Say it ain't so!
After three decades in show business, Matt LeBlanc is ready to retire. "I would love that," the 50-year-old said on Conan Monday. "I would like to retire earlier than later, because I think I would like to do not a f--king thing. That's what I would like to do. Just nothing. Nothing! Zero."
"You say you would do nothing, but you have to do something. So, explain to me what that something would be," Conan O'Brien said. "You can't just lie in bed all day and have ice cream put into your veins intravenously—wait a minute, maybe you could. What do you want to do?"
On a "typical day," LeBlanc sad, he would like to "sleep as long as you want...or get up early, if you want." No matter the situation, the actor wants to be calling the shots. "It's just not having to go somewhere or having someone else telling you what you have to do," LeBlanc explained. "Maybe you go to the gym...or not go to the gym. Maybe you have nine cups of coffee...or not."
And it might be fun to "get up and go drive the bulldozer around—all day long," the Golden Globe winner pondered. "Maybe I'll get another one. We could race 'em! You can come over."
That gave O'Brien an idea.
"You can come here every single day. We'd pay you something. It wouldn't be what you're accustomed to, but it'd be something," he envisioned. "It would be like more than an intern but less than a producer." It only took a moment for LeBlanc to say "all right," which delighted O'Brien. "Look at that! It's that easy! What you should do is announce your retirement right here on the air and start showing up every night," he joked. "You should just retire right now."
"Right now?" LeBlanc asked. "I quit! I'm done! I'm coming onboard here."
LeBlanc was on Conan to promote Showtime's Episodes, which will end after five seasons on Oct. 8; the actor is also the host of BBC Two's Top Gear alongside Chris Harris and Rory Reid.
O'Brien couldn't let LeBlanc's interview end without asking about his most popular role: Joey Tribbiani on NBC's hit sitcom Friends. "It must be getting old that everywhere you go, I'm sure, people must be asking you about a Friends reunion," O'Brien said. "How do you deal with that?"
"First of all, I think it's great that the show still holds up. It's on all the time, everywhere. It's kind of great. But the Friends reunion question is funny. I guess it depends on my mood. Sometimes I'll say, 'Oh, yeah—that ship has sailed. It's not going to happen. It's about a finite amount of time in people's lives—blah, blah, blah,'" LeBlanc answered. "Sometimes I'll say, 'It was on last night—and you missed it! It was awesome! Where were you? It was unbelievable!'"
LeBlanc isn't mistaken for the character as much as he once was in the '90s and early 2000s. "What happens now is people will say, 'Wow, you're so...old.' This kid came up to me on the street and he was like, 'Hey...were you Joey's dad?' But when the show was on in primetime, before it was in reruns, it was like the big phenomenon. When I'd meet people they would speak really slowly," he said. "That was…I don't know. Am I doing a good job and they believe me? Or do they think I'm really dumb? 'How are you? Are you OK?' You drink a lot of coffee?'"