Ghosts' Asher Grodman Hits It Big (Without Any Pants On)

"Knowing that I'm on the show without my pants on is also, well...[most] people get their big break with pants on." [laughs]

Asher Grodman is perfectly fine playing a ghost on CBS ' Ghosts who walks through the afterlife without any pants. "I don't really want to die in the state that Trevor died. It would be nice to have pants on." But for now, Grodman is OK with it if it means he gets to continue to play Trevor, a former stockbroker who died of a drug-induced heart attack and is destined to haunt a mansion with other ghosts. "I still remember reading the pilot and thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever read.'" Now in its fourth season (October 17), Grodman said it's "the most creative, out-there and surprising start to a season that we've ever had." And being part of a large cast just adds to his excitement. "I don't know that I ever anticipated that would be so joyful about being the character actor—you get to be part of this ensemble. And the cast, we're all really friends when a season's over." Because of the success of Ghosts, he's been able to do other projects...wearing pants. "When you're used to not wearing pants, wearing pants feels like the biggest power move in the world."

Editor's Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.

You have the best legs on TV. You should insure them like Mary Hart did on Entertainment Tonight.

You know, it's funny. Am I blown away? I guess I am. I never thought that my legs were anything interesting, or that anyone would care. I remember feeling as a kid that I had big hips and feeling very insecure about that. And then I was a fencer for a very long time, so that probably exacerbated the issue, because it's a lot of leg strength. And people have come up and asked if they auditioned my legs. And no, that didn't happen. It was just an audition, though I did have some people—and we can debate the appropriateness of this—send me their audition tapes for Trevor, people I knew, which included their legs. So maybe I missed a memo that I should have included some skin. But at the moment, it didn't occur to me.

Are you surprised by how much of a hit the show is?

I live in New York, and in New York, no one gives a sh** what show you're on. It's not like people are coming up to me and being like, "Oh my God"; it's not really the New York way. But the core idea of the show, I still remember reading the pilot and thinking, "This is the best thing I've ever read." And if this could just get on the air, I thought there'd be an audience for it. And I think a lot of us thought this. Usually when you get a pilot, you read it and you can kind of picture what the second episode is going to be. You can kind of see what we're going to do with this show. But after the pilot for this thing, we genuinely could have gone in 1,000 directions. There were so many possibilities. We could have done home renos going back in time for like four seasons. We didn't have to ever open the B&B; there were just so many avenues we could have gone down. And there's something so universal and clever about the concept of the show. It sets us up to play. And sometimes we do, sometimes we don't, but it sets you up for some real satire about our society, which you don't usually see on network television. So the question was never whether the show would find an audience, at least in my mind, the question was, are we going to survive a pandemic? Is CBS going to want this show? Are we going to cross the finish line here? So I hope that doesn't sound egotistical, but I had a lot of faith in the concept of the idea, and partially because I knew the British version had been so successful. I hadn't seen it because I was terrified of just copying what they did, because I knew that they had figured it out, and I wanted to have my own process. But yeah, I had faith.

And for a network comedy to do well is so rare these days, because everything is on streaming. So for Ghosts to do this well is even more of a big deal. And for it to be one of your first really big things, that must be exciting.

I've been kicking around this business for 20 years before Ghosts showed up. I was never the most talented guy, I got some opportunities early on, and I got them because of pilot season and network TV and going up for these shows where I'd be up for the lead of a show for no reason. Like this demographic thing that we were into at that time, but it was always network television where I would keep auditioning. And for me, I was like, I want to do gritty stuff. The idea that I'm on a comedy is still completely surreal to me. I've never done a comedy before this. I don't know what anyone is talking about. I like to think I'm learning some things. So, all that [is] to say, network television was my first entrance into this business. The fact that this has come full circle, and I'm on a show on CBS, it is a surreal experience, and knowing that I'm on the show without my pants on is also, well, [most] people get their big break with pants on. [laughs]

No matter where you go, you'll be that pantless guy on TV. At least you can look back on this moment and be like, I had great legs.

I'll tell you a very funny thing. Early on, in season one, you're trying to figure this thing out. You've done a pilot, a lot of thought went into that, you're trying to forge whatever your path is. So everything from the writing to makeup to set, everything, you try to figure it out. And we, early on, had this thing where, Trevor's this Hamptons guy, and I had a little bit of a tan when we started, because it was summer, and we had a period of a few weeks where they were putting makeup on my legs. We quickly got rid of that. And then I got into a bicycle accident that scraped up both my knees. So then we had to go back into doing makeup on it. And then I got another thing where I cut open a leg before season two. So we went back to the makeup that's been applied to my legs, which is not the norm anymore, but there was a lot of surreal situations where castmates were just taking pictures of these poor makeup people who were having to brush my legs.

Again, be careful with those things, protect the legs.

Yeah, I've been very loose with them.

The jokes! You mentioned this being your first comedy. That must be thrilling for you. You clearly have a leading man look, so to be able to lean into this character and be in an ensemble and stand out for your humor, how does that feel?

Oh, well, thank you very much. It's thrilling. I don't know that I ever anticipated that would be so joyful about being the character actor, you get to be part of this ensemble. And the cast, it's just great. And we're all really friends when it's over, when a season's over, and when we don't see each other for a little bit we still are seeking each other to hang out and connect, and so to be on one of these journeys with people who you really feel their substance and you feel safe and playful around some of the people in the show. Some are some of my closest friends. So being able to go on this journey as this little found family. I know that's not really the question you're asking, but it is, weirdly, the thing that I will probably take away from this experience as the most fun, the most joyful thing, the people I got to work with.

And it varies the work you'll be able to do for years to come, but you're not pigeonholed into this one thing, you're showing you can do so much more.

The hope is to have a sense of variety, not to just do the same thing over and over again. And one of the perks of this thing is that it has pulled me out of what my perceived wheelhouse was. So it has surprised me with the flexibility, let's say, or versatility. But it also means, and this is, I think, a real skill as an actor, keeping the ball in the air and working as a group to solve a thing. And that just goes back to what you were saying initially about how rare the network comedy thing is. We are genuinely an ensemble show. And I don't know how much that happens as a comedy, everyone has their separate lanes that they're in, we're all in the same way as this amoeba of ghosts. I learned doing theater. A lot of us came from improv, so there's this common space between those two. And because you're coming at it from an ensemble place, there is weirdly more of an opportunity for transformation, if that makes any sense, because you're bouncing off each other, so you're never really sure where you're gonna end up.

Ensembles also just make you a better actor. It's like being around funny people, it's gonna rub off.

Yeah, and there's a variety of story that comes out of it, too, because a lot of the variety that you're talking about, I was always raised that story is really what reveals character. And so it's really just being open enough to be able to tell different stories, yeah? And when you're in a show like this, where each of these main ghosts, it's like they all have their own narratives, their own backstory that have nothing to do with each other. So you're constantly doing these small little genre shifts.

You're so right. It's like there are endless possibilities for story purely just with the ghosts. That's not even including the characters who are living.

Yeah, I personally feel like we are at our best when we can push the story forward by going backwards, because the thing that we have that no other show has is that 1,000 years of history on this plot of land. And Trevor's pants is kind of a perfect example of that, where we're just going back in time and we're shifting your perspective on the present. And that's, for network television, not something that happens every day.

Exactly. Well, what can we expect from this next season?

