Kelsey Grammer made his return to two iconic franchises in 2023.
First, there was of course the Frasier reboot, which saw the actor reprise his beloved sitcom character for a hilarious new chapter. But Grammer also made a much more secretive return — this time to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in an X-Men role nearly 20 years in the making.
In a mid-credits scene for The Marvels, fans saw Captain Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) appear in the parallel universe she was pulled into at the film’s end. Here, Monica finds an alternate version of her mother, Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) — who, in this universe, is an alternate Captain Marvel called Binary — as well as Grammer’s version of Dr. Hank McCoy, aka the X-Men’s Beast.
“Beast is a passion for me,” Grammer told ET’s Kevin Frazier of making his MCU return, joking, “I’ve always wanted to be a blue person and now I am in film.”
Laughs aside, the actor said he “certainly hopes” to have a future with the character following his cameo, revealing, “There’s been some discussion. I’ve always wanted to play him again.”
Grammer’s portrayal of Beast was first introduced in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. He made an uncredited cameo as the character in 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, but since 2011’s X-Men: First Class, Beast has mainly been portrayed by Nicholas Hoult as a younger version of the character.
“I did the role… we were in Cannes, it was a big premiere, it was all being celebrated, people were taking a bow and all this nonsense,” Grammer recalled to ET of making his Marvel debut in The Last Stand. “I thought, well, we finally arrived! And they came up and said we found this fabulous new direction for the franchise.”
“I thought, ‘This is it. I’ve made it. I’m finally in a franchise movie — and they said that they were gonna go back in time and Beast was gonna be younger,” he continued. “Then I slowly deduced that I was not included.”
There seems to be no hard feelings on Grammer’s side, however, as he reiterated how excited he was to play the character once again, teasing, “It’s a great feather in my cap now that to have him come back and have people still be interested in seeing who was arguably the greatest Beast ever.”
There’s no denying, however, that Grammer remains the one and only Dr. Frasier Crane. When it came to the Paramount+ reboot series, the actor explained that the plan was initially to have all the original show’s legacy cast members return for the new series. But after “that ship had sailed,” Grammer said he was most interested in exploring a brand new chapter for his eponymous psychiatrist and talk show host.
“It suddenly appealed to me — What would it be? What would his third act be?” he recalled. “It has to be something other than what we’ve done before… We dived right into this idea of going back to Boston and centering the relationship around his relationship with his son, so it would sort of bookend it with the previous show.”
In the original series’ premiere, Frasier has moved back from Boston to Seattle to be with his aging father, Martin — played by the late John Mahoney — and take on a new role as a radio host. In the new Frasier, fresh off the success of his television talk show, Frasier finds himself back in Beantown and struggling to repair his relationship with his own son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott).
“Frasier has gotten a lot of the things he wanted — or that he thought he wanted,” Grammer said of where his character starts out in the new series. “He got success, and he walked away from it.”
“He’s looking for something important,” he continued. “His son’s important — that’s there. And he has this other sort of image of himself, [from] when he was a young man when he first arrived in Boston. What was he going to be? He never quite figured out. So he’s back to figure that out.”
Frasier is streaming now on Paramount+, with the season 1 finale debuting Dec. 7.
RELATED CONTENT: