Leslie Jordan Plays Tour Guide on New York City Bus – PEOPLE
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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Leslie Jordan!
The Emmy Award winner, 67, turned heads atop a double-decker bus in New York City last Wednesday, playing tour guide to a group of devoted fans who bought tickets. Despite drawing major applause and laughter from his passengers, the Call Me Kat star says he didn’t do much prep work.
“I really didn’t because I got nervous,” Jordan — who partnered with booking platform GetYourGuide on the campy excursion — tells PEOPLE. “I did have a cheat sheet, things that had happened in Times Square, but mainly I tried to bring it to me and my experiences. This is my New York. I got a little dirty.”
He made that clear to passengers from the get-go, telling them, “We’re gonna have some fun today, because, you know what? I’m gonna make it all up as I go, because I don’t know a whole lot about New York City. But they’re paying me a whole lot of money.”
Indeed, what he lacked in landmark insight, Jordan more than made up for with sassy commentary. Among the highlights: “I can’t work this way,” he joked as a cameraman walked through the tight quarters.
At another point, he recalled walking up Park Avenue in his youth as he spotted “a beautiful girl standing there in a mink coat.”
“She opened it and had nothing on,” he continued as passengers giggled. “She was completely naked! I screamed and told her, ‘Honey, you’re barking up the wrong tree.'”
Nick Maslow
Along for the trip down memory lane was pal Robyn Schall, a stand-up comedian whose video about her “2020 goal list” went viral in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You come to New York, you steal a bus, you kidnap all these people, and you don’t invite me?” Schall said in a comedic entrance.
The funnyman’s favorite tour moment, however, was driving near his first apartment on Lexington Avenue, where he lived long before finding success in Hollywood.
“I was just thinking, ‘My God — how many years ago that was? Forty, fifty years ago,'” Jordan — who recently bought his first condo in West Hollywood, California — tells PEOPLE. “It just seemed so full circle. I was really a struggling actor then. I had an agency here that handled me only for commercials and I was told, ‘Well, they shoot commercials back east when it’s pretty. So you’ve got to go back east when it’s nice and they can shoot.’ So I would come back here for part of the year. It was such a struggle.”
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“But that was a moment,” he adds, “to drive past and think, ‘Wow, you know, I’ve come pretty far.'”
As much as Jordan appreciated the tour, he admits his famous Will & Grace character, the fabulously flamboyant Beverly Leslie, would not be so thrilled to board a bus.
“I think this would be a little beneath him,” Jordan says of Karen Walker’s rich nemesis. “He’s probably in a limo… a car. You never say ‘limo’ out here. I’ve learned the language: car, and it can’t be white. It’s got to be black or navy.”