkey was a good idea at all.
“If Katie had to work with him again tomorrow she would do it no problem.”Probably because she lacks the concepts of “work,” or “David Schwimmer,” or even just words in general.Nothing against Katie but she’d probably work with a table or Adolf Hitler just as quickly.
I know this is meant to be jokey, but fuck that trainer and fuck anyone who forces primates to work on movie/TV sets in this day and age. https://variety.com/2021/film/news/hollywood-monkeys-ban-1234943232/
I can’t believe they added that monkey to the show in season 1. Friends really tried to jump the shark early and often.
It’s a shame the monkeys couldn’t tell their side of the story at the reunion, I bet they would have been more coherent than Matthew Perry.
“We worked on a scene with Jennifer where the monkey supposedly pooped in her shoe,” he says, “And she was a pleasure to work with.” Morris contrasts Schwimmer not just with Aniston and LeBlanc, but Katie The Monkey’s other co-stars, like the cast of Outbreak and Jerry Seinfeld, who didn’t have a problem with the distinguished capuchin.
So, this is a lie. Here’s Jennifer Aniston totally not having a problem with Katie (see 14 second mark).
I guess David Schwimmer was somehow throwing her timing off, huh?
“So, this is a lie.”
You mean the part where you attribute Jerry Seinfeld’s not having a problem with the monkeys to Jennifer Aniston?
Nah, that wasn’t a lie. Just incredibly ignorant and lazy.
“Here’s Jennifer Aniston totally not having a problem with Katie”
Any time you want to point out where it says Aniston didn’t have a problem with the monkey…
Yeah, Monkey Boy is afraid he won’t get work.
Horse-toothed creature from the jungle, Monkey Boy!
RIP monkey.
Rip Monkey woulda been a more interesting name than Monkey The Monkey.
That’s cool, since Monkey The Monkey wasn’t the monkey’s name.
Are you Todd the Retard? No, just because you’re retarded doesn’t mean that’s your last name.
Rip Monkey, Intergalactic Primate adventurer!
Starring Rip Torn. “If you can dodge a banana, you can dodge a ball! We’re not hosting an intergalactic kegger here!”
Typo in the headline. The primate who would bite, throw shit around and mess with Schwimmer’s timing was Matt LeBlanc.
Or Matthew Perry when he was off the wagon
and this whole time HE was the one with the monkey on his back!
I absolutely love it. All you sanctimonious keyboard warriors always reveal your hypocrisies. Perry suffered from addiction, an illness, and here you are punching down at him and mocking him for his relapses. Why are you all like this??? You can’t expect people to believe all your concerns about Friends being racist and transphobic and fatphobic when, in your very next breath, you mock people struggling with addiction…unless of course all of your criticisms are merely perfomative and not sincerely held (which is the case here).
“the long-standing feud”
Ah yes, this long-standing feud between David Schwimmer and some guy he doesn’t remember ever having a single interaction with.
“the capuchin thespians in question, would attempt to bite him, throw their shit around, leave half-eaten meal worms on him, and mess with his timing, Morris has said, “They didn’t do any of that. None of it is true.””
Well, the trainer says they didn’t do that, and as we all know, monkeys certainly aren’t known to do literally exactly what Schwimmer described them as doing, so I guess this trainer, who needs people to think that his stupid monkeys don’t do what every single other monkey in the world does, is right.
Hey trainer, howzabout you fuck off with pretending you’re using these monkeys as anything but a pay check and then the next time one of your monkeys throws shit at you, which it will absolutely do, you can pick up that shit and you can eat that shit, then you can fuck off once again.
Monkey handler to Schwimmer:
Schwimmer’s move is to wait for the $20 million annual residual check to come in and have another drink and say, “Man, fuck that monkey.”
Im imagining him just furious online with like 80 sockpuppet accounts with a raging need to just disparage that monkey all day, every day. “David, another check for $20 million just came—-”
“FUCK THAT CHECK. I’m doing important work here, goddamit. When I’m in here, I’m WORKING. That means you dont come in here!”
He did!! That is why it stopped showing up after Season 1
“And now, stay tuned for tonight’s rerun of The Monkees!”“Monkeys? I don’t see any Earth Monkeys! All I see are four Earth humans!”“They are not Earth Monkeys! They spell their name differently, with two EEs! BEHOLD!”“THIS CONCEPT OF ‘MONKEES’ CONFUSES AND ALIENATES US!!!”
Capuchin monkeys are a lot like other primates, including humans, in that sometimes they run across someone they just don’t like. I’m guessing Schwimmer was a guy these little monkeys didn’t like. It doesn’t surprise me at all that they’d nip at him, throw feces (as monkeys are known to do), and otherwise show their disdain if they thought he was a jerk. It also doesn’t surprise me that they’d get along fine with other people on set they liked.All the monkey business aside, both sides of this argument are probably right. I don’t doubt that the trained monkeys were generally good performers and got along with most of the people on set. I also don’t doubt they they occasionally cast a turd in Schwimmer’s direction. As for the comment’s on timing, it’s a pretty stupid debate to have—they’re animals! I don’t think they have a sense of comic timing like we do. If the animals were throwing off Schwimmer’s timing it was on him because he’s a human actor. If the human was throwing off the monkeys’ timing it was on the trainer because he was the human responsible for making sure the animals hit their marks. I think the trainer is just trying to get his moment in the limelight because of the reunion show.
Yep, its just like how pretty much all dogs love me for some reason lol. One of my buddies dogs will run out to my car when I show up to see me, and another dog (pitbull, big old boy too) I just met the other day liked me so much he would not stop barking at me if I stopped petting him lol. It was hilarious!
No word on Chandler and Joey’s chick and duck and their feelings on the matter.
don’t repost rubbish non-stories from the sun of all places. the only place that rag belongs is in the bin.
Slow news day, huh?
Asked to comment on the David Schwimmer vs. Monkey the Monkey controversy, Jennifer Aniston said, “Oh, all the stories are true. He would throw shit, bite people, leave food all around the place. The monkey, on the other hand, was a joy to work with.”
Is this real life? Like, what is happening right now?
Who did Schwimmer blame for all the years he never got laughs after the monkey’s left?