‘Ghosts’ Star Teases an Unexpected Chaotic Team-Up: “They Should Be Together and Working for a Common Purpose That Causes Mayhem”

Summary

• Collider’s Perri Nemiroff talks with Asher Grodman for Ghosts Season 5.
• In this interview, Grodman revisits Episodes 4 and 5 and Trevor’s relationship to Abby.
• He also shares the ideas he’d like to dig into as a director, possible future storylines with Trevor and Abby, and upcoming holiday episodes.

One of the most charming shows on television today is CBS’ cozy comedy Ghosts. Currently in its fifth season, the series explores the day-to-day and past lives of its deceased residents, and the hijinks they and the B&B owners Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) get into together. With Episode 5, “T-Daddy,” on the books, Collider’s Perri Nemiroff chatted with Asher Grodman, who plays Trevor, about his “pretty rare” two-parter story this season with Gideon Adlon‘s Abby, and what’s to come.

After Abby’s first introduced in Season 4, Sam reveals her ability to see the ghosts, allowing Trevor to have a relationship with his daughter. Her return to Episode 4, “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day,” and Episode 5 marks the first time in the series that a living outside of Sam and Jay are aware of the ghosts’ presence “in a concrete sense,” and Grodman believes this “opens up so many doors” going forward.

Check out the full conversation in the video above or the transcript below for Grodman’s thoughts on where the series could take this new and unexpected relationship between Trevor and his daughter. He also discusses working with Adlon on set, what kind of stories he’d like to explore as director, how they craft scenes with six or more cast members sharing the screen, Trevor’s challenging 9-5 job, and upcoming holiday episodes.

‘Ghosts’ May Have Just Found the Key to Opening “Infinite” Doors

Grodman discusses the two-part story with Trevor and Abby.

PERRI NEMIROFF: Before I dig into the details here, two personal questions inspired by these episodes. The first one leans into the title of Episode 4. Do you have any good personal “bring your child to work day” memories?

ASHER GRODMAN: I guess I kind of do. My dad used to run this clinical laboratory that he started, and they would have a really great Christmas party that I would go to every year growing up, and my dad would always be like, “We’re going to stand by the front door and shake every person’s hand as they come in.” So I remember that, and I remember they used to do a Halloween party, too, where, my dad is a big Lions fan, and they made him a Lions jersey with his name on it, and he loved it. So, those are my two memories that pop out.

A Lions fan and a Jaguars fan.

GRODMAN: I know. Well, one kind of led to the other because I was raised as a Lions fan, and my mom was worried that we were going to suffer too much and weren’t going to have any friends, so she told my dad that it was wrong. So, he told us we weren’t allowed to be Lions fans anymore. We had to pick our own teams, and I picked the Jaguars because they’d just started their first year.

I appreciate how your parents were looking out. As a Jets fan, I wish.

GRODMAN: Let me tell you, there is nothing better than the memes that come out when the Jets suck. It is so funny. I’m sure we’re all seeing the Instagram reels of children weeping because they have to watch the Jets. It’s so funny. There was a period where I was like, “I think Aaron Glenn might be the guy who I want in Jacksonville,” but I think we got the right guy. But yeah, I both feel bad for the Jets and I can’t… It’s just so funny. It’s good when a city with the creative potential of New York is also suffering because they handle it in the best way. In the worst way, which is the best way.

Another personal question that pertains to something that happens in Episode 5. How did your parents react when you told them that you wanted to get both a BA and an MFA in acting?

GRODMAN: Well, they weren’t wild about the MFA. That was a bit of a little conflict. But it wasn’t because of being an actor. My parents have always been like, “We don’t care what you do, but you better bust your ass trying to do it.” So they’ve always been supportive of me being an actor. I think the MFA was just like, “You’re gonna hang it up for three years? Shouldn’t you just go out and try to get a job?” That was the debater on that. But yeah, they’re very supportive. Super supportive. I was very lucky for that because this business is very hard. You need all the help you can get.

Digging into what goes down in these first two episodes, I want to start with a broader question about working with Gideon [Adlon] . I know she was on the show last season, but this is a pretty epic one-two punch that her character has on Trevor this time around, so I wanted to know something you saw her do on set while working on either of these episodes that made you stop and go, “I knew you were a good fit for this role, but that right there, that’s why we neededyou for this character and no one else.”

