As soon as it was revealed in an earlier episode of Ghosts that the body of ’90s stockbroker bro Trevor Lefkowitz had been thrown into the pond at the Woodstone B&B, the discovery of his remains seemed to be an inevitable future episode.
But even the man behind Trevor, actor Asher Grodman, didn’t expect “Trevor’s Body” to arrive so soon in the hit CBS comedy’s run.
“I look at this show and I’m like, ‘There are a million possibilities.’ There’s no need to find my body until season 7,” Grodman tells PEOPLE. “I don’t ever think that things are going to happen as quickly as they end up happening. I was surprised.”
With guest appearances from Laraine Newman and Chip Zein as well as Tara Reid — whom Trevor loves to name-drop when telling stories of parties in the Hamptons — Grodman, 35, isn’t complaining. Instead, he’s laughing, even at the scenes he wasn’t in.
“The thing that was a real treat for me with this episode is that it was so funny,” he says. “This is the only table read that we’ve done that I actually cried laughing. The whole thing with the horny Pilgrim [a ghost from a neighboring home] who was talking like he was in an internet chat room or something? That was so funny.”
Below, Grodman shares more of his experience on “Trevor’s Body,” as well as what’s next for Trevor and some of the ghosts, especially Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky).
ASHER GRODMAN: I go back to, I was unemployed for 20 years and the most acting I was ever doing was to two people in an audition room with no windows. The idea that we made something in our little bunker in Montreal that people rated on a list is mind-boggling. It’s this crazy thing. That was episode 16 of 18, so we had 16 episodes for the cast to figure out our dynamic and our chemistry and stuff like that. We got that script and we probably started shooting 48 hours later, and we had a very short period of time to figure out Trevor’s group dynamic with the friends who really helped form him as a human. How does that play out? Those guest stars were incredible and so down to play and so much fun. I also have to give a tip of the cap to the writers because the episode plays out like a murder mystery, but it’s about a missing pair of pants, and so the juxtaposition of those two things is so clever.
There is a braggadocios version of this kind of guy that Trevor is, where it’s all bulls—, it’s all just telling stories. For Trevor, all of the things that you think would be lies, like Tara Reid’s birthday or being at the White Party, all that stuff is real — it’s the simple good guy stuff that is all hidden away. I think that switch is also very exciting.
We’re always figuring out, among the eight of these ghosts, how do we relate to each other? How do we compare to each other? Trevor is, I would say, the most social of the ghosts because the thing that happened to him was the worst thing that ever happened to him, realizing that his friends who he loved didn’t see him the same way or weren’t capable of that. There’s something about the concept of the show that lets you do something that juxtaposes something as trivial as a pair of pants up against something like hazing and group dynamics and heartbreak, and I’m very lucky to be part of this concept.
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For “Trevor’s Body,” what did you think when you heard Laraine Newman and Chip Zein were playing your parents? You don’t really get to play with them so much as around them though.
We’re not talking to each other, but we’re kind of playing at each other. They’re doing a thing that is going to set me off, and so I get to kind of be the surfer behind their boats. That’s so much fun, because they both are so spontaneous and smart. The speech that Laraine does at the memorial was just so heartfelt and devastating. I didn’t want them to leave, I wanted to keep hanging out with my parents. They are both legends!
