Fabulous Flashback: Leslie Jordan - Complex, Comical & Courageous (Originally published in 2003)

Nicholas Snow's Perspective of "Sordid Lives" Through The Years

Leslie Jordan. Photo courtesy of Ed Baran Publicity.

The Sordid Lives Star Discusses Will & Grace, The Hollywood Closet & Drug Abuse

By Nicholas Snow

“I love working on that show,” says actor Jordan about NBC’s Will & Grace before commenting on the show’s creators and executive producers. “You have Max Mutchnick who’s gay, and David Kohan who’s straight. It’s a marriage made in heaven. They are both intrinsically some of the funniest people I know.”
So, how did Jordan, who also reprises his stage role as Brother Boy in the film version of Del Shore’s Sordid Lives, get cast in Will & Grace?

“This is what I heard,” explains Jordan. “They had written an episode for Joan Collins who had appeared on the show before, in which they wanted her to steal the maid, Rosario…and then for her and Karen to get in this big dynasty witch fight. At the last moment, Joan Collins said, ‘No, I won’t have my wig jerked off.’ So, my agent called me and said, run over there and meet with them, and wear something sort of Truman Capote-esque.”

Well, it turns out that Jordan owns the perfect, three piece suit, with a big straw fedora, gifted to him from John Ritter, when Ritter and Jordan worked together on the TV series Hearts of Fire. Jordan showed up to the Will & Grace casting office looking just like Truman Capote, and the rest is history. As the character Beverly Leslie (the use of the name Leslie is coincidental), Jordan has appeared twice as Karen’s nemesis (played by Megan Mullally).

Jordan described his experiences on the set.

“You shoot the screen as scripted, and then they run in and whisper a line to you and a line to your scene partner, and thus, you get these wonderful reactions. Those four (the stars) are the most down to earth. They’re so cute. Even at fourth or fifth season, they still care about what’s going on with their show.”

Those who’ve followed my media pursuits over the last decade know that I always discuss the “Hollywood Closet” in interviews, and my conversation with Jordan was no exception. We discussed the leading man type whose career may be dependent upon people perceiving him to be heterosexual, and of course, those Tom Cruise rumors.

“I worked on a show once, not Will & Grace,” explains Jordan, “where the lead actor was in a long-term relationship and gay, but he wasn’t out to the public. When we would be in the make-up trailer with the ‘girls’, he was chatty chatty chatty, but the minute we hit the set, he put on the butch thing, and I was in the deep freeze. I just thought it was unusual that this man, who I knew to be gay, wouldn’t have much to do with me.”

On the day I interviewed him, Jordan explained, “We had a huge argument, all of us at dinner last night, about Tom Cruise. There are gay people who think everybody’s gay, but there are straight men out there who like women. There are straight ballet dancers that like women. It’s like what Tallulah Bankhead said about Tab Hunter when asked if he was gay. ‘I don’t know dahling. He hasn’t sucked my cock.”

As a recent gathering of the cast of the film version of Sordid Lives, I asked Jordan, in front of a large audience, how it feels to be a gay role model. He jokingly accused me of outing him right then and there, but the reality is that he’s openly gay, very proud of it, and he delivers an incredible performance in Sordid Lives as “Brother Boy”, a drag queen confined to an institution for restorative therapy because he dresses up like Country Western divas and worships them.

Leslie Jordan as Brother Boy. Photo courtesy of Ed Baran Publicity.

About the other cast members present at the above-mentioned Sordid Lives gathering, Jordan explained, “They laughed all the way home because everyone on that stage knew me prior to getting sober five years ago. During the run of Sordid Lives the play, I went to jail five times. So they thought that was just hilarious. My primary purpose today is to stay sober and clean from crystal methamphetamine, because I had a terrible problem with it. It was my little secret. I read recently that crystal methamphetamine addiction in West Hollywood is on the epidemic level. If anything was gained from the AIDS epidemic, it’s that the gay community got a spiritual center. These drugs are eating away at that spiritual center….whatever we gained. So to be referred to as a role model among people who knew I went to jail five times….it was hilarious to them.”

Interestingly, Jordan hopes for another sort of gay role model to emerge.

”I do wish with all my heart that some very famous, very masculine actor or sports figure would come out, because the lesbians now have Rosie and they have Ellen. They have role models. And I still don’t think there are really any role models on the big icon level for gay men. I wish we had a champion.”

I do think of myself as a role model, and I do try to practice the principles that I preach.

The last time I went to jail, I called Del Shores and asked him to get me out. And he said, ‘I have to make a phone call’. And he called a friend of his who has been sober for many years, and she said, ‘leave him’, and I wouldn’t speak to either of them for a long long time, but it’s the best thing that ever happened.”

Jordan also penned and starred in the award winning independent film, Lost In The Pershing Point Hotel.

“I found out a long time ago that when the scary monsters under the bed begin their low moan, I write. I’ve always done that,” explains Jordan. “I’ve journaled for years. When I got sober and stopped drugging, it was very important that I write about all those lost years. I decided to write a screenplay. I just told the story of moving to Atlanta, Georgia in 1973 from a very devote Southern Baptist family, coming out of the closet, and living in this indigent hotel. I was both figuratively and literally lost in the Pershing Point Hotel. I never could find my room. I would wander for days and meet up with different people doing various kinds of drugs. I’d find myself on speed and couldn’t get to sleep.

At the time of our interview, Jordan told me about being considered for a starring role in the forthcoming Cohen Brothers movie, Bad Santa, opposite his former Hearts of Fire co-star, Billy Bob Thornton. Thornton’s character, and a dwarf “cook up this scheme that they’ll dress up like Santa Claus and an elf, and get hired in the mid-west in a mall and case the point and rob it,” explains Jordan. Incidentally, Jordan’s first feature film was entitled “Frankenstein General Hospital.”

Jordan told me one of his favorite anecdotes on the set of Sordid Lives.

“Delta Burke showed up,” Jordan says with a laugh. “She brought Gerald with her, her husband. Here’s this big, masculine, all-man, and he’s just putty around her, carrying that little Yorky….carrying her purse. They have such a wonderful sweet relationship. I’m sitting there all dolled up as Brother Boy, and I said, ‘Gerald, does this do anything for you at all?’ And he turned sort of crimson, and said, ‘Not a thing, buddy, I’m sorry to say, but not a thing.’”

How does one sum up such a wonderful, complex, spiritual man? How about in his own words?

“I’m a sober, gay, actor who is trying very hard to not have my self-worth be dictated by whether I’m working or not. For years and years, I was my job. I know that I’ll be taken care of. I know that, when it’s time, that big job will present itself. Cuz, call it the short man’s ego, what I want is to walk into a Seven Eleven in Omaha Nebraska, and I want them to shit and fall back in it.”

I feel privileged to have met Leslie Jordan on several occasions, and for me, he truly is a role model. I was particularly moved when he explained, “My journey into Sordid Lives, the movie…has been this wonderful sort of journey into my Queerdom, into my sobriety, into myself.”

To Leslie, I say, you make us proud.

Find more photos like this on NotesFromHollywood.com

Photos of the "Sordid Lives" Cast and Creator Reunion at the Camelot Theaters, Palm Springs, California, May 31, 2002, by Nicholas Snow