Friends star Matt LeBlanc: A young fan thought I was Joey’s dad

Matt LeBlanc has revealed he was once mistaken for the father of his famous character from Friends.

The Top Gear star, 51, played soap actor Joey Tribbiani for 10 years between 1994 and 2004. He said people still stop him in the street to talk to him about the sitcom and the show has found a new life on Netflix.

He told US chat show Live With Kelly And Ryan: “It’s unbelievable for me, it seems every year a new generation is watching it.

“I was walking down the street one day, this was a few years ago, and this kid, he must have been 13, 14, he’s like, ‘Oh my god, you’re Joey’s dad!’.

“And my response was, ‘Scram!’. Like an old guy would say.”

LeBlanc also addressed the controversy about the size of the apartment lived in by the characters played by Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox.

He was asked by Kelly Ripa, who was starring in a soap opera at the time Friends was on television, how they could afford their “palatial loft” while she was living somewhere that could “arguably be considered a shoebox with a hot plate and a shoilet, like a shower toilet”.

He replied: “This has been a point of contention for a while now because other people have brought it up, and how I think we dealt with it on the show was it was Ross and Monica’s grandmother’s apartment that was rent-controlled, maybe even their great-grandmother.

“Also on television everything looks bigger, it wasn’t that big in real life. I think also the purple paint makes it look bigger, if you look close the faucet on the sink was old and crappy,  it wasn’t that nice.”