Kelsey Grammer’s grandfather influenced his role in the World War II film

In Shane Dax Taylor’s film Murder Company, Frasier Star Kelsey Grammer transports audiences to World War II, when a group of American soldiers are ordered to smuggle a member of the French Resistance (played by Gilles Marini) behind enemy lines to assassinate a Nazi target. Grammer stars in the film alongside William Moseley, Gilles Marini and Pooch Hall, with several actors and the film’s director having personal ties to the D-Day invasion film.

“My grandfather was in World War II and served, and he raised me,” Grammer said Yahoo Canada“So I have a real energetic connection with him that continues to this day.”

Maverick Film & Complex Corp.

Buy Murder Company for $9.99 or rent it for $6.99 on Apple TV

$10 on Apple TV

Similar to Grammer, Taylor’s grandfather was a colonel in World War II. This connection between Grammer’s and Taylor’s family history helped them collaborate on Grammer’s character, General Haskel.

“One thing I said to him when we first met was, ‘Tell me something, my grandfather… I’ve never heard him swear in my life.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s funny, I’ve never heard mine swear either,'” Grammer said. “I said, ‘Well, I think that guy should never say a swear word,’ and so he didn’t.”

“I really liked that about him because it speaks to the character of these types of men. They experienced really challenging things and yet never lost their dignity, and that was a very cool thing. Even when they did some things they weren’t proud of, they maintained an outward legacy of nobility and decency among themselves. And that’s what I loved about the character.”

Both of Grammer’s co-star Moseley’s grandfathers were in World War II, one of whom was a paratrooper, which also made the actor feel particularly connected to this story.

“I wanted to give this character everything I could,” Moseley said. “It was something that was really close to my heart.”

“If your family has been through this, you have to do your best.”

Marini’s grandmother was active in the French Resistance, which forced him to be part of this movement. Murder Company.

“It meant a huge amount to me to be offered this role,” he said. “When I heard about it and read it, I thought to myself: I don’t care if I get paid for it, I have to play this role. That’s how important it was to me to be able to give a little bit of myself to this time in history.”

For Hall, who was friends with Taylor before Murder Company, The opportunity to portray a black soldier in a film about World War II was an incentive for the actor.

“In World War II, black soldiers didn’t get to fight very often, and I felt like this was an opportunity for me to contribute to this ragtag group of guys, of brothers, to see what it would have looked like … if black soldiers had been integrated into World War II earlier,” Hall said. “We come together. We fight with one family. Under one flag.”

“I want the audience to feel like it’s real”

With Murder Company Since the portrayal is based on true events, Taylor and the actors went to great lengths to make the war and the soldiers as realistic as possible.

“I think it’s very important to embody the physical aspects of your character,” Moseley stressed. “Just take the fall. … Maybe I say this every now and then, when I’m 60 I wouldn’t want to do it anymore, but throw yourself on the ground. Shoot the gun. Do it full force. Take the hit. I want the audience to feel like it’s real.”

“Shane shot the film in a way that was almost like guerrilla filming, documentary style. The camera was on the shoulder, our (cameraman) was literally running in with us, falling with us. So it was really important to me that it looked real and that I gave it everything I could. To be honest, I was battered and bruised by the end. Really tired, but it was cool.”

“My father, rest in peace, was a soldier, so I have that discipline,” Hall said in a separate interview. “I think when you make a film like this, first and foremost I don’t want to offend soldiers. We have stuntmen, but I want to do as many stunts as possible, because it’s not like soldiers are asking anyone to fill in for them.”

“As soon as you hear action, you just think about it because you’re already exposed to the elements with the heavy clothes, we were sweating a lot. At lunch we had to take off all of our clothes and either let them dry or hang them up to dry because they’re wool. … With (Shane’s) experience of coming here and coming into unfamiliar territory, shooting in Europe, and not knowing exactly how things were going to go because the language was a factor, the climate, the food was hit and miss. You’re out there, you’re at the mercy of your guys, and I think shooting in Bulgaria brought that real element of us fighting abroad for our country, but for this film.”

Each actor also had their own process for getting into character, from the physical elements to the more emotional moments. For Marini, it was especially important to understand the significance of his character’s weapon, especially as someone with significant trauma that reveals itself throughout the course of the plot. Murder Company.

“Initially, I felt in my head and in my work as an actor that the only important thing in this circle around Daquin, the character, was his gun,” Marini explained. “The gun is his wife, the gun is everything. That’s what will fix what he feels needs to be fixed.”

“(World War II) comes, his whole family is devastated. He has no life left in him. … Maybe one of the greatest things I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.”

The “relaxation phase” after shooting a war film

Developing characters is part of the equation, but at the end of the project, the actors also had to leave those roles and that setting behind, which presented its own difficulties.

“I live in a typical English village in the Cotswolds. When I came back from filming, I went to the local market to get some bread. Everyone was very smartly dressed, with dogs, and talking about very simple things like their children and what they were up to,” recalls Moseley. “And I felt like I had just been thrown out of a war zone. And I thought, ‘Where am I?'”

“Of course, you get back into the rhythm after about a week, but that takes time. And I don’t know many actors who can say that you don’t need time, a kind of relaxation phase, after shooting a film of this kind.”

Maverick Film & Complex Corp.

Buy Murder Company for $9.99 or rent it for $6.99 on Apple TV

$10 on Apple TV

As for the benefit of continuing to make films set in the era of previous wars, such as Murder Company, Grammer stressed that it was beneficial to “remind people of their history.”

“It can serve as a backdrop to make better decisions in the present,” Grammer said. “Because if you don’t have a sense of where you came from, if you don’t know who you are, you don’t know where you’re going.”

“It’s a very interesting dilemma that we’re constantly faced with today. … When you look back a little bit at our past and see what people were willing to give up to preserve what we have and who we really are, you realize that it was worth something. And we need to pass that on to the next generation.”

Murder Company is available in select theaters, digitally, and on demand.