David “the greatest physical comedian since Buster Keaton”

Here’s a great new interview with David in the Culture section of today’s Sunday Times. Enjoy!

Forty-six years ago in Saratoga Springs, New York, a five-year-old boy named David would stand at the top of the stairs and pretend to be shot. His parents, at breakfast, would hear the thudding of their youngest child crashing down the staircase. “I loved the idea of performing death scenes,” he explains. “It is the most dramatic thing you can do.” About 30 years later, David was acting in a television sitcom. He was in a kitchen and, in an attempt to impress the woman he loved, was trying to look cool by hoisting himself onto the counter top. He kept failing. Then he tried so hard, his head crashed into some hanging pans and he toppled over and fell to the floor.

The two incidents gave birth to the greatest physical comedian since Buster Keaton. He learnt to fall as a child, then, at a critical moment, the men behind the camera spotted how well he did it. “It was funny, and, after that, the writers started looking for ways for me to hurt myself.”

David is David Hyde Pierce, and the television series was Frasier, the finest flowering of the sitcom art. David played Niles Crane, Frasier’s neurotic and inhibited, but also passionate and romantic, younger brother. Dotted through Frasier’s 263 episodes over 11 years, there are Niles-centred scenes of unsurpassed physical comedy. Alone in Frasier’s apartment, he cuts himself, faints at the sight of blood, fails to do some ironing and sets fire to the place. On another occasion, depressed, he retreats to the bathroom. A shot rings out. But it is not a shot, it is the explosion of his father’s Hot’n’Foamy shaving-cream dispenser. Niles emerges, looking like a snowman, to announce that he feels hot and foamy. A pet cockatoo attaches itself permanently to his head. Extravagant panic attacks sweep the poor man, forcing him to hide under the piano. There are hundreds of such scenes — and almost everybody I know remembers them all.

And here he is, in a rehearsal room in Southwark, southeast London. You have to blink before you realise it is indeed him. He is not wearing one of those ludicrously baggy Armani suits that made Niles look like a glove puppet. He is wearing big trainers, jeans and a sweatshirt. He also has a beard that, at first glance, conceals the rather gaunt features of Niles. He is amiable, serious, unjoking and apparently physically competent. He is highly self-possessed. His eyes do not flicker anxiously. In short, he is not like Niles; he is, like all the very best, a pro.

Pierce is rehearsing his first West End show, David Hirson’s La Bête, a satirical comedy written in verse and set in 17th-century France. In New York in 1991 it bombed, although it did well when it moved over to London in 1992. One of the prime reasons for its Broadway failure was a scathing review by the revered New York Times critic Frank Rich — “an almost insufferably smug example of the exact middlebrow fluff it wants to attack.”

“I actually have,” says Niles — sorry, David — choosing his words carefully, “myself been the beneficiary of a few quite severe criticisms from Frank Rich over the past few years. But I run into him and his wife regularly, and I have talked to him about this play. He wasn’t dismissive, he was supportive of the idea of doing it again.”

Anyway, the 1991 production didn’t have Niles … David. He was, at the time, a reasonably successful theatre and television actor, but nothing more. Now he has the greatest sitcom ever made under his belt, as well as his sublime performance as an English-accented Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot, in Spamalot on Broadway. (Watch him on YouTube doing ‘You Won’t Succeed on Broadway if You Don’t Have Any Jews.’) Back in Saratoga Springs, Pierce was the runt of the litter, the youngest child of four by a long way. His father was an insurance salesman with theatrical aspirations. “He did amateur shows. I never saw him act, but I read a review of him in a play that said he was brilliant. He played a half-baked nut in an asylum, with a Napoleon hat, and the review said he belonged on Broadway.”

He says his childhood was “completely contented”, which sounds a bit overstated to be entirely true. Was the fact that he was gay an issue? “Not then — I had no idea. It didn’t mean anything. I didn’t identify myself as that. I think, if I was at all isolated, it came from being the youngest, although it might be in my nature. I love people, but I am also very contented on my own.” The British press reported that he had outed himself when he married his long-term lover, Brian Hargrove, in 2008. In fact, he had been generally known to be gay in America since Frasier began in 1993.

“The way coming out is, every time you meet someone who doesn’t know you’re gay, and you tell them, you come out. The idea that it happens once is a fiction. Brian and I were in the American tabloids from the early years of Frasier — they hid behind trees and took pictures.”

