Leah Remini

The Queen of The King of Queens is Crazy About Her Prince of a Pooch

By Lori Golden

This is an exciting time for Leah Remini. After landing roles in several failed TV sitcoms, she finally hit the jackpot as comedian Kevin James’s wife on the CBS series The King of Queens.  As she waits to return for the show’s sixth season, she’s planning her upcoming wedding this summer to longtime boyfriend Angelo Pagan.  Her life seems to be void of the usual Hollywood hoopla, content to just spend time with close friends, her very tight-knit family, and the love of her life – her two-year old Siberian Husky named Blue.

Although Leah was advised early on to lose her Brooklyn accent, it’s perfect for her role as Carrie Heffernan, a legal secretary married to a parcel delivery driver, living in Queens. Leah doesn’t have to work to create that New Yawk twang.  That’s her… loud and clear.

According to her show’s co-creator David Litt, “Leah has the mouth of a construction worker in the body of a model.” He’s right.  She definitely says what’s on her mind.

Raised in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, Leah didn’t have dogs, but always had about three or four cats. “My mother was a huge cat person.  It seems like every mother in the ‘70’s was a cat person. My favorite was a cat named Moley that I got from my stepmother.”

“Then one Christmas we got a puppy that passed away about two days later.  It  devastated us. Throughout my adult life I really shied away from dogs because I always felt that I was responsible.  As a child you think weird things like that. So I never really had or wanted dogs as I got older, until recently, when all of a sudden, I was like, oh, my god, why don’t I have a dog?” 

Then one day, at the pleading of her fiancé’s son, they set out to get his father a dog.  “I was using that as a guise for getting me a dog.  So we went to The Beverly Center where I was horrified to see how dogs are treated in pet stores. It was horrible.  These little dogs are in these cages and they’re pissing on themselves. They’re in these little crates and their little feet are falling through the cracks. I felt so bad for them, like they had to audition for me.  You took them into a little play area and it’s like, ‘All right. Do your best.  Be cute and be all those things that a dog should be ‘cause you’ve got five minutes, buddy.’” 

“At that time I didn’t know a damn thing about rescue groups and animal shelters,” explains Leah.  “It’s like you know about them, but you don’t … until you actually have a dog and become involved with people at the dog park and hear their stories.  (How did you find your dog?)  But that happens AFTER you have a dog.”

“So there we were in The Beverly Center.  I had tears in my eyes. I kept saying how I wished I had a huge house.  I’d take all the dogs right now to save them.  They were in little cages with their water dish and some food.  No animal should live that way… in a cage.  Where do they go for walks in The Beverly Center?  I don’t know how they work it out.  What do they do, go down five flights on the escalator with 20 dogs?  I just wish I could save them.  They need to be in homes with someone to love them.  I’d like to see it outlawed, selling puppies in pet stores like that.  It’s not humane!” 

And then Leah’s heart melted when she saw the little Siberian Husky with the blue eyes. After determining that he was feisty and sweet, they decided that he was the one.  They brought him home and named him Blue.  “I didn’t feel like I was buying Blue,” she says.  “I felt like I rescued him.  From that moment on I was a dog person.”

“You have to understand, throughout my childhood, if I saw a pigeon with a broken wing, I would pick it up.  Or a squirrel.  I was one of those kids that if I saw a snail, I’d pick it up and move it, because I didn’t want anybody to step on it.”

“Years ago I saved a dog on Los Feliz Blvd.  Imagine I’m in rush hour traffic at 6:00 at night in the winter in the pouring rain, and I see a dog running back and forth on Los Feliz.  It has no idea about cars.  It’s just darting in and out of traffic.  At the time I had my baby sister in the car. So I get out of the car in traffic, and I start yelling at this dog to get in my car because I just felt so bad for it.  And I was thinking… I guess nobody else sees that the dog is going to get hit by a car or jump on the freeway, because this was by the two freeway entrances near Griffith Park. Finally I get the dog in my car.  But I can’t have a dog.  I live in an apartment with my mother, two sisters, and my stepfather, and we’re not allowed to have animals. I take the dog home anyway, give it a bath, and then I find it a home. Actually, what I really do is burden my friends with the guilt.  I go, ‘Look.  I found this dog.  He’s a precious angel.  You have to do something.  I can’t keep the dog.  You have to do me a favor.’ Eventually the dog gets a home.”

