'Call Me Kat' Star Opens Up about Saying Goodbye to Leslie Jordan

"Call Me Kat" Star and executive producer Mayim Bialik shared her thoughts, and some teases, about how the show will usher off the late Leslie Jordan's character, Phil: "His character will live forever."

Jordan died last October at the age of 67. At the time, the sitcom was in the middle of taping an episode that, Bialik told Entertainment Weekly, had to be "restructured" and rewritten due to the actor's death.

This week's episode – airing Jan. 5 at 9:30 p.m. – will give closure to Jordan's character, Phil, and do so in a happy way, Bialik told EW.

"When it came to the episode that is essentially his tribute, the cast felt very strongly and completely unanimously that the thought of doing a funeral episode while we are actively grieving our friend – it felt like a hurdle we weren't sure we all wanted to jump together," Bialik said.

Instead, Bialik went on to say, "we found a way for him to live forever. His character will live forever, and he can have whatever adventures we all imagine. And because we break the fourth wall anyway, we were able to use that convention to say simply, we gave this character a happy ending, but there's a lot more going on here."

Bialik gave credit to showrunners Jim Patterson and Maria Ferrari, who she said were "incredibly sensitive" to the cast's feelings of grief following Jordan's death.

"I think that it's very rare that actors get the opportunity to be able to speak to showrunners and say, 'We're going through an emotional experience that may not be able to be surpassed by our ability to play pretend,'" Bialik shared. "Grief is a full process, and I think there's a level of authenticity that we feel we want to have as actors. And I'm grateful that Warner Brothers and Fox and Jim and Maria were able to let us have that."

"We're humans and we lost our friend. We lost our little buddy."

But though Jordan is gone, he's not forgotten on the "Call Me Kat" set.

"Cheyenne does a spot-on impression of Leslie Jordan, which I find very comforting," Bialik said of co-star Cheyenne Jackson, who is also openly gay. "We'll just think of things all the time.... There are plenty of Leslie-isms – many involved curse words, though, so we couldn't use those on camera."

Asked about a scene in which it's acknowledged that Phil has left the cat cafe where the sitcom is set, Bialik said, "Our hope was to get it done in one take so that we wouldn't emotionally go through it several times," though, she added, "it took a couple takes" to get the scene done.

"I try not to say, 'He would've wanted this,'" Bialik went on to say, "but we're all pretty certain that he knew he was incredible. He knew he was beloved. He was a fabulous, fabulous person. And the ability to both celebrate him and honor him in a way that we hope is respectful was really our goal."