Matt LeBlanc

He had eleven dollars to his name when he got the call about Friends. Before that, he'd bounced through failed pilots and a ketchup commercial lucrative enough to buy a house, a car, and a motorcycle. NBC cast him as Joey Tribbiani, the sweet, dumb actor who couldn't book a job, which was basically autobiographical at that point. The show turned him into one of the highest-paid performers on television, earning $1 million per episode by the final seasons. His film work (Ed, Lost in Space) went nowhere, and the Joey spinoff lasted two seasons, proving the character only worked as part of the ensemble.

He hasn't taken a screen role since CBS canceled Man with a Plan in 2020, and he doesn't need to: he reportedly pulls around $20 million a year from Friends syndication royalties, a deal all six cast members negotiated for 2% of backend profits. When Matthew Perry died, he posted a personal Instagram tribute calling him a brother, the first of the Friends cast to say anything publicly. He shows up to the occasional concert, posts about cars on Instagram, and otherwise stays in Camarillo being nobody's idea of a celebrity.

He studied building construction management at Wentworth Institute of Technology and dropped out freshman year to act, which makes him a trained carpenter who became a fake one on television. He's fluent in French, which makes Joey's catastrophic language-lesson episode something of a private joke. The character never had to choose between work and a sick kid. Marina, his daughter, was diagnosed with cortical dysplasia at eleven months and started seizing at eight months. He took a five-year break from acting after NBC canceled Joey, largely to be around while she recovered. The seizures stopped by age two. Joey would have been back on set the next week.