[This story contains some spoilers from Goosebumps: The Vanishing.]
With Goosebumps: The Vanishing, David Schwimmer stars in his first major horror role. It’s something the actor, known mostly for his comedic and dramatic work, had wanted to “sink my teeth into” for years, he says. Hollywood had just never given him the opportunity.
“I’ve always been a fan of horror, especially of horror action-comedy. The genre is so exciting to me,” Schwimmer tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m a genuine fan, and I’ve never been asked to do it.”
In the second season of the Disney+ and Sony Pictures Television series — which released all eight episodes Friday — Schwimmer plays Anthony Brewer, a botanist and divorcee who, after going on sabbatical to better support his mother with dementia, finds himself caring for his twins CeCe (Jayden Bartels) and Devin (Sam McCarthy) for the summer in his Brooklyn childhood home.
With a dark childhood trauma of his own, Anthony is determined to help his kids have a good final summer before their last year of high school. He’s also looking to continue with his research, courtesy of a homemade lab he’s built in his basement — a storyline that pulls directly from R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps book Stay Out of the Basement.
For co-showrunners, Hilary Winston and Rob Letterman, who previously spoke to THR about their appreciation for the line between comedy and horror, the actor (who has “done just about all you can do in a half-hour comedy space,” says Winston) was a perfect fit tonally for the series.
“We both love casting comedic actors to play dramatic roles. We find that it’s a really interesting, very honest, authentic portrayal of something when someone can dance between comedy and horror,” Letterman explains. “He’s also a filmmaker and understands it from different levels. Not just from the acting level, but from storytelling, from directing. He vibed on it quite a bit. And he has a 13-year-old kid, so he was also looking at it from that perspective and just wanted to have fun doing something that people don’t know him for.”
While the role doesn’t mark the first time Schwimmer has played a father — that was during his run on Friends — it was a moment where he could finally portray a parental experience that more closely resembled his own life.
“I’ve not been able to play a dad of a teenager, which I am now in real life. So that part of me was also really excited,” he tells THR. “It’s another level of meaningful at this stage.”
New York, this season’s backdrop, would also end up being personal to Schwimmer, despite the actor having filmed many projects in the city where he was born. One of the show’s most significant locales — the fort responsible for all of The Vanishing’s horrors — was just minutes, he says, from a place he grew up. “We ended up shooting at Fort Totten, which is 15 minutes from where I was born and where my grandparents used to live on Utopia Parkway in Flushing,” he says. “I’ve shot in New York before, but it was just great to be on location.”
One borough over, the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Flatbush, Brooklyn, serves as the Brewers’ fictional home in the series. It’s the place where Anthony first encounters a plant-like monster in the basement after scrapping a substance off of his dead brother’s jacket. It’s a room he swears his kids off from, and that ultimately kicks off a terrifying series of events that unfold across the season.
Down there, among all his plants and microscopes, is where Anthony has his first run-in with some sentient vines, getting the botanist closer than he ever has been to his work. It results in a transformation that will show fans exactly why Schwimmer was cast in the series. “Anthony definitely goes through some changes in the series,” Schwimmer explains.
“This plant begins to get on my skin and then in my arm, I notice that it starts to grow out from within me and then later takes the form of this bulb that I have to squeeze out of my arm,” Schwimmer continues. “It’s still inside Anthony and takes the form of more of an ooze — like a black viscous fluid that he doesn’t realize is sort of living within him.”
It’s a real body horror moment for audiences, with the spores that spark Anthony’s transformation scraped from a hoodie belonging to his brother who disappeared along with several other friends at the fort in 1994. What Anthony’s hiding in his basement is ultimately the link between what happened to his brother at Fort Totten and what CeCe, Devin and their friends face throughout the season.
Similar to Goosebumps’ first season, the series nods to the cycle of growing up and the way kids face dangers their parents try — and sometimes fail — to protect them from, again and again. That’s both a fictional and real-life experience, Schwimmer acknowledges.
“As a parent of a teenager, you never stop worrying about your kids. You’re worried about your kids just leaving the house or going on a school trip,” he says. “In the circumstance of this anthology series, stuff starts to happen where things are so much more heightened and so much scarier. There’s so much more potential for harm, psychological or physical. In that, the amount of worry as a parent just skyrockets.”
Despite those threats, Schwimmer promises that at its core, Goosebumps: The Vanishing celebrates not just the scares, but how the challenges of family, growing up and unresolved trauma can not only strengthen the bonds between loved ones but repair them.
“The story moves in such a way where, in the first couple of episodes, you feel how grounded this family is and you know the relationships are solid and loving. But you can tell that everyone’s got something going on,” Schwimmer says. “There’s kind of a separation [among them] for a while, but then we realize that [the teen’s experiences are] linked directly to a mystery that happened back in 1994 to my character’s older brother.
“It’s this family where everyone’s present and communicative, and then suddenly everyone’s kind of hiding from each other, hiding truth from each other,” he continues. “Then it comes together, and they end up working closely together to save the world and to save their relationship.”
That dynamic — with a character who is a working man, grappling with caretaking for his mother, and his two children, and dealing with a past family trauma amid the increasing presence of deadly threats — is a little more material than most parents in YA series get. Schwimmer says it’s that nuance that ultimately drew him to the role.
“When I learned more after not just reading the first script, but then talking to the writers, the showrunners, about the arc of the series and the backstory of what happened to Anthony, I just felt like, ok, this is really a character I would like to sink my teeth into,” he says. “This was just kind of a no-brainer.”
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Goosebumps: The Vanishing is now streaming all eight episodes on Disney+.
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