Today, he has nothing to hide
Leslie Jordan, who plays a flamboyant AA sponsor on the new teen soap “Hidden Palms,” says people who use drugs and alcohol are masking something.
“With me, it was my homosexuality. It was just easier to be gay when I was high. So I stayed high for 33 years,” he explains in his Chattanooga drawl.
“It was recreational, then it just evolved. … I don’t know when it went from recreational to medicinal, but that’s the line you cross where I needed a drink to get to a party, to be funny, to be me.”
Jordan, 52 – who won an Emmy last year for his recurring bit as Megan Mullaly‘s pretentious rival on “Will & Grace” – has tapped into his tumultuous past for “Hidden Palms,” which airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on the CW network (cable channel 22 in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene).
He plays Jesse Jo, the local drag queen and confidant to troubled high-schooler Johnny Miller (“The OC’s” Taylor Handley), who’s struggling to stay sober.
Like his past roles, Jordan delivers with an innate irreverence and dramatic honesty that has made the 4-foot 11-inch actor one of the biggest character players in the business.
“I’ve been a huge fan of his for a long time,” says “Hidden Palms” creator Kevin Williamson (“Dawson’s Creek”). “He has this amazing one-man show, ‘Like a Dog on Linoleum,’ in which he tells his life story.
“I’ve seen it several times, and I mean, he’s got so much depth. Not everybody could make you laugh and cry at the same line of dialogue.”
Jordan is nearly 10 years sober after a drunk-driving incident that found him sharing a cell with Robert Downey Jr. in 1997. They later worked together on “Ally McBeal.”
“I stayed sober, didn’t take an aspirin. Nothing,” he says. “And I worked my (behind) off, and my career began to blossom.”
Jordan arrived in Los Angeles in 1982 on a Trailways bus “with a dream and $1,200 pinned in my undershorts.”
Although he was told his impish looks and Southern-speak would hold him back, he’s amassed close to a hundred TV and film credits, including the hit series “Ugly Betty.”
He got his big break as the hapless ex-con, Kyle, in a 1989 episode of “Murphy Brown.”
“When that episode aired, my agent called the next day and said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. The phone is ringing off the hook,’ ” Jordan recalls. “(T)hey started trotting me out like an aging show pony, and here I am.”
He’s juggling a laundry list of projects, including an upcoming HBO series with “Designing Women” producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.
Jordan plans to publish his memoir, “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet: Or How I Became Insufferably Satisfied With Myself,” next April.
“I read some of it, and I was thinking, my mother will die,” he giggles.
“She told me one time, ‘Leslie, honey, if I live to be 105, I will never understand this deep-seeded need you have to air your dirty laundry. … Why can’t you just whisper it to a therapist?’ “
The birthday bunch
Actor Gene Wilder is 74. Actor Chad Everett is 70. Actress Adrienne Barbeau is 62. Actor Hugh Laurie (“House”) is 48. Actor Joshua Jackson (“Dawson’s Creek”) is 29. Actor Shia LaBeouf (“Surf’s Up”) is 21.