Mayim Bialik says Call Me Kat cast learned of Leslie Jordan's death while 'waiting for him' on set
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Mayim Bialik is opening up about the day that the Call Me Kat cast learned of their costar Leslie Jordan's death.
The actress revealed that the entire cast and crew of the beloved Fox sitcom were all "waiting" for Jordan to arrive for work to begin filming that day when they learned the tragic news. Jordan died at 67 after suffering a "sudden cardiac dysfunction" that caused him to crash his vehicle into a building in Los Angeles on Oct. 24.
"It was a sudden thing. We were all at work and waiting for him to show up at work, so it was very, very, very complicated to have the whole crew there and the whole cast," Bialik said during Tuesday's episode of Jennifer Hudson Show. "You know, we were a family."
Bialik explained that Call Me Kat's cast was a tight-knit team because the series was "one of the first shows back" after the COVID-19 lockdowns. "We kind of became this little COVID unit," she recalled. "We were often the only people that we were interacting with outside of whoever was in our homes so we were all very close."
"People knew Leslie Jordan as Leslie Jordan; not necessarily just as the character that he played on our show," Bialik continued. "He's been in people's lives and, especially during COVID, he was in people's Instagram feeds and a lot of people really formed a real connection with him and he loved that. He loved being approachable. He loved being loved."
The series honored Jordan in a January episode by having his character, Phil, move to Tahiti with his new husband. At the end, Bialik, Cheyenne Jackson, Kyla Pratt, Julian Gant, and Swoosie Kurtz broke the fourth wall and spoke directly to the audience. "What we've done here is given Phil a happy ending. What we're really doing is mourning the loss of our dear friend, Leslie Jordan," Bialik said at the time. "He is irreplaceable. We will miss him very much. Love, light, Leslie."
FOX via Getty Images Leslie Jordan & Mayim Bialik
"When he passed, we all — it's rare to find a group of people so unanimous about something so quickly and we all just said, 'We want him to live forever,'" she told host Jennifer Hudson about the tribute. "We all kind of felt like this is a really hard thing to do. There's no right way to do it, but our showrunners, Jim Patterson and Maria Ferrari, they really kind of ushered us through it but it was very emotional to decide how do you grieve also, while having to act as people grieving?"
"This whole season for us feels like it's the season that we lost Leslie," Bialik concluded. "It's been hard, and we're grateful to have gotten the opportunity to work with him the way we did and in the time of his life that we got to work with him."
Watch Bialik talk about Jordan in the clip above.
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