Available on digital beginning July 24th is the new sci-fi mystery ‘Lars Shrike Walks the Night’, which was directed by Gary Walkow and is a continuation of his 1987 film ‘The Trouble with Dick’, and stars six-time Emmy Award winner Kelsey Grammer (‘Frasier’ and ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’).

Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Kelsey Grammer about his work on ‘Lars Shrike Walks the Night’, his first reaction to the screenplay, the film’s universal themes, the challenges of acting alone, making an independent movie, and working with director Gary Walkow.

Grammer also discussed his work on the upcoming ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, the recent trailer, getting ready for the press tour, appearing at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, reuniting with his ‘X-Men’ cast members, playing Beast again, and what its like to have played so many beloved characters throughout his career.

Related Article: Kelsey Grammer Talks Thriller ‘Turbulence’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday’

Moviefone: To begin with, can you talk about your first reaction to the screenplay and were you familiar with ‘The Trouble with Dick’ and how this movie fits into director Gary Walkow’s previous work?

Kelsey Grammer: I wasn’t really familiar with that. It’s kind of funny. Gary came to my house, and he said, “I want you to read the script, check it out.” He basically was asking me to finance it. Then after I read it, I thought, “Well, I think I should play Lars Shrike.” I’m not sure if he felt comfortable with my suggestion at first. A couple of days later, he called and said, “You know what? Honestly, I’ve been thinking about it. I think you’d be great.” So, that set the table. We found a little money. We picked a time just before Christmas, and shot in the desert when it was freezing cold, so it was a bit of a challenge, a bit of a hardship to actually get through it. We shot for about 18 days, and we did this movie that I think is actually pretty extraordinary. I didn’t have much of awareness of the previous manifestations of who Lars Shrike was or where he was in the world, or where he fit with ‘The Trouble with Dick’, and all that stuff, but I’ve subsequently been made more aware of it. I loved the character, I loved the mission, and I loved the story. I thought this is just quirky enough and fun enough for me to do something I’ve never done before. I like doing things I haven’t been asked to do before. That’s the reason I did this one, and I’m very happy with the outcome. I really liked the journey.

MF: In the movie, Lars is asking existential questions like, “Who am I and what is my purpose?” Can you talk about that and how those themes are universal?

KG: Absolutely. It’s the every man journey, the journey of why am I here? What does it mean? Where do I fit in the universe? All these things. Of course, he has forgotten where he is from. So, he has the added gift, I guess. He only knows who he is by virtue of who has told him or what he’s wearing. These are the only clues he has in his own being. Then there are occasional moments of clarity that come out to him, like he picks up gear and thinks, “Wait a minute, was I an inventor? Am I a mathematician?” Just wondering what his brain power is. It’s a very universal kind of piece, and that’s what I liked about it. What do we mean? What are we heading toward? Where are we from? Why? All those questions come into his head, and we don’t necessarily answer them, but he gets some answers and that’s what I like about it. Somebody I knew, who was much smarter than I, a long time ago said, “What’s the purpose of art?” He said, “Great art is supposed to inspire you to ask questions, not necessarily give you any answers.” I think ‘Lars Shrike Walks the Night’ leaves you with several questions.

MF: There are large sections in the movie where you are acting by yourself. What are the challenges of acting alone and is it different than working with a scene partner?

KG: Yeah, it’s actually not different really. Acting is reacting. That’s one of the old sayings about it. You take what’s given to you, you take what you’re dealing with, what’s in front of you. It’s freezing cold, or it’s, I got to hide out, somebody is after me. Things that you perceive are what you respond to, that is your action, and your response becomes your action. So, he has got plenty to deal with, but there’s mystery and challenge and fear and questioning. Most of the other people are actually like plot points, honestly. They move the script along a little bit, or divulge a piece of information he didn’t know. But I love his literal voyage through this. It is like ‘The Odyssey’, honestly, in a funny way, but without the budget.

MF: What was your experience like working with director Gary Walkow on set?

KG: The best thing about Gary is he’s really prepared. I mean, he was so prepared and knew what he was shooting, of course. He had already shot some of it in his head before, but that was great. When we would drive around, he’d go, “Wait a minute. It’s here. It’s right here. No, it’s not. No, it’s not. No, there it is. That’s the place.” We’d pull up, and that’s where we’d set up camp basically, and that’s where we were shooting that day. He had searched the desert outside of Palm Springs for years and found these really wonderfully isolated locations that looked like some sort of other landscape, some sort of maybe other moonscape or planetscape, or whatever you want to call it. That’s the backdrop on which Lars Shrike begins his adventure, and it was great. He was always ready. The only thing we had to agree on was I said, “You got to shoot the rehearsal,” because in this case, because this character doesn’t know anything, it’s just going to be interesting to see the first take as often as we can use it when it’s usable. Sometimes they’re not. You got to opt for hopefully being repeatable and having the same genuine quality of innocence and spontaneity. But if you can capture it in the first take, it’s worth it because if the actor has never seen it before, that’s in the performance. That’s just what I think. It’s like if you trust yourself enough to say, “Please roll camera on this, don’t rehearse it.” That’s what I said to him. I said, “Please just let me go with it. Go with what happens.” Gary started to trust that, and he said, “I’ll never just rehearse a shot again. I’ll always film it.”

MF: Do you usually work that way, and do you like shooting several takes or do you usually feel like you got it in the first few?

