Peri Gilpin on Reprising Her Sex Positive Roz Character on Season 2 of 'Frasier'

Frasier fans were happy last season when the iconic sitcom returned in a reimagined format with Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) returning to his Boston roots, where it all began on Cheers, to try to reconnect with his son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), a firefighter in Beantown, and to enter the next phase of his career, teaching psychology at Harvard.

It was the next evolution for Frasier Crane, and it worked. Guest appearances by original series regulars Lilith (BeBe Neuwirth) and Roz (Peri Gilpin) also helped the show make the transition, giving the new format some continuity, and, happily, we will be seeing more of Roz [Gilpin now is a recurring guest star] in Season 2, beginning with the “All About Eve” episode tonight.

It turns out that through the years since Frasier left KACL Radio to become a TV shrink, he and Roz have stayed friends, so when she’s on the East Coast to visit her daughter Alice (Greer Grammer), who is attending RISD in Providence, R.I., Boston isn’t too far away to visit a longtime friend.

“I think that their friendship was always extraordinary during all those years, and now they reconnect when he’s at a time where he’s changing the course of his life and trying to figure out what he wants to do next, and wanting his relationship with his son to finally be everything it can be and wanting to do all the work that he thinks it needs to get there,” Gilpin tells Parade.

And along those same lines, Roz, too, is going through changes with her daughter having moved away and she having reached the top job at KACL that she always aspired to, so she may be searching for something new.

“I think Roz is in the same place, but she doesn’t know it,” Gilpin continues. “[She’s] touching base with an old friend that she has a deep history and deep relationship with who’s such a good friend. Frasier’s a great friend. He cares about people, and he shows up and he also has training in psychotherapy, so he can see what’s going on with you even if you can’t sometimes.”

Related: Frasier Reboot Premiere Date Revealed Hours After Series Picked Up Three Emmy Noms

On the “All About Eve” episode, Roz recognizes that Frasier’s neighbor Eve (Jess Salgueiro), a single baby mom, needs to have a night out, and Roz, in her very practical way, decides that the three men—Frasier, Freddie and Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst)—will babysit, so Roz can take Eve out for a night on the town.

The three men have plans of their own, so they decide to take the baby along to delightful consequences. That is until they get busted by the women. But as part of the story, we once again see a light shone on Roz as the sex positive, independent woman she has always been when she winds up going on a date with a man she just met who gave the women his phone number in hopes that one of them would call.

“Getting someone’s number is almost pious,” Gilpin says. “It’s almost like, ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ these days. But it feels age appropriate, for sure. It was really fun playing that part back in the ‘90s. It felt thrilling to play that because I had a very close friend who I could base all of that on. I loved doing it because they just wrote it so perfectly. Now that she’s got a grown daughter, Roz is still sex positive. It just remains to be seen how sex positive and how that manifests itself.”

Also, during our Zoom chat, Gilpin talks about Roz’s evolution, working with Grammer’s real-life daughters Greer and Spencer, the continued success of Frasier and how the cast from the original show stays in touch.

The character of Frasier is definitely elitist. Why do you think we love him so much?

It’s because he’s reaching for the stars, he’s reaching for that extraordinary thing that somebody thought of. That’s the best ham [This is a story point from Season 2's first episode, where Frasier and Alan order a very expensive ham from Spain] and it cost a billion dollars and we have to treat it with kid gloves because it’s obscure and he learned about it and now he must have it, learn all about it and share it with friends. He just does it with such charm and it’s so important to him, but he feels that way about his friends, too.

We’ve seen an evolution in Frasier. On Cheers, he was a psychiatrist. Then he was a radio talk show host, then a TV talk show host, which was off camera. Now he’s a college professor. How has Roz evolved? Has she made changes in the same way?

It’s interesting because when you apply what you know about the entertainment industry in 2024, and then this ended in 2004, you’d think maybe Roz would reach out. Plus, the radio world is so nomadic. You go all over the place. My father was a disc jockey and did that all over the country. I assumed that she was all over the place, that she went from job to job and tried different things.

Then when we started to work on the episode about Seattle and about KACL, I realized she had stayed there. She’d reached the job that she wanted, which was station manager, and she has been there all these years. I loved it because it felt like Roz’s ship, that’s what she wanted to do, that’s what she was dreamed of and was married to and thought she would be good at. I think she’s been good at it.

You mentioned the episode where Frasier returns to Seattle and visits KACL one final time. How was that for you?

I think a lot of changes have happened in that world. It was a very melancholy, kind of bittersweet episode to go back there, although it was very funny. Bulldog (Dan Butler) is there and Edward Hibbert was there, who plays Gil Chesterton. It was just one of those things where it really felt like a life decision was imminent.

Related: Kelsey Grammer Explains Frasier's Return to Seattle for Season 2

What would you like to see for Roz?

I don’t know. I don’t have any preconceived ideas except that I think that Roz has wanted to go to work since she was a little girl. She wants a job, she wants responsibility, she wants to make things work, she wants to be a problem solver. I think radio was her place, she loved being there, she loved that world. I don’t know what the next thing holds. But I know she needs to be busy, and she needs to be relevant and she needs to make things work.

What is it like having Kelsey’s real-life daughter play your on screen daughter?

I met Greer when she was a baby and I’ve gotten to know her over the years. She is a lovely young woman who’s worked very hard to be an actress and to make her way through this difficult industry. When I heard that she was going to play Alice, I thought it was brilliant casting. I think there was probably a little more pressure on her because she’s a Grammer to be on the set and to get that part. She worked really hard, and she really brought so much to the table. But it’s also just absolutely perfect casting. She has a very serious side to her. She doesn’t take anything for granted, she works very hard.

I did a series with Spencer [Grammer], one of Kelsey’s other kids, who I’ve known all of her life. That was really great, too. We were in a scene, and she was pulling me across a bar, like I was drunk, and she was pulling me out of a bar and I’m like, “There’s always a Grammer pulling me drunk out of a bar.” Thank God for the Grammers.

A lot of reboots don’t work, but this one seems to have legs.

I think so. I think the new cast is adorable. They’re so hard working and they’re charming. The characters that they’re playing, you can see them working just the way we all did to create a world and to start to create a history and a Bible for these characters. They were very welcoming to me and they’re fun to work with. I think that’s a big part of it.

I think Kelsey’s a big part of it because he creates that atmosphere where everybody feels great coming to work and everyone can communicate with whoever they need to communicate with. If it’s a writer, if it’s the DP, if it’s the director, whatever they need to do, they can do to get what they need to make it work. It’s just a very gratifying place to be.

Roz and Frasier have stayed in touch, but how about you and the rest of the cast of the original series? Do you stay in touch?

Yes, we do. We all keep in touch and we’re old friends. Dan Butler and I did a play a couple years ago in Vermont. I talk to David [Hyde Pierce] all the time, I talk to Jane [Leeves] all the time, our kids are best friends. We are good friends. We will always be great friends.

Season 2 of the Frasier reboot streams new episodes Thursdays on Paramount+.

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