By Angus Dalton
In those early days of lockdown, once the initial panic had subsided and we were staring down the barrel of endless days of mundanity, there was one phrase that begged to be delivered in an overemphasised southern drawl that came to dominate our household.
“Well, shit. What y’all doin’?”
Comedian Leslie Jordan poses for photographers as he arrives at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington in April.Credit: Jose Luis Magana
Leslie Jordan had invented the perfect mantra for monotony. The actor, who died on Monday night in LA in a car crash, aged 67, became a source of solidarity and levity for millions after he started posting videos twice a day to his Instagram account in early 2020. His posts had the soul-soothing quality of FaceTiming your favourite quirky relative.
From an AirBnB he booked in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jordan documented himself spiralling on the couch, attempting not to murder his family, entertaining himself by learning Spanish (hashtagged #sillygringo), and painting his toenails.
In those bewildering early days, I didn’t need an excruciating celebrity rendition of Imagine. I didn’t want glossy Kardashians. I couldn’t cope with Ellen likening lockdown in her $52.8 million mansion to jail.
I needed an extremely close-up selfie video of Jordan eating an egg sandwich while the unmistakable sound of porn played in the background.
“Oh don’t you dare judge me,” he scolded his followers. “It’s better than CNN.”
After a fan from Sydney asked Jordan if he was “fried” while filming his lockdown videos, the actor kicked off a series he dubbed “pillow talk”, in which he shared stories and gossipy anecdotes from his career.
“I hadn’t been fried since 1978!” Jordan retorted, before recounting a story where he and his best friend were arrested at Atlanta Airport because they “freaked out” on a travelator while high on ecstasy. Jordan battled addiction and alcoholism in the 80s and 90s and, after sharing a jail cell with Robert Downey Jr in 1997, went sober for the rest of his life.
Other pillow talk anecdotes Jordan shared included Betty White “walloping the bejesus” out of him with a skillet on Boston Legal and being pranked by George Clooney, who asked the costume department of Bodies of Evidence to add half an inch to Jordan’s pants each day to trick him into thinking he’d lost weight.
Jordan dressed up in a suit to celebrate hitting a million Instagram followers in April 2020. By the time of his death, he’d clocked 5.8 million.
The glimmerings of Jordan’s late-career renaissance began in 2013. He endeared himself to a young, queer audience when he joined RuPaul’s Drag Race as a guest judge and also made his first appearance in the American Horror Story franchise, playing a witches’ councillor in Coven.
In 2014 Jordan had an explosive two-week stint on Celebrity Big Brother in the UK, during which he struck up a vicious rivalry with model and TV personality Angelique “Frenchy” Morgan. Jordan was booted from the Big Brother House after only a fortnight but was voted by fans as the most entertaining housemate. (Jordan later blamed his profanity-laden tantrums on hypoglycaemia.)
The Will & Grace star had two more roles in American Horror Story, directed a musical on RuPaul’s Drag Race season 14 and appeared on The Masked Singer last year. In 2018 he starred in an instalment of the Sharknado films and last year appeared in The United States vs. Billie Holiday.
But it was really the actor’s own content that relaunched Jordan to the peak of his career. In an entertainment industry that doesn’t easily elevate senior stars Jordan rocketed back to relevance on the whim of his own irresistible impish character and charm.
Off the back of his lockdown fame Jordan released a gospel album and published his second memoir named for his famed catchphrase: How Y’all Doing?: Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived.
“I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m perfectly comfortable with who I am, so it’s all kind of gravy,” he told Good Morning America upon his book’s release last year.
“Whatever I feel like I want to do seems to come to fruition. It’s just a good time to be Leslie Jordan.”
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