Matthew Modine says there’s something even better about being famous than scoring courtside Knicks seats — wriggling out of speeding tickets.
The 61-year-old actor estimated that cops have let him out of approximately a hundred infractions over the years due to his indelible portrayal of Private Joker in the 1987 Stanley Kubrick classic “Full Metal Jacket.”
Modine, who insists his lead-foot days are over, told Page Six that anyone who has been through any kind of boot camp, such as cops, always recognize him and are happy to give him a pass.
Not that he sniffs up his nose at courtside seats at the Garden.
“I was there for some of the most exciting basketball games I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “When Jordan was playing and Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Allan Houston, yeah it was wonderful.”
The Manhattan-based actor has a new movie out called “Foster Boy,” a legal thriller based on a true story about a white corporate lawyer who represents a young black man who was abused in the foster care system.
It’s an issue that deeply resonates for Modine.
“The more you learn about the foster care system in the United States it so resembles the privatized prison system, on a different scale for a different age group,” he said. “It’s a big problem in the United States.”
The Emmy nominee revealed that his parents adopted a brother and sister whose mother was killed by their father.
“There were things that were peculiar about my brother and sister and I didn’t understand it,” he explains, “but as you get older and you understand that they were in the house for hours before the police came and you think what kind of damage a 4-year-old and 7-year-old child, being in the house with dead parents, what that must have done to their psyches.”
“Foster Boy” is available to stream now.