Smallscreen Reviews

Starz “Boss” has heft: Kelsey Grammer's Tom Kane bold as Chicago, interview

By April MacIntyre Oct 22, 2011, 2:30 GMT

Money, graft, cronyism, favors, paybacks, alliances, back office deals, nepotism, shake downs, threats and media smear campaigns are all in a day’s work.

The beginning of the new series “Boss” lays it out straight away: Mayor Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer) is treated by a female doctor in a warehouse away from media and delivered the grim news: He will have little to look forward to thanks to a degenerative brain disorder will most likely debilitate and/or kill the most powerful man in Illinois within three to five years.

The same doctor is later threatened when he feels the information can politically harm him.

This Friday, Oct. 21, on Starz political drama is taught, mean, sexy, humorous at times and mostly riveting because of the caliber of actors that inhabit the series.

Kane is hedonistic, fatalistic, ruthless, charismatic and remorseful. His diagnosis makes him reflect on his soured relationship with his wife and his estranged drug addict daughter.

His coterie of political minions are a study in enabling and opportunistic personalities that are drawn to the gravitational pull of a powerful man in office. It will make you hate politicians even more than you may already do, if that is at all possible.

The other star of this series is the location itself, Chicago, where the architecture and the grandness of the city shine in burnished warm wainscoting and high ceiling moldings, with inlaid brass and copper embellishments and polished heavy glass and marble. Chicago always had heft and style as a city, and so does Grammer’s new character and series.

Connie Nielsen (“Gladiator”) is the perfect wife, Meredith, who understands her place with Kane. Their relationship is an arrangement now with occasional fleeting moments of tenderness or kindness, but just barely. She loves the power as much as he does.

Emma (Hannah Ware) is gamine, haunted, addicted and restless. Her father misses her and she tries her hand at helping less fortunate, always close to the danger that can bring her straight down.

Gus Van Sant makes his TV directing debut with the first episode of the series, and it shows, the feel of the pilot is golden, burled well-oiled wood patina made epic and grand by expert lensing, set decoration and production design, in a production befitting a cinematic effort more than a TV series.

Other notable players include Martin Donovan as his chief of staff and a sultry femme fatale brainiac Kathleen Robertson as a top advisor.

Boss debuts Friday, October 21 at 10:00 pm

Kelsey Grammer spoke to Monsters and Critics and a few other online reporters regarding this new series which is highly recommended.

Monsters and Critics: Kelsey, I really enjoyed your new series. It’s a great watch.

Kelsey Grammer: Thanks April, thanks. How many have you seen?

M&C: I’ve seen three of them.

Kelsey Grammer: Three, oh cool. They have become more - I think they’re going to send them all to you guys...it’s an interesting run isn’t it?

M&C: Yes it is. That’s excellent. I’m really curious, your character is such a complex guy and he’s not entirely bad of course or good. He seems to have softened when you got the diagnosis of your neurological disorder that your reputation. Was there a real-life pol you studied for this role?

Kelsey Grammer: There is actually nobody. There is no particular person that we have tried to emulate or imitate or indict or anything else. Chicago has the storied history of colorful mayors and but it goes back for hundreds of years actually, it’s not just the last two generations. And that’s really what we draw on. I mean, I think it’s the history of the mayor’s office in Chicago that, you know, maybe we’re taking as inspiration to the story.

But in terms of what happens to Tom Kane when he gets this news, he suddenly has that next - what’s the word, mission to try to forge and determine what place he will hold in that pantheon of mayors. And so as you suggest a sort of softening possibly, it’s certainly there.

I think he now has the kind of perspective - and there are moments in the performance when I’m looking out the window or wherever actually, I took a second, I don’t know if it comes across in the performance but where suddenly he isn’t there anymore. He is actually looking at his own image as a mayor and what story that will be rather than the moment he’s in.

I mean, it’s kind of funny. It’s as though he has started his step off of his plane a little bit because of the news he has gotten. And there’s something freeing and gentling about that.

So I don’t know if it’s happening to my satisfaction but I do sense that he is. But your question is actually fairly perspicacious. So yes, I’m answering yes. That is what is going on with him, his legacy is now as much a concern as his actually day-to-day.

M&C: I talked to some of the Lionsgate producers and they were very proud of some of the emphasis and some of the shots that the cinematographer was able to get. It is a very stylish looking love letter to Chicago.

Can you talk about some of your favorite moments or shots or buildings and if you are an architecture fan?

Kelsey Grammer: Well there’s some great shots - there’s one of the old hotel that when we were coming up the escalator which I loved, I thought that was beautiful. It’s got that sort of painted - ceiling painted in it. I forget the name of the hotel, maybe you would know better, I don’t know.

But the architecture of Chicago of course is one of the stories of Chicago itself. I mean, so much rebuilding had to be done after the big Chicago fire. A lot of things happened as a result of that in terms of nothing could be built out of wood anymore which gave rise to the high rise.

