GHOSTS: Asher Grodman Previews Trevor’s Unexpected Reunion with His Parents

When Trevor’s (Asher Grodman) body is found on the Thursday, February 9 episode of GHOSTS, it brings his parents to Woodstone.

Unfortunately, when they show up at the B&B, “Trevor gets blindsided by news that shakes his world and his sense of the world he came from,” Grodman tells Give Me My Remote. “[Since he’s] spent more time alive than he has dead, Trevor feels very connected to the living world [and], as usual, is trying to affect it. He’s always trying to bring his experiences of living into his afterlife and vice versa. So he’s gonna try to get involved and see if he can rectify some of the things that he feels were his fault.”

While Trevor’s reunion (of sorts) with his parents is complicated, it was nothing but joy off-screen as Grodman got to work with Chip Zien (who plays Trevor’s father, Lenny) and Laraine Newman (who plays Trevor’s mother, Esther).

“I got so lucky,” he gushes. “Chip Zien is obviously a theater legend. And Laraine Newman is a comedy and television legend. I had so much fun with them…They’re both so funny. It’s very easy to fall into like a mother-son dynamic with Laraine and a father-son dynamic with Chip, too. They were wonderful. I hope we get them back.”

“Sometimes being a guest on a show can be a very hard or thankless job, and you feel, ‘Oh, I gotta come in and fit into the puzzle,'” he continues. “But in a role like this, just the selection of those two actors, and then them showing up on set and hanging out with us, it informs so much for me in terms of where Trevor came from and what we’re establishing. The brilliance of this BBC concept that we’re playing is, yes, you can’t leave [the property if you died there], but there’s a thousand years of history that you can go back into. His parents inform so much of who he is.”

With Trevor being one of the few ghosts with living ties to the outside world, “there is this opportunity to talk about closure in the world you left behind that,” Grodman points out. “I think that’s a lot of what this episode does. To be able to look back and say, ‘Okay, how did I leave things when I left and what impact did I have?’ [Our show is] goofy, it’s fun, we’re a bunch of clowns, I’m not wearing pants, there’s a Viking, and there’s a hippie—but there’s also a little bit of existential stuff going on.”

“It goes back to that Tom Sawyer thing of watching your own funeral, which in essence is what all these ghosts—or at least what Trevor—can do,” he continues. “And we’ve got those stories of Pete in ‘Dumb Deaths‘ and Trevor with ‘Trevor’s Pants‘ …there is this wonderful proximity [to our old lives] we get to play with.”

The memorial also allows the show to go back to one of its longest-running jokes when Tara Reid (playing herself) shows up to attend Trevor’s memorial service.

“I still remember when we first aired the pilot and sending our showrunners a tweet, because she replied to the clip of the Trevor monologue that like kicks off one of the first ghost scenes, where he tells the Tara Reid birthday party story,” Grodman recalls. “And she said something like, ‘You guys are funny’ or something. I sent it to our showrunners and they’re like, ‘Oh my god. This is crazy.'”

GHOSTS co-creator Joe Port replied to Reid on Twitter, extending an invite to the show; she expressed interest in taking them up on it and the groundwork was laid to pay off the gag.

And when everything fell into place in season 2, “the coolest part was chatting with her—just hearing her being like, ‘Yeah, so they had a night together,'” Grodman says with a laugh. “She’s come up with her backstory [for Trevor and GHOSTS’ version of Tara Reid]. That’s kind of surreal. And it was great to have her; she’s so sweet. And it was just a fun week to spend with each other.”

GHOSTS, Thursdays, 8:30/7:30c, CBS

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