David Schwimmer's 5-Year-Old Daughter Cleo "Loves" Beer

"If I turn my back, she'll be chugging it," the actor tells Seth Meyers

David Schwimmer's little girl is growing up fast—faster than he would like, it turns out.

Because the 49-year-old actor plays a widowed sommelier in AMC's upcoming drama series Feed the Beast, when he appeared on NBC's Late Night Wednesday, he had a wine tasting with host Seth Meyers. "My research is tough," he joked. "I have to drink a lot, so that's not easy."

Perhaps David should have invited his 5-year-old daughter, Cleo Buckman Schwimmer, to join them. "Listen, I don't know how the other parents are out there, but my thought when I pour myself a glass of wine that my wife and I have over dinner and my daughter says, 'Can I try that?' I thought, 'Well, if you start saying no then they're just going to want it more.' So, I thought 'Yeah, all right. Go ahead, sweetie. Have a sip.' And luckily she was like, 'Blah! No!'"

David assumed he was in the clear—but oh, how wrong he was! "It worked until I let her try beer and she loves it. I'll find her in the middle of the night just [guzzling it]. I'm serious!" he said. "If I have a beer out, I have to watch it, because if I turn my back, she'll be chugging it."

Seth joked, "You've got a long life ahead of you!"

The next morning, David appeared on NBC's Today and told Matt Lauer more about his new series, co-starring Jim Sturgess. "They really are the only the family they have left. They've been childhood friends," he said of their characters, who open a restaurant together. Early on, their plans go awry. "They have to borrow a lot of money from some very bad people," David teased.

Though he's primarily known for the sitcom Friends, David said it wasn't a "conscious decision" to transition into TV dramas like Feed the Beast or FX's The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. "I've always wanted to work with Ryan Murphy," he said of playing attorney Robert Kardashian. "Then this came up right after that…I just thought, 'This is a great show.'"

Feed the Beast is a different beast than Ryan's miniseries, though. "The tone of the show is tricky because you've got to create characters that people feel are credible and believable," David said. "Because these characters are coming from a place of tragedy, the humor...Some of the greatest jokes come from the darkest times we're in. I think it's a defense mechanism for survival. We have to make fun of our situation because it's so ridiculously tragic."

(E! and NBC are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)