Friends star Matt LeBlanc’s wild Logies night finally revealed

Matt LeBlanc was flown in for the 1998 Logies – and ended up having a night to remember with one Aussie star, it’s now been revealed.

It was 1998 and the annual TV Week Logie Awards was unfolding without any surprises.

Daryl Somers was hosting again, Lisa McCune would win Gold again and her Blue Heelers co-star John Wood would miss out on taking home a trophy again, continuing what would become an almost decade-long losing streak.

If the evening seemed predictable for the local talent, think about how mind-numbingly tedious it may have been for the celebrities who’d flown in from overseas. Kenny Rogers had at least managed to belt out a tune, but Friends actor Matt LeBlanc was sitting at the bar, presumably wondering why interminable foreign awards nights were in the job description for a global sitcom superstar.

Matt LeBlanc on the 1998 Logies red carpet.

Spotting LeBlanc looking downcast and surrounded by flunkies, TV stalwart Larry Emdur grabbed a bottle from behind the bar and pushed through the actor’s entourage. “You look bored as sh*t, mate,” he said. “Want a Sambuca?”

LeBlanc’s eyes lit up. “Hell, yeah. Are you Italian?” he replied to the then thick-haired host of The Price Is Right.

“No,” Emdur answered. “Does it matter?” He promptly poured his new drinking chum a shot.

For the rest of the night the pair whooped it up, sending staff at Melbourne’s Crown Towers in search of more bottles of the liqueur.

At one point (or possibly many), Emdur told LeBlanc his wife Sylvie loved him. When he woke the next day, head thumping, the host found a personally signed photo from LeBlanc to Sylvie pushed under his door. As Emdur tells Stellar, “I thought it was really sweet he remembered – because I didn’t remember a thing.”

Emdur at the 2012 Logies with colleague Kylie Gillies.

Notably, the night Emdur was carousing with LeBlanc was the same evening a naked Tracy Grimshaw, then host of Today, inadvertently locked herself out of her hotel room after drinking tequila shots with James Packer.

These and other illuminating Logies anecdotes can be found in this week’s Stellar magazine, which pays special tribute to an awards show that has been forced to take a year off due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Morning Show host Emdur will be equally restrained when the Logies hopefully resumes next year.

“It’s a great chance to catch up with old friends, though obviously since the introduction of phone cameras, I have given up Sambuca,” he says. “I still feel sick every time I smell the stuff.”

The June 28 issue of Stellar magazine.

The June 28 edition of Stellar is available in today’s Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun.