Kelsey Grammer Says He Did His ‘Best’ to Convince David Hyde Pierce to Return to ‘Frasier’: ‘We Won’t Force It’

Samantha Bergeson
·2 min read
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Kelsey Grammer knew that Frasier Crane needed his brother Niles Crane for an onscreen reunion. The only issue: Convincing former co-star David Hyde Pierce to return as the neurotic psychiatrist for the “Frasier” Paramount+ revival series.

In a new interview, Grammer revealed to Variety that he did his “best” to get Pierce back, even in a cameo role. “I really wanted David Hyde Pierce to join us. And I did my best to have him come along for the ride,” Grammer said. “And at one point, he finally just said, ‘I don’t really want to play the character anymore.’ And that was fine.”

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The lack of Pierce’s Niles inspired Grammer to reimagine what a “Frasier” reboot would look like, landing on a return to the character’s original “Cheers” roots in Boston. “It came to me in a dream, let’s go back to Boston. There’s unfinished business there,” Grammer recalled. “His son lives there. It suddenly went into this new world, which is, of course, what ‘Frasier’ did the first time.”

He continued about a possible Pierce return as Niles, “I mean, we have Niles’ son on the show. It would be nice to have that happen. We won’t force it; we’ll see what happens. We can certainly write to it. There’s arguably a lot of people in the world that have seen ‘Frasier,’ and would really sort of celebrate seeing him again.”

“Frasier” revival writer Joe Cristalli told Vulture in October 2023 that the slated premise for the reboot would be centered on Frasier and Niles opening a theater together. “For a long time, the idea was that Frasier and Niles were going to run a black-box theater, like how they bought that restaurant and brought it back to life,” Cristalli said. “But it’s hard for Frasier and Niles to run the theater when you don’t have Niles, so we had to step back from that.”

Pierce previously told Vulture in June 2022 that the “Frasier” revival did not need his presence as Niles to succeed. “[The show] can be done without me, finding new stories to tell, in the same way that ‘Frasier’ did after ‘Cheers,'” Pierce said. “They didn’t bring along the ‘Cheers’ gang to make a new show. They popped in from time to time and that was a blast, but there was something else that needed to be said, and it needed to be said in a different way. And maybe they will find that and I’ll be in it, or maybe they’ll find it and they won’t need me to be in it.”

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