Leah recently found herself in a similar situation, while with a realtor at an open house.  “I hear this loud, horrible noise that I ask the realtor about. She says, ‘I don’t know, it’s probably a bird.’ (I knew it wasn’t a bird.) Now I wasn’t even going to look at the rest of the house because already I can see it’s disgusting.  But we walk out back and there’s a tiny little gray thing near the pool in a puddle of water on its back, with about six neighborhood cats surrounding it. It turns out to be a kitten, drowning in this puddle of water.” 

“I asked the realtor if she could take the cat, and she said yeah, ‘In two hours, because I have to show the house.’  Well, I just thought she was the epitome of evil!  So I took the cat and put it in my jumpsuit. I’m yelling, ‘Fight, kitty.  Fight.’ And I keep shocking it to wake up because I have a feeling it’s gonna die.  As I’m driving with one hand on the cat in my sweatsuit, I’m calling my mother, crying that I found a cat and it’s dying.  And she’s like, ‘What? You found a hat?’  And I’m yelling at her on the phone, ‘I got a cat.  I found a cat.  It’s going to die!’  She meets me at the animal hospital where I throw down my AMEX card and the kitty, and I tell them to give it anything it needs. They told me the kitten was going to die in an hour had I not saved it, because it was going into hypothermia.  It was only two weeks old. Guess what? My mother has the cat.  Her name is Sadie, she’s a few months old now and is doing just fine.”

“I do this often.  I always hope that I won’t see an animal because I know I’m going to do something about it.  But I’m always ready to stop.”

Meanwhile, Blue has completely changed Leah’s life.  “Blue is a spoiled little brat, but I love him.  If Angelo tells him to sit, he’ll sit.  If I say sit he’s like, ‘What?  No.  What I’m gonna do is chew on your leg.’  I have holes in all the asses of my jogging pants because he just gnaws at me.  It’s like I’m his playmate and Angelo is his daddy.  He listens to his daddy but he doesn’t listen to his playmate.”

“And my poor dog is at the vet all the time because I don’t want him to die. I’m always petting him to see if he has any lacerations or ticks. I’m completely obsessed with the well-being of my dog.” 

With all the excitement about her impending wedding, the thing Leah is obsessing about the most is, “what am I gonna do with Blue for a couple of days?  I don’t like to go out of town, and I don’t leave him alone for more than three hours. (When she’s working a pet sitting company takes him to doggy daycare.)  I won’t have him stay somewhere else; he has to sleep with me. I just don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“I know it sounds crazy but Blue is like my child.  I just love him to death. I’m trying to talk Kevin (James) into getting a dog.  I tell him, ‘You don’t know how your life is going to change. I’m telling you, Kevin, I have really calmed down since getting a dog.’”

Occasionally dogs are on the show because one of the characters, Spence, has a pug.  “I love when the dogs are on the set. We’re all just kind of doing our job and then in come these adorable pets wagging their tails and wanting to lick you, and you feel like you’re a human being for a minute. Not an actress on a television show.  It totally changes the dynamics on the set. I feel bad for these dogs because they have to work, but the trainers are always telling me that the dogs love it.  I’m like, “How do you know?’ They also tell me not to pet them because they get unfocused and become more dog-like.  But you can’t tell me anything, and I end up sitting on the floor, petting them, and getting all their dog crap all over me.  They lick off my makeup that took an hour to do, but when there’s an animal around I just don’t care.” 

“Blue has changed my life tremendously!  It’s like I have a child.  When I walk in the door the first thing I do is drop to the floor and have my dog kiss me.  I don’t care what I’m wearing or what happened that day, I’m getting pure love from my animal.  And that’s it. They enrich your life with pure affection.  That kind of unconditional love is just amazing!”  

(Leah wants everyone to know that in September, The King of Queens is moving to a new day and time: Wednesday nights at 9:00pm on CBS.)  

June, 2003