In fact, you might fully expect him to be suspicious – and wary of every word he says when speaking to the Press.
So it is a surprise that he agrees to an interview with the Yorkshire Post at all – and even more of a surprise when he turns up, utterly charming and as open as you could hope.
Striding into the café area of the Gateway Theatre in Chester, where he's appearing in the national tour of Pride and Prejudice, Leslie, at well over 6ft tall, is a giant of a man.
With no hint of PR people fussing around him, no airs and graces, he arrives immediately after a matinee performance still in costume, on his own and ready to talk.
Given the expectation that Leslie might be untrusting of journalists, it is with some trepidation that I tell him my dictaphone is suffering from what the BBC calls technical difficulties.
He recoils in horror, holds his hands to his head and lets out an exclamation that sounds something like "gaarrgghh".
Oh dear, does this mean he won't continue with the interview?
"No, no, it's just a shame that you'll have to make notes instead, isn't it?," he says in his soft Scottish burr.
Come again?
His hair slightly flattened and ruffled by the top hat that he wears on stage, Leslie is undoubtedly handsome. But the 39-year-old (he celebrates his 40th on the opening night of the Bradford Alhambra run of Pride and Prejudice) also has a haunted look about him, the past two years have aged the fresh-faced television presenter of old and he admits he did think about suicide.
"You have to go through something and experience just how bad it can be to know that you are never going to go to that place again," he says.
"I contemplated suicide, a lot of people think the same thing, but when you get there you think "b****r this". If that isn't a shot in the arm, then nothing is."
"The only reason I'm still here and breathing, apart from my family and friends, is because of the public.
"I couldn't go out anywhere without people coming up and saying (he mimes putting a hand on his shoulder) are you OK? My friends and family were obviously going to support me, but the public being so good, that was my medicine.
"I realise now that the reason I lost out on so much was that I didn't look after the John Leslie brand. It was a brand that was phenomenally successful, John Leslie, the TV personality, but I did not take proper care of it and left myself open to people who took advantage of me. Some of the things that happened were unjust, but none of it would have happened if I had taken better care of myself."
The events of the last few years are not going to go away, but when speaking about Pride and Prejudice and his role of Mr Wickham, Leslie comes alive. It's clearly more than just another job. For him it marks a whole new start, a new life.
"I was on the floor," he admits when asked about when he first went for the role in the London production.
"I had not worked for two years and I just had no idea how I was going to earn any money. It's not as though I could go out and just do an ordinary job because the Press would have hounded me out of it."
Ah, the Press.
It is a subject to which Leslie returns several times during our interview, but without venom or animosity.
"I'm not going to do any tabloid interviews. If I need them, then I will go to them," he says matter-of-factly.
"I will deal with it on my level. If I do interviews it will be when I want to do them. I'm a lot more worldly wise now, I'm aware of the game. At the end of the day they (the Press) have got a job to do, it's not something personal.
"I served a hell of a sentence – even though I was totally exonerated.
"To have the Press constantly on your doorstep for a year-and-a-half is quite an experience. But it was something I came to terms with and the experience has made me stronger."
The Press has played a major part in Leslie's life since he embarked on his career as a television presenter with Yorkshire Television's The Music Box in the mid 1980s.
In 1989 he became a presenter on the children's programme Blue Peter and from there followed jobs on This Morning, Wheel of Fortune and Scavengers, and in 2001 he was promoted to co-host of This Morning with Fern Britton.
Shortly after the promotion, Leslie's private life became very public.
Former weathergirl Ulrika Jonsson published her autobiography in 2002 in which she claimed early in her career she had been raped. Jonsson didn't name her alleged attacker, but as the speculation grew in October the same year, Leslie was named as the man involved by television presenter Matthew Wright on his Channel Five chat show.
Jonsson remained tightlipped, but when three women made complaints to the police and countless more sold their stories to the tabloids, Leslie also found himself pictured on the front of a newspaper snorting cocaine and had to deal with news that sex videos starring his former girlfriend Abi Titmuss had been put on to the internet.
And then he was arrested and charged with two counts of indecent assault.
In 2003, he was cleared of all charges, but the damage had been done. Leslie was sacked from his £250,000 a year presenting job and lived for two years in what he describes as "a long, dark tunnel".
During that time Leslie, who has previously only appeared in panto, never considered acting either as a career or a way back from his lowest ebb, securing his latest role more by luck than judgment.
Director Sue Pomeroy was looking to stage Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and, according to Leslie went on to Spotlight (a casting website which features performers) "and put in that she was looking for someone Scottish, with a media profile, who could play the piano".
"Two out of three's not bad," chuckles Leslie, who is not a musician.
He talks about acting with the enthusiasm of a newcomer to the game, describing himself as a "sponge" who wants to watch his fellow actors, soak up knowledge and learn from them.
But he also knows this role as Austen's archetypal cad has thrown him a much needed lifeline.
"It's saved my life," he says. "A man without a job is not much of a man. I had not stopped working since I started working and there I was not even able to work.
"I think challenges in life are not about how you fall, they are about how you rise again, you gain a lot of strength through what you go through, mine has given me a much bigger backbone and I'm far more aware of the choices you face in life."
Leslie has clearly come a long way since he first became the media's darling as Blue Peter presenter and boyfriend of the now Hollywood A-lister Catherine Zeta Jones, but I ask, is there anyone, perhaps from his past, who he has turned to for acting tips.
"You mean Catherine," he laughs. "We are still in touch, but I don't know who I'd ask for acting tips, her or Michael."
It looks like Leslie is picking up his life with a smile on his face and a much tougher skin.
Pride and Prejudice is at Bradford Alhambra from February 22-26. Tickets 01274 432000.