It wasn’t David Schwimmer! Or Ross. Or Russ. The Friends alum responded to reports that he looks like a man who was accused of stealing a case of beer from a restaurant in Blackpool, England.
“Officers, I swear it wasn’t me,” Schwimmer, 51, tweeted on Wednesday, October 24, alongside the surveillance video. “As you can see, I was in New York. To the hardworking Blackpool Police, good luck with the investigation. #itwasntme.”
After Blackpool police shared an image of the man, who looks very similar to Schwimmer’s Friends character Ross Gellar, on Tuesday, October 23, social media users quickly pointed out the resemblance.
“That’s clearly Russ, trying to frame Ross for ending up with Rachel,” one person tweeted, referring to the Ross doppelgänger Jennifer Aniston’s character, Rachel Green, went out with during a season 2 episode titled “The One With Russ.”
Other users flooded the Blackpool Police’s Facebook page with comments.
“Lay off him. He grew up with Monica. IF YOU DIDNT EAT FAST YOU DIDNT EAT,” one person quipped in the comments, referring to Courteney Cox’s character, Monica Gellar.
Another user joked, “I was going to read the report for this but it was 18 pages… FRONT AND BACK! It rambled on for so long that I fell aslEEP.” (Fans may remember Schwimmer’s Ross infamously fell asleep reading Rachel’s letter about their “break.”)
“A The One Where Ross Became a Thief,” a third person wrote.
After receiving more than 140,000 comments, the police department responded: “Thank you to everyone for your speedy responses. We have investigated this matter thoroughly and have confirmed that David Schwimmer was in America on this date. We’re so sorry it has to be this way.”
Friends ran from 1994 to 2004 on NBC. The sitcom also starred Aniston, Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry.