By Gill Pringle
Currently voicing the character of Hunter in this week’s animated flick Storks, Kelsey Grammer is setting himself up for something a little heavier with his next project. “I’m doing The Last Tycoon for Amazon Prime,” the actor tells FilmInk. “We’re going to start shooting in November. We just did the pilot.” Part of the streaming service’s seventh pilot season, The Last Tycoon got the hoped-for nod, and was officially sent to series in July. The series is based on the final, unfinished, posthumously released novel by revered American author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, most famous for The Great Gatsby. “You get a novel written originally by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and you get to make up what happens afterwards,” says Grammer. “It’s quite a luxury for a creative guy, and [series writer/director] Billy Ray [Shattered Glass, Breach] is a really good writer, so he’s got some ideas about how it’s meant to end.”
Set in the thirties, the series follows movie producer, Monroe Stahr (played by Matt Bomer, and based on the real life Irving Thalberg), and his various trials and tribulations in Old Hollywood. The Last Tycoon has been previously adapted as a TV play in 1957, and most famously for the big screen in 1976, with a screenplay by British playwright, Harold Pinter; Elia Kazan in the director’s chair; and an impressive cast including Robert De Niro, Theresa Russell, Jack Nicholson, Robert Mitchum, and Tony Curtis.
In the TV series, Kelsey Grammer will play ruthless studio boss, Pat Brady. “He’s an amalgam of some of the great studio heads…some of the big dudes,” the actor says. “He’s pretty much without any redeeming grace. The character is largely based on Louis B. Mayer. When he died, a funeral was given on his behalf, and everybody in Hollywood showed up. Red Skelton said on his show that night, ‘Louis B. Mayer is proof that if you give the people what they want, they’ll show up.’ He was not particularly liked. But I think we’ll find ways of making this guy fun on the show…loving and creepy all at the same time.”
It could very well be another iconic character for the veteran actor. “I still get recognised on the street, sometimes for Frasier, and sometimes for Boss,” Grammer says. “That was short lived, but it was a good show. Sometimes it’s Finding Neverland, which I did on Broadway recently. But I’ve had people walk up to me and say, ‘I saw you do Richard II twenty years ago!’”
Storks is released in cinemas on September 22. The Last Tycoon will screen in 2017.