GRODMAN: Good question. I feel like I need to go study our show before I talk to you every time. I love Gideon, but something that I really love about her work is that there is such an ease to her work. It’s so natural. It’s so free-flowing and very authentic. We have many days of just being eight Muppets running around our set. We’re not far from Clue, in terms of our tone, so to get someone who’s so grounded, especially for Trevor, it’s a really great juxtaposition or foil for him.

I remember watching Gideon, particularly in that last scene. We’ve never really done this before, where someone now knows that one of us is on the property. I’m trying to remember — a previous interview said that that wasn’t the case. Maybe Alberta with her descendants, but I’m not sure that she knows that Alberta is there in a concrete sense. I think she might know that she exists, but I don’t know. Anyway, so this moment we had, it was like a nine-page scene at the end of the second episode of this two-parter. By the way, just a two-parter in and of itself is pretty rare for us, so I was very grateful that our writers decided to do one of those for Trevor. But watching Gideon navigate that nine-page scene, which starts with going on a date, and Sam and Jay are being weird, so much happens in that scene, so watching her navigate it, I was like, “You’re amazing.” It’s a fun dynamic for Trevor because being a dad is so antithetical to every decision that he makes, so it’s fun to see him in this new kind of crucible.

She fits right in. And you all do that all the time where you navigate 500 things in a single scene, and somehow it comes together seamlessly.

GRODMAN: Look, when you have this concept, it’s so limited and yet it opens up so many doors. There are, like, infinite doors you can walk through. These scenes end up being very full and very rich. I know, as a cast, we’re usually like, “So much is happening. Can we slow down and just mine this spot for a while?” because it’s just such a fruitful concept.

After Episode 4, It Seems Trevor’s Sitting on a Small Fortune

Grodman breaks down big ensemble scenes and just how exhausting Trevor’s job is.

I want to zero in on the big reveal scene at the end of Episode 4. I thought that was so incredibly well done. I’m watching all that happening, and as a viewer, I’m getting chills while watching all of that play out, so I want to know if you can feel that on set. Do you know that you’re all pulling that off, or do you not get certainty on that until you see it cut together in the finished product?

GRODMAN: The finished product, definitely. There’s absolutely a sense of just, like, “I don’t know. I’m just throwing this stuff out there. I hope this works.” And a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are so many of us. If I remember correctly, that scene is, then again, I haven’t seen it, just because it’s not available for me to see yet, but I believe it’s Sam, Jay, me, Hetty, Thor. That’s at least six people.

I think Bela is in the room?

GRODMAN: Of course, Bela is in the room. There might be another ghost. I can’t remember. So that’s already four livings and at least two ghosts. Maybe more. So it’s at least six people. And there were, I think, two or three different props that I had to do something with and Hetty sticks her head in a purse. And that room is not big. That is a small room. So blocking that scene, I feel like, took an hour for us to figure out how can all of these things happen in a way that we can also cover six people, and not be here for three days. So there was a lot that went into that, but it’s such a fun challenge for our show. And yes, I guess I had hopes that this would feel like we’re moving through a threshold, like we’re moving into a new territory, because now one of the central tensions of the show is that we know and no one else does, that we’re here, these ghosts. So we’re breaking through that for the first time. So the hope is that that has that effect. I haven’t seen it to know if it worked yet, but I trust you, so I’m feeling pretty good right now.

At the end of Episode 4, we get the situation with the water bottle, and it requires a great amount of effort for him to move that water bottle, so it leaves me wondering, how hard is doing the 9-to-5 grind for him? How do you manage that he powers through that every day?

GRODMAN: Look, there is a responsibility we have to the fact that these episodes have to stay at 20 minutes, whatever they are, because theoretically, this should be this Sisyphean task. It would be so fun, and I hope we do it just as a runner in an episode, just to see Trevor at work for an episode, just to see the effort that he has to go through. I hope we do something where we get to play into how exhausting this job must be, because it’s very funny for the guy who is always operating at a ten. His desires are just off the charts, and for that guy to be exhausted, I think, is so fun. So, yeah, Trevor’s got a hard job. He loves it, but it’s a hard job.

I would like to see that in one episode eventually. Kind of connected to that, in Episode 5, we get the situation where he’s paying Abby’s salary, he spent all that money on the Porsche, he offers to pay her tuition. How much money do you think he has squirreled away?

GRODMAN: I think a modest estimate of what Trevor’s probably making is in the world of $90 to $100,000 a year, and I think that’s modest. So he’s earned probably close to $200,000. I don’t know how much that Porsche was.

I think it was $200K.

GRODMAN: Maybe it was. So then I’m really lowballing that. It’s very easy for me to imagine a world where Trevor is sitting on half a million dollars.

I would totally believe that.

GRODMAN: I don’t think he’s paying taxes because he doesn’t exist. The fact that this guy has more money than Sam and Jay is so funny to me, and I love it. The whole stuff with the labor disputes in that episode, I just think our writers did such a great job with that one. I’m all for them leaning into this wildly wealthy ghost who can do anything he wants. He has no power in death, but now has a small fortune.

‘Ghosts’ Trevor and Abby Need to Team Up and Wreak Havoc

Like father, like daughter, after all.

Veering back toward Abby now. First, a question that you likely can’t or won’t answer, but I must ask. Do you think we’ll get to see her again this season?

GRODMAN: I probably can’t answer that, but I also can’t answer it because we’re not done.

Where are you at right now in the process?

GRODMAN: We have done 12 of 22.

Here’s a safer question to dig into Abby a little bit. Should Abby return in the near future, what do you think is the next lesson that Trevor needs to learn about being a good and supportive dad?

GRODMAN: Oh my God. Here’s where my head goes to. They have mostly been at odds, which makes me feel like the next thing that should happen is that they should be together and working for a common purpose that causes mayhem, like working together to manipulate something to get her what she wants. Now he’s gone from, “I want you to live the life that I want you to live,” and I think he’s let that go. The funny thing about that, of course, is that Trevor, in every aspect of his life, was just saying yes to everything. He had all the sex he wanted, he had all the drugs he wanted, he had all the money he wanted. It was just yes to everything. He was partying with celebrities. So, the idea that he was trying to be like, “No, lady, you have to have a plan,” is like Trevor almost not being Trevor anymore. And weirdly, for me, the end of that thing is a little bit of Abby being like, “I’m like you. Let me be.” Well, that’s not the language on the page, but the dynamic was a little bit. I think that’s why he’s able to turn the corner so quickly, is, “Oh, this is the way I lived my life. She should live the way I lived my life.” So with that alignment, I would imagine, I would hope, I think it’d be fun if the two of them are collaborating to manipulate a situation.

I like this idea. I’m going to add a little layer to it. I want to see the two of them collaborate, but given the fact that she’s one of the more grounded characters we have in the show, I also want her to cause hijinks and then get caught up in them, where, because she knows there are ghosts, she has to find her way out of something Sam-style.

GRODMAN: How great would that be? We haven’t really seen anyone endure the mayhem that poor Sam has to deal with, with the aid of these Muppets, so it’d be fun to see someone like Gideon have to navigate that. And there is this thing where she knows that I exist, but she doesn’t know there are a bunch of other ones, so there may be something in that, too.

Asher Grodman Has Some Ideas as a Director

“There are two things that I love to do with our show…”

Here’s something I want to follow up on from our San Diego Comic Con conversation. I was wondering if Utkarsh [Ambudkar] even knew this was going to happen at the moment becausewe had talked about this. We talked about your directing potential on Ghosts, so I want to know, has Utkarsh directed his episode yet, and if so, have you had the opportunity to shadow him?

GRODMAN: [Laughs] That would be very funny, and he would enjoy every second of it. He has not. I believe that Rose [McIver] is about to, and then I think he’s the block after that. So I think he might be Episode 15, and we’re about to start shooting 13. I think that’s it, but don’t quote me on that. He’s about to. I’m excited to see it. He’s such a creative guy, and of course, the perk of any of us directing is we know the show and the process of it so well at this point, so moving efficiently through it, but also finding those opportunities for creativity is something that we’re all very familiar with. We’ve experienced this with Rose, and Rose was excellent. I’m sure we’re going to have a great experience with Utkarsh, too.

I have no doubt whatsoever. I am in the business of manifesting things, so when you direct an episode of Ghosts, do you have a Ghosts directing wish list, a particular character or a type of interaction you’d most want your episode to focus on?