I have said this before, so I hope I don't sound like a broken record, but I think this is the most creative, kind of out there and surprising start to a season that we've ever had. We left with this big cliffhanger at the end of season three with Isaac [Higgintoot, played by Brandon Scott Jones] being abducted [by Patience, played by Mary Holland]. So you're gonna meet Patience, spend some time with her, go back in time with that story. And that's the fun thing that the show does, where it's going to take you back to another branch of American history and American zeitgeist and bring it into the modern world. Something that I really love that the show does, and this is something that's kind of specific to Trevor, Trevor isn't the most recently dead, Carol [played by Caroline Aaron] just died. Something I love about Trevor is how much he just really wants to be alive again, like most [of the ghosts] just want to get sucked off—and if you don't know what that means, it doesn't mean what you [think] it is. [On Ghosts, to be "sucked off" means a ghost is able to go to heaven or hell.] But he still has this yearning to be connected to the real world. And there is this, is it Tom Sawyer who sits at their own funerals? Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn?

I think it's Huck Finn, actually, but I don't remember. It's been a long time. [It is both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.]

Whoever it is, pretend that I said the right name. [Trevor] gets to have some experiences like that. In this season, he's desperately trying to feel connected to the real world, and then kind of watches what he left behind.

I mean, wouldn't you want to be alive again if your afterlife was spent pantless?

That would be a dream, wouldn't it? For the actor. I don't think I can say anything right now, but I got to go shoot some other things in the off season and got to wear pants. And when you're used to not wearing pants, wearing pants feels like the biggest power move in the world.

I mean, I do hope that from here on out, every time you show up to set and look at your costumes in the trailer, the costume department plays a joke on you and it's just shirts hanging up. As a joke.

I would hate you. [laughs] The other thing that's very interesting is we don't use props. Like, we [the ghosts] can't touch anything. So there is this funny calibration you have to do when suddenly you're touching things again, because it feels like novelty on camera. Like, "Oh, I'm playing with this thing." It's very exciting. It's a calibration that has to happen, leaving ghost world.

I do have to ask you about It Was Written, a short film you directed and wrote. How did that come about?

This is my opus, my proudest accomplishment in life. I'm a big football fan, and I'm a fan of a team called the Jacksonville Jaguars. I am a big fan, and every year, at least in recent history, NFL teams have made these little videos when the schedule gets released to, in a fun goofy way, reveal their upcoming schedule to fans. But it's usually very clickbaity, kind of like a kitten and you're dangling the opponent's mascot as it swipes. It's that kind of vibe. And there were so many jokes about the NFL becoming so dramatic and certain teams always winning. And there became this conspiracy theory that the NFL was really just scripted. The Jaguars are a smaller market team, and I'm a guy who's a fan of them on a TV show, and that was a new experience for them, and so they kindly brought me in and I pitched them, instead of doing a schedule release, as you would normally do, let's make a mockumentary about the NFL actually being scripted and starring all the players. So it's their star quarterback playing himself as an actor playing himself. It's basically this juxtaposition of professional football players in theater camp as they attempt to figure out this television show filled with the writing changes and the existential crisis of playing yourself on national television. They were amazing. They gave me kind of unfettered access. The owner's in it, the coach is in it. It's really these guys taking this big swing, this big risk of acting on camera. So I got to write it and direct it, and I get to be in the scenes as the kind of head writer of the television show of the Jacksonville Jaguars, lead them through vocal warmups, theater stuff. We won Tribeca, remarkably, and then won a Cannes Lion, which is insane.

So your character is pantless in the afterlife, but, if you had to choose a state to die in that would set you up for a comfortable afterlife, what state would you want to die in?

First of all, I don't really want to die in the state that Trevor died. I think I've had enough of that. It would be nice to have pants on. My answer to this, in terms of where I would want to be—and I think you'll appreciate this from the little I know of you—if you could die anywhere, [you'd] die in the White House, right?

Oh yeah. You could haunt them. In fact, you could impact policy.

That's what I think. If you have the power to just move little things.

Just really freak them out.

With your ghost powers you can write speeches, you can change the teleprompter, that's an amazing ghost power actually. And what state I would want to be in? I want to be in comfortable shoes. I will tell you that Trevor I love, but the shoes are not very comfortable. I don't want what Isaac's dealing with and his little...that's hot in there. I don't want to be in a corset. I want pants and some comfy shoes.