“Normally, there’s a code with actors,” Kudrow explained. “We don’t give each other notes under any circumstances, and we don’t comment on each other’s performances.” It was almost taboo, what Cox was suggesting, but she knew if they could all agree to it, then it would make them infinitely better as a cast. And since she was the most famous one among them, it was on her to offer that permission. Given her status, Cox could have done the opposite, behaving like the lead and letting the others settle into supporting roles around her. Instead, she used her clout to cement them as a team. Kudrow recalled: “She was the one who set that tone and made us a real group.”
Matt LeBlanc was nervous, even so. Looking at this cast of characters, he knew there was at least one who could be kicked out of the group, and it was him. Phoebe was a weirdo, sure—but Joey was a letch. The original character breakdown described him as a “handsome, smug, macho guy in his twenties.” His interests included “women, sports, women, New York, women” and himself. On paper, it might seem funny to have this egotistical creep juxtaposed with two sensitive beta males and three women, but how many times could Joey leer at his female counterparts and make crude jokes before everyone turned on this sleazeball?
It wasn’t just Joey at issue, either. LeBlanc was greener than his castmates, a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed during his first audition. “He wasn’t quite as experienced, it felt, as some of the other actors,” Kauffman remembered. She was right. LeBlanc had a lean list of series credits by that time, and his biggest gig thus far had been a long-running commercial for Heinz ketchup. Even in a cast of relative unknowns, he stood out as a newbie. And it didn’t help that he walked into the audition room with a hangover and a bloody nose.
LeBlanc had gotten into acting as a side gig. He’d grown up in Nonantum, or “The Lake,”28 a predominantly Italian-American village in Newton, Massachusetts. There, he said, “everybody had some type of trade. That’s what you did.” His was carpentry, which he began studying during high school, and later at Boston’s Wentworth Institute of Technology. He left after one semester (thinking that, in this line of work, higher education was basically pointless, “like going to LEGO college”), and started working on a construction crew building houses in the nearby suburb, Natick. He had skill as a carpenter (certainly more than Joey would), and he had a good job. But he was also eighteen and, as he put it, “I got ants in my pants.”
A friend suggested he go down to New York and give modeling a shot. He was already in great shape from his labor-intensive job, and it could be a good way to make some money on the side. He went down to the city to meet a photographer, shelling out five hundred bucks for a set of head shots. The photographer was happy to take his money, though declined to inform him that, at 5'10", he would never be hired as a model. Looking around, LeBlanc figured it out for himself, but there was no getting his money back. He headed back down to the street, feeling like an idiot. Then he saw a girl.
Telling this story decades later, LeBlanc had to admit it—the moment that changed his life was a very Joey moment. The girl passed him on the sidewalk and he turned around to check her out. She turned around to check him out, too, and they both started laughing. The young woman was an actress on her way to an audition and invited him to tag along. She’d later introduce him to her manager, who thought LeBlanc had a great look for commercials and signed him as a client. “I’d just hoped to get laid before I got back on the train,” he recalled. “So, I was pretty happy with how that turned out.”
LeBlanc did have fast and remarkable success in commercials, doing ads for Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, 7 Up, Fruitful Bran, and Heinz in his first three years alone. The ads gave him a degree of experience, and enough cash to pay for real training. He signed up for classes with Flo Greenberg, founder of the Actor’s Workshop. After the success of the Heinz commercial, LeBlanc began to get calls from LA, urging him to come out and read for sitcoms. LeBlanc hesitated—not because he didn’t want the jobs, but because he felt he just wasn’t good enough yet. He still knew more about carpentry than acting.
“Everybody wanted him,” Greenberg later said. “He said to me, ‘Flo, I’m not quite ready to go. I know that we need to work a little bit more.’” But it was now or never. If he waited too long, the buzz from the commercial would fade and there’d be another hot new face all over the television. He asked Greenberg if she would let him come back and work with her soon. Maybe he’d make some sitcom money and then he could fly back to New York for a whole month to train with her. Would that be okay? She told him, of course, anytime, and then she urged him out the door, knowing this was goodbye. “He was sent for, and he had to go.”
Of course, the buzz faded, anyway. LeBlanc was not an instant star, though he did book a series, TV 101, starring Sam Robards, which ran on CBS and was canceled in its first season. In 1991, he landed a recurring role on Married with Children, playing Kelly Bundy’s boyfriend, Vinnie Verducci. He’d play the role again on the spin-off series Top of the Heap, and then once more on the spin-off of that spin-off Vinnie & Bobby—both of which were canceled after seven episodes. Next came some music-video gigs, a couple episodes of Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries, and a few more Italian Guy characters. If he was bothered by getting pigeonholed into this macho, leather-jacket niche, he didn’t complain. It was a stereotype, yes, and often quite an ugly one with undertones of criminality and misogyny that had plagued the Italian-American community since long before The Godfather. But again, it’s unlikely that any of that crossed LeBlanc’s mind as a young twentysomething with bills to pay, and absolutely nothing to pay them with. Beggars can’t be choosers, and by early 1994, that’s pretty much what he was. The commercial money was gone, and one day he checked his bank balance and knew he’d have to find another guest spot (or a day job) immediately. So when his agent called saying he’d been asked to read for a pilot role—another chauvinistic, leather-clad Italian Guy—LeBlanc said yes, please. He had eleven dollars.
Then LeBlanc had a really stupid idea—and not a Joey-style stupid idea that ends in laughter and knee-slapping. It was his buddy’s suggestion actually, but LeBlanc went along with it, perhaps because he was so excited just to have a potential new gig. The night before the audition, LeBlanc was hanging out with another actor, running his lines. His friend had a thought: This was a show about young, close friends, right? So, maybe they should quit practicing and instead go out and “prepare”—by getting shitfaced. Just like real friends do, right? Right!
Cut to the next morning: LeBlanc woke up on his friend’s couch, stumbled into the bathroom, tripped and fell face-first onto the edge of the toilet seat. A few hours later, he was standing in an audition room, in front of Kauffman, delivering a monologue about women and ice cream.29 Kauffman looked at him—at the enormous bloody gash running the entire length of his nose. “What happened to your face?”
This anecdote would become Friends lore in years to come—the story of how Matt LeBlanc Joey’d his way into stardom. But back then, it seemed to underscore LeBlanc’s youth and inexperience. Still, Kauffman and Crane loved his reading. LeBlanc had made the choice to play Joey as dim-witted, though they hadn’t written him as such. It worked so well, giving Joey a sense of innocence and sweetness, which tempered his machismo. And LeBlanc had a knack for playing dumb—no easy feat in comedy. It wasn’t broad or childish; LeBlanc just played him a little ditzy. That was great for the character, but if this guy was a nitwit in real life—and what with the toilet injury, he wasn’t coming off like a genius—they’d be sunk. Hank Azaria had also come in to read for the part (and would later be cast as David, Phoebe’s beloved Scientist Guy), and he seemed a safer bet. They were leaning toward him when Barbara Miller, then the head of casting at Warner Bros.,