His TV alter ego is still struggling to make it in Hollywood, but Matt LeBlanc is sitting pretty these days in real life.
At 37, the two-time Emmy nominee knows there are no sure things in television, but he’s feeling pretty confident about “Joey,” the sitcom spinoff premiering Thursday in the same time period previously occupied by its parent show, “Friends.”
The new series finds Joey Tribbiani (LeBlanc) finally ready to make a serious stab at an acting career, now that his New York chums have married or otherwise moved on with their lives.
With that new resolve, Joey moves to Los Angeles, where he reunites with his older sister, Gina (Drea de Matteo, hot off “The Sopranos”), and her 20-year-old son, Michael (Paulo Costanzo), the nephew he barely knows.
Just as “Frasier” did so successfully before it, “Joey” takes a beloved comedy character and moves him into a completely new, family-centric context that opens up new story lines. The show is largely written and produced by “Friends” alumni, and early critical buzz is very, very favorable.
“When you are lucky enough to find a character that somehow connects with viewers the way they connected with Joey Tribbiani, I think to come back as a completely different character is just asking a lot of an audience,” LeBlanc says. “Obviously, we’re following the ‘Frasier’ model, where a familiar character continues without a break, just in a different context.”
If LeBlanc feels relaxed and reasonably confident about his life and career, things were very different a decade ago when “Friends” was about to premiere. In a fall 1994 interview, LeBlanc admitted to being depressed and lonely, missing his close-knit family back in Massachusetts.
“That was a very tough time for me,” LeBlanc says today. “I was at a crossroads when (‘Friends’) came around. I had been struggling as an actor for quite a while, had a little bit of success here and there, but at that particular point, and for a year prior to that, I was really hurting. I was really questioning whether I was going to spend the rest of my life doing this, or whether I needed to read the handwriting on the wall and get a ‘real’ job and become more responsible, in terms of thinking about my future.
“It was just a lousy, lousy feeling, and I was missing my family probably more than I ever had before. Some things haven’t changed in that respect. I can fly back and forth, and my family can come out there, but they’re mainly still back East and I’m out here where I have my own family now. My mom comes out to visit her new granddaughter quite a bit.”
If his real family is the most important thing in LeBlanc’s life, family also played a key role in persuading him to sign on for “Joey,” a character whose own family life on “Friends” was vague and ill-defined.
“If you look at the arc of Joey’s character on ‘Friends,’ vs. the other characters on that show, Joey was actually the least-developed character,” LeBlanc points out. “Remember those holiday episodes? It was generally the Gellers or the Greens, or maybe the Bings. There was, I think, one episode my parents were in, and that was very early on. You just didn’t learn much about Joey’s family, ever.”
