James Marsden has removed his name from the list of potential men who fathered January Jones' son. The Mad Men actress has never revealed Xander's paternity, though Marsden was rumored to have been involved with the TV star when she got pregnant in 2011.
"There's so much stupid talk out there," Marsden says in the December issue of Playboy. "I think that came from somebody thinking we were both in X-Men so it must be true."
Luckily, the single stars are able to laugh off such speculation. "Every time I see January, she's like, 'Hey, father of my baby,'" Marsden tells the mag in its recurring 20 Questions feature.
Jones, 35, has no intention of ever revealing the identity of her mystery man. "That's my son's business," she told The New York Times in May. "It's not the public's business." Speaking to Net-a-Porter's The Edit that some month, Jones revealed that she had always planned to be a single mom.
"It was something I went in to knowingly, I was prepared mentally—and I was excited about it," she said. Jones once again refused to reveal who fathered her son, telling the magazine, "It's just not something the public needs to know. I don't divulge my sexual preferences. There are parts of your life—no matter what your job—that should remain private."
Marsden doesn't mention Jones again in the Playboy article, though he does name-drop many other celebrities. Opening up about his early days in Hollywood, the 40-year-old actor recalls an unusual dinner he had with Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart, who were not yet married at the time.
"I did the last season of Ally McBeal, and it was right when Harrison was starting to date Calista Flockhart. I had become friends with her, and one night she said, 'Come to dinner with me and Harrison.' I'm like, 'Me, you and him?' It turned out to be a small group of us, thankfully, but I ended up as her wingman.
"We had dinner someplace in Brentwood and then went back to his house. He put music on and made everybody drinks. He was giggly and goofy around her but pretty aloof with the rest of us," Marsden remembers. "I kept thinking we should leave the two of them alone, but Calista was like, 'Don't leave, don't leave, don't leave.' I'm making him sound like a rapist, but he was very hospitable. She was just really nervous. Anyway, we had more drinks, he played more music, and then at some point he gave me a look that said, 'Okay, you've got to get the f--k out of here.'"
Before he became an actor, however, a 16-year-old Marsden bumped into Candace Cameron and her sisters during a trip to Hawaii. "We hung out by the pool the whole trip," he says. "They invited me to Los Angeles, and I flew out to see a taping of [Kirk Cameron's] Growing Pains and Full House."
That experience led to another encounter with a famous face. "The dialect coach from Growing Pains introduced me to Leonardo DiCaprio," Marsden says. "A few years later, after I'd moved to L.A., I played two-on-two basketball at the Oakwood Apartments, and one day we needed a guy, so I called Leo to play. He said sure. It was just as his career was taking off." (The Wolf of Wall Street star later played George Clooney on the court, but that didn't go as well as it did with Marsden.)
None of those celebrity run-ins compare to the time Marsden met the most famous romance novel model in the world. "There's a place where you can ride horses under the Hollywood sign and then go to a Mexican restaurant," the Anchorman 2 star says. "Everyone gets drunk on tequila and rides the horses back. Fabio was on the ride with us, and I remember thinking, 'This town is so f--king awesome.'"