FRIGHT NIGHTS

Its "The One With Plants Gone Wild!" Friends star David Schwimmer take on his first horror role in Goosebumps: The Vanishing

- Damian Holbrook

GOOSEBUMPS: THE VANISHING

SEASON PREMIERE, FRIDAY, JAN. 10, DISNEY+ AND HULU

How's this for a pivot? Best known for the comedy series Friends, David Schwimmer is turning over a new leaf with a scary-fun role in Season 2 of Disney+/Hulu's top-notch Goosebumps anthology. "I just thought it was going to be a blast," he admits of his first real foray into horror. "I'm a physical actor, but I've never really had the chance to do horror, action and comedy. To blend all those three was a dream."

Of the invasive nightmare variety, of course. After all, this plant-themed season is based on the works of R.L. Stine (see sidebar), the king of late-20th-century young adult thrillers. Unlike the first season, which leaned heavily into the bestselling author's more supernatural stories for the tale of Pacific Northwest classmates terrorized by the sins of their parents' past, the all-new entry has a decidedly sci-fi vibe. Schwimmer stars as Anthony Brewer, a single dad and botanist who has returned to the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn to dig into a personal, never-solved mystery with some help from an old pal, cop Jen Diaz (Ana Ortiz). "It was a tragic event that happened 30 years prior, in 1994, to my older brother, who, along with three other teenagers, disappeared one night," explains Schwimmer. "They just went missing and are presumed dead. So there's this trauma that's affected Ana's character and mine." In the premiere's opening, we see exactly what happened to the group after they broke into an abandoned military fort and, well, let's just say this isn't your campy Scholastic Book Fair Goosebumps.