Article from Zap2It.com...A Must read!

[Frasier W. Crane]

First 'Friends,' Next 'Frasier'?
Wed, Nov 20, 2002 05:37 PM PDT

by Chad Greene
Zap2it, TV News

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - David Hyde Pierce isn't Dr. Niles Crane, his character on NBC's hit sitcom "Frasier." Although the Yale-educated actor is every bit as intelligent and droll as his television alter ego, Pierce's relaxed wardrobe is a sure sign that he's much less uptight.

The top two buttons of his tan corduroy shirt are undone, revealing a plain white undershirt. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, exposing forearms that are constantly making expansive gestures that punctuate his words.

Unlike "Friends," which will end after this, its ninth season, "Frasier" is cruising through its 10th and is contracted for an 11th without showing any signs of slowing down. Still, can the show last forever?

"I don't think that's reality," Pierce tells Zap2it. "I think we're contracted for this year and next year, and people have started talking about, 'Well, would we do a year after that?' We all sort of thought that it would end in two more years, and the only reason it would end is that we all feel like, 'Uh-oh, it can't be good anymore.'"

Not that Pierce has noticed a decline in quality. "The writing has stayed so great, and this year we're having an amazing year -- discovering all kinds of new relationships and stuff," he says. "Here we are in our tenth year, that's just such a comfortable place for us to go, it just happens."

Not that he wants to see "Frasier" linger on past its prime. "My feeling is that I really want after the last show to think, 'Oh, I wish we had one more season,' instead of thinking, 'Thank God it's finally over.'"

Pierce says that "Frasier" remains the ideal television show for an actor with his theatrical background. "I'm so lucky, because really my experience in television, on this show, is a theatrical experience. That's where I came from, and I'm working with theater actors. The writing is certainly as good as any play you'll ever see, and we do it in front of a live audience. I feel like I'm blessed that way, because I get paid really well, too, which you don't in theatre, and that's the thing I love to do."

However, he's quick to add, he's also enjoying movies "more and more," and finding ways to squeeze them into his busy schedule. For example, "I did 'Full Frontal,' the Steven Soderberg movie, and because of the way he scheduled that I was able to do it while I was doing 'Frasier' last fall, because that was such a tight production schedule."

"But I did a big, regular, gnarly feature this summer in the hiatus, and that's really when I can do anything where I have a large part." The "gnarly feature" Pierce is referring to is "Down with Love," a romantic comedy co-starring Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger. The film, slated to premiere in April of next year, is an homage to the early 1960's sex comedies that starred Rock Hudson and Doris Day.

"It's full of references to all of those movies," Pierce says, "and it also plays with some of the conventions that you accept in those movies. It just tweaks them a little bit and updates them."

With a post-"Frasier" career in film seeming assured, Pierce says that he's only worried about the series ending "in the sense that I'll miss it terribly. That's going to be really hard. I mean, they were all over to my house for dinner last night. We've become ... no, we haven't become friends; we were friends from the first day. So that'll be tough."

"Because I also know from the theatre that as close as you are to these people, what holds you together really is the show, and we'll see each other afterwards, but, really, it won't ever be the same."