A Cheers Icon Added An Extra Layer Of Terror To Jack Cutmore-Scott's Frasier Audition
The new cast of "Frasier" had big, hilariously pretentious shoes to fill, and when it came to Jack Cutmore-Scott's audition, the pressure was on. The actor, who plays Frasier's son Freddy in the show's revival season, recently spoke to the hosts of "The Talk" about how he landed the presumably highly coveted role, admitting that the presence of not one but two TV legends in the room made the whole process more nerve-wracking.
"It was a fairly conventional process to begin with," Cutmore-Scott told the show's hosts. "You do the tape and you send in the tape and you don't hear anything for weeks and you think, 'Well, that was fun.'" The actor has previously appeared in films like "Tenet" and "Kingsman: The Secret Service" and led the short-lived Fox comedy "Cooper Barrett's Guide To Surviving Life," but "Frasier" is by far his biggest role. After waiting to hear back from the powers that be at the Paramount+ series, the British actor soon ended up face-to-face with Kelsey Grammer for a live audition.
James Burrows sat in on the actor's audition
"Before I know it, they've got me coming in reading with Kelsey in the flesh, and that was, I think, the first in-person audition I'd done since before the pandemic," Cutmore-Scott explained. "It was deeply intimidating, obviously, acting opposite Kelsey, but also Jimmy Burrows was in the room." The "Jimmy Burrows" in question here is television icon James Burrows, who directed countless TV classics like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Will and Grace" and co-created the beloved sitcom "Cheers." (Frasier Crane, in case you forgot, showed up on that series before getting his own.) Burrows was also heavily involved with the original run of "Frasier," directing 32 episodes of the show's 11 seasons and winning an Emmy along the way for the episode "The Good Son."
With the highly decorated, deeply respected industry veteran in the room (Burrows directed the new show's first two episodes), Cutmore-Scott was understandably nervous. "He's everything, so just to have him silently judging you is one of the more intimidating..." the actor said, trailing off before adding that the audition was "definitely terrifying." But Cutmore-Scott showed them something worth watching: he was asked back for yet another audition afterward. "They made me come back and do it again a week later, they hadn't had enough," he told "The Talk."
Frasier 2.0 has a whole new cast
Eventually, the actor got the part, but he was clearly a frontrunner from early on, as Grammer told the hosts of "The Talk" his own wife loved Cutmore-Scott's audition tape. "We saw a bunch of tapes were sent over by our casting director and she said 'I like this guy Jack, he's pretty good,'" Grammer said in his own "The Talk" interview. Grammer explained that "four or five" actors made it to callbacks for the part, including the man who would eventually become Boston fireman Freddy. "We finally had an in-person sit-down, a reading with him," Grammer told interviewers, "And he was the only one that was actually funny."
While Cutmore-Scott clearly earned his spot in the new show, "Frasier" has so far served as one of the odder sitcom revivals in recent memory, as no original castmates besides Grammer returned as members of the show's main ensemble in season 1. That puts a lot of pressure on Cutmore-Scott and other new cast members (like Anders Keith, Jess Salgueiro, Toks Olagundoye, and Nicholas Lyndhurst) and the show's first season polarized critics. Will "Frasier" find its footing, or is it set to become a footnote in Burrows' lengthy filmography? You can check out all the season 1 episodes now on Paramount+ to decide for yourself.