By SEAN DALY Special to the Daily Press
Matt LeBlanc is finally ready to tie the knot. The only question remaining is... when?
The star of TV’s hit comedy series “Friends” says he plans to marry actress Melissa McKnight, his girlfriend of five years, “sometime soon,” but denies rumors that the ceremony will take place during the upcoming Christmas holidays.
Why the secrecy? “I don't want helicopters overhead,” he says. “The idea of standing up there and taking your vows and hearing a helicopter or some jerk in the bushes... I just don’t want to have that in the back of my head.”
That’s precisely what happened when his “Friends” co-star Jennifer Aniston married actor Brad Pitt on a Malibu cliff in July, 2000. LeBlanc, 35, was the only principle cast member not in attendance for the nuptials — he was in Austria at the time filming “All The Queen’s Men,” a new historical comedy which opened Friday. “But I saw the pictures from the helicopter,” he laughs.
With or without a formal ceremony, LeBlanc has already assumed the role of father to McKnight’s two children: Tyler, 12, and Jaqueline, 8. “It’s not like I said, ‘I want to meet a single mother with two kids... I think that will be good for me,’” he admits. “But that’s the package and that’s OK with me.”
It’s an arrangement he knows all too well. An only child, LeBlanc’s parents divorced shortly after his birth. He was raised in the suburbs of Boston by his mother, Pat, a computer parts designer.
“My mom worked very hard to make sure we had food on the table,” he says. “I remember from a young age being really aware of the sacrifices she had to make for me.”
So far, LeBlanc’s mom has yet to see “All The Queen's Men,” a comedic tale about a group of Special Services agents who infiltrate a factory in Berlin by dressing as women.
“I haven’t really told her too much about it,” he confesses. “Just that I am doing this World War II movie. I might have left the drag thing out.”
LeBlanc says most of his tips on how to get in touch with his feminine side came from co-star Eddie Izzard, a comedian and well-known transvestite.
“He taught me how to walk like a man trying to be a woman,” the actor remembers. “It was pelvis forward, tits out, shoulders back, chin up and smile.”
Despite the coaching, LeBlanc says he looked more like “a gorilla” than a woman, adding: “I am just built all wrong to be wearing ladies clothes.” Funny enough, step-daughter Jacqueline seems to agree.
“She was like, ‘Matt, I saw that movie and you don’t look like a girl at all,’” he admits. “There is a brutal honesty that kids have. They smell bullshit a mile away and they don’t pull punches.”
Neither does LeBlanc — especially when it comes to his private life. He admits to being uncomfortable with fame and says he would gladly trade any Hollywood party for an afternoon at his northern California ranch. That’s where the 6’ 1” former model spent most of last week riding his dirt bike.
Today LeBlanc is relaxing in a penthouse office suite staring out toward the Hollywood Hills. He is wearing a dark navy two piece suit, careful to keep the jacket closed to conceal a salad dressing stain he acquired during lunch.
Those who don’t know LeBlanc are often surprised to find he is nothing at all like Joey Tribiani, the high-energy, dim-witted soap opera star he plays on “Friends.”
“People tend to talk very slowly around me,” he laughs. “I don't have the energy he has. People are always asking ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Are you tired?’” And I say, “’This is who I am.’”
“I have to kind of crank it up before the show every day,” he adds. “I have a bunch of coffee, get all wired up and go out there. So I guess I will miss that... but my body won’t.”
There are a few other things that seem to bring LeBlanc to life. One is riding motorcycles.
“I am a full on race nut, gear head kind of guy,” he says.
LeBlanc received his first bike as a gift at age 8, and entered numerous competitions as a teen, hoping one day to race professionally. But his mother disapproved, so he turned his talent briefly to carpentry before deciding to become an actor.
By 1987, LeBlanc had landed spots in TV commercials for Levi’s, Coca-Cola and Doritos. The following year he began formal training and landed a starring role in the short-lived TV series “TV 101.”
After nine seasons on “Friends,” he hopes to now turn his attention to feature films — (he has a small role in “Charlies Angels 2”) — but LeBlanc has not entirely ruled out appearing in a widely-rumored “Friends” spin-off series.
“If it was done correctly and the idea was right and I trusted the writers, absolutely I would consider it,” he says. But first there is the small matter of wrapping up the story-line on “Friends.”
So how would LeBlanc like to see the series end?
“Lisa Kudrow and I had a pitch we thought was great — that Joey and Phoebe (Kudrow’s character) have been sleeping together the whole time,” he reveals. “You flash back to all these really monumental events during the show, like Ross and Emily’s wedding in London and five minutes before the wedding is a scene you never saw of Joey and Phoebe coming out of the back room together. We wanted to do it as a flashback thing. But they didn’t go for it.” (Sean Daly is a freelance writer based in Santa Monica and president of Showtime Entertainment.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 26, 2002. Read the original PDF.