When it comes to David Schwimmer's recent complaints, it sounds like this animal trainer isn't monkeying around.
More than a month after the Friends reunion made its debut on HBO Max, animal trainer Mike Morris sounded off on the actor's candid comments regarding Marcel the monkey. (ICYMI, Schwimmer made it very clear he was not a fan.)
"The first couple episodes, David Schwimmer was pretty good with the monkeys," Morris recently told The Sun. "After that, he seemed to get a little bitter about them being there. It made it harder to work with them."
As the trainer put it, "A five-camera show is hard to work on anyways and if you have an actor that's not very helpful, it makes it even harder."
In fact, Morris shared his honest thoughts on why Schwimmer wasn't a fan of his sidekick. "The first couple episodes he was pretty friendly with the monkey and after that, the monkey was getting a lot of laughs," Morris said, "and either it was throwing him off or getting a little jealous."
Today, Morris thinks this longstanding feud is absolutely bananas: "Him still talking ill about the monkey all these years later seems pretty childish to me." There's also the fact that one of the monkeys who played Marcel recently died of cancer. "Schwimmer was talking ill of the dead when he made those comments," Morris said. "I find it despicable for him to still be speaking ill of her."
As for Schwimmer, who played Ross Gellar on the hit series, he explained that his discontent with the monkey stemmed from having to do multiple takes. "Obviously it was trained and it had to hit its mark and do its thing right at the perfect time," he said during the HBO Max special, "but what inevitably began to happen was we would all have choreographed bits kind of timed out and it would get messed up because the monkey didn't do its job right."
Plus, Schwimmer wasn't exactly into the "live grubs" the trainer would feed the monkey as it was sitting on his shoulder. "I'd have monkey grubby hands all over," Schwimmer recalled, adding, "It was time for Marcel to f--k off."