KG: If I was directing a movie and I needed to get 35 takes to get it the way I wanted it, I would. As an actor, I’m pretty much done after two. But I’ll be glad to do three and four and even five if you need, or set up a different angle. I get that. I’ll try to do a different nuance. I’ll try to give a little something else in that particular angle. I’ll tilt my head a slightly different way, things like that that you would adjust to what’s being shot at the time. The lens has changed, it’s tighter, or it’s looser, whatever it is, and there’s something that might pick up a piece of body language. An actor needs to be aware of that. My greatest relationship on camera is always with the camera operator. I always say, “What do you think? Did we get it?” Because his or hers is the first eyeball to see it. That’s the first eyeball and this is all about eyeballs. That lens focuses, and then directs it through whatever the machinery is, and the editing process and the lighting and all that, and it ends up in somebody’s retina, and that’s what takes it to the brain. I love the process. I love film for that reason. I think it’s fantastic. It’s deeply personal, and you don’t really realize how connected you really are to the audience.

MF: You’ve worked on some big movies throughout your career, but this is a very lox-budget film. What is it like going from a movie like this to something like ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ and does your approach to acting change at all depending n the size of the project?

KG: You enjoy different things. Each has its own set of trappings. There’s something really cool about making a gorilla movie where you are just freezing in the middle of the desert at 3:00 AM in the morning, and you think this is really hard. You’re crawling over rubble and it’s real rubble. It’s not like somebody threw some styrofoam at you. These were hardships that contributed to the performance, I think, in the end. You gather yourself and you fight the good fight. You always have to in terms of something as big as the money that’s behind it. For instance, when I did ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ or ‘X-Men:The Last Stand’, or this movie, ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, you sense that there’s an enormous budget, but the challenges are pretty similar. There’s one set of things you have to achieve. You got to think about what would this character do in this situation? It’s kind of a universal question. That’s what actors are good at. We figure out a reason to keep going. In ‘Lars Shrike Walks the Night’, there are a lot of reasons to keep going. That’s what I love about him. I got to discover a lot of things about myself, and it was a nice journey. I really enjoyed doing that movie.

MF: To follow up on what you just said, what did you discover about yourself from working on ‘Lars Shrike Walks the Night’?

KG: My willingness to accept that life is worth the challenge. Life is worth it. More worth it when it’s tough. It’s more like a reminder. A way to remind myself, “You know what? That was still a good thing. That fight was a good thing.”

MF: Speaking of ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, the first full trailer dropped yesterday. Have you seen it yet and are you looking forward to being part of the media campaign leading up to the film’s release in December?

KG: Oh, I haven’t seen it. I will always do what I can to help a movie get some attention. I love the character. I love Beast. He’s one of my favorite characters. I love him. So, it’s a big thing for me. I would love to play him forever. I’d love to play him in five or six more films. I don’t know if that’s in the cards, but I really enjoy this character. There’s a personal sense of identity that I love. I don’t know why, but I think of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. and the champion of mutant rights. We all can relate to that, whether we think we can or not. But this character to me is that guy, and I love playing that.

MF: San Diego Comic Con is this weekend and Marvel Studios will have a big presentation on Saturday. Are you going to be in San Diego for the panel?

KG: I will be down there. I think we’re there on the 25th. I’ve got to be somewhere on the East Coast on the 24th. I’m flying back so I can be there on the 25th just to celebrate it. I mean, people are very excited about the movie.

MF: I’m sure you know, not only was Beast an original member of the X-Men, but he was also an important member of the Avengers in the comics. Will there be any Easter eggs in the movie that fans can look out for that will acknowledge that?

KG: It’s beyond me. That’s not one they would even tell me. If I could tell you, I wouldn’t, but I don’t know. I hope so.

MF: What was it like shooting ‘Doomsday’ and reuniting with your ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ cast members and also working with other MCU actors that you hadn’t worked with before?

KG: Yeah, I don’t know Thor, but I know Cyclops. I know some of them. I certainly know Patrick Stewart. I mean, he came on ‘Frasier’. But what a pal and what a wonderful performance, and what a lovely guy. I mean, I’ve known him for years now, since the first time we did the ‘X-Men’ movie together, and he’s a delightful man. It was great to see him. It was great to se Rebecca Romijn again. I love her. She’s fantastic. She’s wonderful in it. So, I got to see her, and it was fun to go, “Yeah, we’re back. We did it.”

MF: Finally, as an actor, I would imagine it’s a gift to have played one character in your career that resonates with audiences over generations, but you have had so many including Frasier Crane, Sideshow Bob, and now Beast. What does it mean to you personally to have had such a full and rewarding career?

KG: Yeah, there is a kind of a pinch me moment about it. A pinch me like, “Well, that’s what you wanted to do.” I dreamed just big enough to get it, which is really good. There’s another role I just loved. I loved Mayor Tom Kane in the series ‘Boss’. It was one of my absolute favorite roles.

What is the plot of ‘Lars Shrike Walks the Night’?

Lars Shrike (Grammer) knows only two things: his name, and that he has escaped. Alone in a hostile desert landscape, he struggles to piece together who he is, where he came from, and what exactly he has fled. As fragments of memory, hallucination, and reality begin to blur, Shrike is pulled into an increasingly strange odyssey where every answer only deepens the mystery. Is he a prisoner on the run, a damaged mind inventing its own mythology, or a fictional character who has somehow stepped into the real world?

Who is in the cast of ‘Lars Shrike Walks the Night’?

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