GRODMAN: Oh, wow. There are two things that I love to do with our show. One is the flashbacks are so great. I doubt that they will deal with all the big set stuff with one of the ghosts or one of the cast directing, but I think the advantage of our show or the fun of our show is that at any given point in the show, the audience knows way more than these ghosts do about everything, about the world and what’s happened and all that. The one thing that the ghosts know more about is the history of their lives and what’s happened on this plot of land. So, those flashbacks that are like those world-building things where we’re planting a seed and then it’s setting off a domino effect, when our show gets to be like a prequel to itself, I love that.

The other thing I love is that these people are trapped together for eternity, and the storylines that are purely just these eight Muppets dealing with each other. There was an episode called “Thorapy” that happened in Season 1, where the entire conceit of the show was just that everyone had to start being roommates. It was something so small, and from that we got Thor with these nightmares where he killed his best friend. We find out it was a squirrel, and then he ate his best friend. We get Isaac coming out of the closet to Hetty. There are so many things where we lean into the limitation of all these people just stuck in the house, and we get to play into the relationships between the ghosts, some of which are 500 years in the making. That’s the stuff that is so exciting to me, because it’s stuff that only we can do. And the pettiness of it, like the thing that someone said 200 years ago, it’s like, “I’m still not over that.” That kind of stuff. I love that stuff.

‘Tis the Season for a ‘Ghosts’ Possession!

“We’re using the construct of a classic Christmas movie to explore the kind of defining dynamic of our show.”

I like all of that, but I have a pitch for you. Here’s what I think you should do. Ghosts is consistently great at doing holiday episodes. I think you should direct a Super Bowl-themed episode.

GRODMAN: Oh, that’d be fun! Oh my God, yeah.

I feel like there’s something there.

GRODMAN: Maybe everyone in the house saw Rudy for the first time or something, or we all just saw The Sandlot for the first time and now we’re all just quoting it and obsessed with it. We’re playing a game. We’ve come up with a ghost Olympics type of thing or something like that. God, anything with that would be so fun.

Going from Jurassic Park references to Sandlot references would speak to my heart so, so much.

GRODMAN: It’s the best. Someone giving those ghosts a halftime speech would be so fun.

I’ll squeeze in a tease question because the holidays are upon us, and again, you all always ace the holiday episodes. I know there’s a Thanksgiving episode. I’m sure there’s a Christmas episode around the corner. Is there any holiday episode first you all achieved making one of those that you can tease for our viewers?

GRODMAN: Something that I really enjoy that we do, and we don’t do it very often, but when, to the extent that we can, our form kind of meets our content. The example of that that I would use is Trevor’s pants. The question is, how did Trevor die? So it’s a murder mystery, but because it’s us, it’s about a missing pair of pants. The whole thing is following the clue to how did we get there, and who knows what story, and putting that information together. We do something similar for the Christmas episode, where we’re using the construct of a classic Christmas movie to explore the kind of defining dynamic of our show. That’s new, and it’s a really great two-parter. I haven’t seen it, but on the page it was fantastic, and it was a joy to me. I think I can tell you that and not get in trouble.

I’ll take that tease. I’ll end with one last tease-type question, because, you know, I love forcing all of you to give each other flowers. So, in an effort to tease more of what’s to come in Season 5, can you tell me something one of your Ghosts costars has done in one of the episodes that you shot that would make you want to tell fans out there, “You think you know how good they are, but wait until you see what they do in that episode?”

GRODMAN: Well, I’ll give you one that you’ve already seen, which is we did the debate between Isaac and Flower. We shot it a while ago, but I’m fairly certain that those words came in while they were sleeping. So, again, I haven’t seen the episodes, but they had no time on that one. I was in that storyline, and God, as a West Wingnut, I would have killed to be in that storyline. From what I’ve heard, Sheila [Carrasco] and Brandon [Scott Jones] were incredible. So, that’s a big thing. And that happens a lot with the nature of our show.

And because we’re on Christmas, I’ll say, there’s just a possession coming around the corner that’s just so, so well done.

That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Sheila crushed that, and adding that particular wrinkle to the character of Flower is a pretty genius thing that opens the door up to, again, so many more possibilities going forward.

GRODMAN: And I’m fairly certain that was Sheila’s pitch. She’s a genius. She walks through someone who’s high, and she gets sober. Such a fun idea. She’s so good.

New episodes of Ghosts Season 5 are released weekly on Thursdays on CBS.