And then there’s the whole modernist movement.
And that is part of the culture of Chicago and of course we borrowed liberally from the culture of Chicago to enforce and reinforce the world of this fictional mayor. And yes, I mean, I think it’s a dramatic part of it.

Do I have any favorites? I mean, I love the director of photography (Kasper Tuxen), the DP and he is the head cameraman basically. He did some fantastic work. And I do think the look of the show is very unique and also kind of in praise of Chicago.

Boston Herald: How is it different when you approach a role like this and what do you have to do differently as an actor?

Kelsey Grammer: Every role, you approach every role a little differently. You just want to find out what it is about you that helps that role come to life. And in this case I decided that I needed to just strip myself bare and play the words as I saw them and be honest emotionally and be pretty vicious honestly. I mean, but tortured and challenged and emotional, I mean, Tom Kane is a very, very complex character to play and he’s fun to play for that reason.

In this particular case I approached the role without bringing along my customary (third eye) which is very helpful in comedy especially because you always have to be aware of even if there’s not an audience when you’re shooting film you have to be aware of what the audience may be perceiving when you do a comedy. You have to invite them to laugh and be ever conscious about that.

But in this case honestly it’s more important I think to be self indulgent enough to allow just you and the role to sort of take their path without a real awareness of how it may or may not impact the audience. And so in a weird way it’s a little more honest honestly. It has less artifice in some ways than doing a comedy does which I guess we know is one of the reasons sometimes they say comedy is really hard.

BH: How applicable do you think it is to what city politics may be like?

Kelsey Grammer: Well, it’s interesting. We didn’t really try to do some kind of indictment of city politics as we know it because we know nothing about it honestly, we’re guessing. We know about the history of city politics, certainly Chicago city politics.

But we’re not out to, you know, harpoon or lampoon anybody. We’re actually taking a modern day scenario and lending classic tragical elements to it to play out on that stage.

We’ve borrowed a lot from Shakespeare. People talk, it’s not a Shakespeare piece, we don’t want to alienate anybody from the show, saying oh dear God, we’re going to tune in to a Shakespeare play.But the kind of world this whole intrigue and betrayal and violence and implied violence and sort of a simmering plot of people can die was what we wanted to have in the body of the show, in the implied language of the show.

The fact that the stakes are enormous for these people, that he’s losing his kingdom, that betrayals are the betrayals of lifetime friends and family and wives and husbands. That’s the kind of stuff that is classically Shakespearean or Jacobean. Another thing we wanted to explore is where that line between threatened violence and actual violence might get crossed.

I have no idea if these things really take place in Chicago politics or in politics in general but it’s kind of fun to put the world out there, to sort of explore it in this fiction.

TV America: Have you ever had anything in previous when you’re on stage to compare to getting that long and that chunky a piece? And second of all what does it feel like when you’re doing it and how hard is it to get the words right beforehand?

Kelsey Grammer: Well what’s funny is it’s - in terms of the big speeches and that demand, good writing is always easy to learn and (Sarha)’s writing is exemplary, it’s terrific. And it goes in the head very quickly and very easily because one thought leads to the next.

The thoughts of the character are kind of twinned with what he’s actually saying. So in a weird way it’s a little like doing Shakespeare because the same thing is true of Shakespeare’s writing. It is easy to learn honestly
even though it seems so difficult because it makes so much sense and it’s so connected to the character.

TA: You describe yourself in the autobiography sometimes as feeling you would always be lonely and this guy is incredibly lonely in some ways.

Kelsey Grammer: Oh yes, there is no one he can trust so he is extraordinarily lonely. And yes I guess, it’s funny. You don’t set up or set about playing a character, at least I don’t, and then try to like stick all of my own autobiographical information into the character.You have been given a fantasy basically that has been written by a very creative mind and your job is to fill that fantasy. You do it with your own imagination I think and approximate the character based on your creativity rather than your own history.

Some of that naturally takes a ride along with the character. And when things are really firing once in a while and, I mean, in this case it is pretty common honestly, the things that I’ve experienced in my own life kind of piggyback into the life of Tom Kane.

And that’s just sort of a luxury for, when you’re doing a job like this. I’m just an actor, I don’t have a lot of important things to sell you. I just leave it in this case my personal live has had an opportunity to kind of take a nice little ride along with Tom Kane.

Red Eye Chicago: Do you think that the city sort of becomes a character as well?
Kelsey Grammer: Yes well certainly we chose the Chicago as a character. I mean, it is the City of the Big Shoulders and of course that typifies who this guy is as well.
Tom Kane’s life energy if you will comes from Chicago.

I mean, it is his relationship with that city, his relationship with the history of that city that makes him a remarkable guy. And that’s what I like about him.And in playing it I got a sense of that city all the time and it does - it bolsters that man.

His choices, his life, his energy is as big as that town and it’s pretty damn big. It’s got a swagger about it, an interesting dynamic that is really - is unique to Chicago. And it’s twinned with Tom Kane’s energy I think. So yes it was helpful, extremely.