His family were Episcopalians — American Anglicans, basically — and, aged 12, David decided he wanted to be a priest. Wisely, the minister suggested he go into his father’s business instead. His childhood faith swiftly became agnosticism when a friend introduced him to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but his love of church music persisted. He played the piano, learnt the organ and, finally, went to Yale to study classical piano. At this, he failed. “It was not only that I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t have the interest — I wasn’t interested in the coursework you had to do to be a music major.”

He switched to a combination of music and drama, and for 12 years after graduating, he was a happy and fairly successful actor. Comedy, both physical and non-­physical, kept intruding. “I did a lot of stage combat. I did a production of Cyrano where I was both the understudy of Cyrano and the person fencing with Cyrano, and I played Laertes and understudied Hamlet. It was an inappropriately funny Laertes.” Then, one day, he was picked to play Niles on the basis that he looked enough like Kelsey Grammer to be Frasier’s brother. Grammer having filled out somewhat, this now seems improbable.

Today, the show would never have got past the first pitch to the network: two fussy, over-refined psychiatrist brothers in Seattle have a dad who lives with the elder, a radio star; dad is a retired cop who needs a live-in physical therapist, with whom the younger brother falls in love. The setup seems arbitrary and novelish, rather than comic. In 1993, though, it was seen primarily as a spin-off from the highly successful Cheers, in which Frasier had been an overintellectual barfly in Boston.

Aged 12, David decided he wanted to be a priest. Wisely, the minister suggested he go into his father’s business instead “If it hadn’t been a sequel to Cheers, if it had just come up full-blown in that form, I don’t know that they would have put it on the air, if I’m truly honest. But they knew the characters and they said, ‘Okay, we know what this is.”

The wonder of the show is that it is both highly theatrical and fantastically upmarket. There is a live audience, and all the scenery is in the form of stage sets. Although the Cranes are mocked, their highbrow cultural tastes and references are central to the show. Like The Simpsons, Frasier optimistically and bracingly assumes — and gets — intelligent viewers. Yet the eccentric setup was also, Pierce says, topical. “The guys who created the show wondered what a real-life issue was nowadays. They decided it was people finding they had to take care of their parents.”

One of the primary dynamics of the show is the presence of the father in Frasier’s apartment. It is also the father whose need for care brings the English Daphne into the picture. Ah, Daphne …

From the moment he sees her, Niles is deeply in love. It is a love that takes more than 200 episodes to be acknowledged by both, and it is a love that makes the Ross and Rachel romance in Friends look bloodless and irritating, especially as Niles is married to someone else (whom we never see). For all his neuroses and in spite of his invisible, sexless, domineering and even more neurotic wife, Niles was consumed by pure passion. Nothing better demonstrates Pierce’s quality as a comic actor than his infinite variations on the look of hopeless, hangdog longing when in the presence of Daphne. Sexually, he is a mess. At one point, he replaces one thin, domineering wife with another, his plastic surgeon.

He even, drunk, goes to bed with Frasier’s thin, domineering ex-wife, Lilith. On waking up, he says: “It happens all the time … in Arkansas!”

“He was a very passionate guy,” Pierce says. “There was a great episode with him and Daphne where every single scene was titled as a version of a Tennessee Williams play. The air conditioning was off, and it was hot, and they were both in his apartment for some reason, and she was all sexy, and it was great. That’s what I like about him. He was neurotic and he was prissy, but he had this deep, deep love for Daphne.” Eventually, of course, they tied the knot.

Pierce has said elsewhere, though, that he would not want to spend too much time with Niles. “Well,” he shrugs, “he has a good heart.”

The show took 11 years of his life. One day, the producers called in the cast and said the next season would be the last. “It was a real privilege that the network didn’t end the show, the producers did.” Pierce was not anxious because, he says, he seldom looks into the future. He had, however, been having voice coaching, with the vague idea that he wanted to be in a stage musical. Then Spamalot, the stage version of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, fell into his lap. At once, he was no longer just Niles.

By the end of Frasier, he would have been earning about $1m per episode, so he would have had plenty of what a friend of mine calls “F-off money”. He could choose his future freely. And, in a relaxed, professional kind of way, he has done so. He lives in Los Angeles with Hargrove and picks and chooses his projects. It all seems very calm and exact and — apart, perhaps, from the exactness — nothing like Niles.

Niles Crane was one of the great fictional creations of our time, a modernist romantic — neurotic, locked in pretension, anxiety and inhibition, but buffeted by an intense and pure passion. Of course, he was written like that by the best television writers in the world. But if runt David had not learnt to throw himself down the stairs, he would never have happened.

La Bête is at the Comedy, SW1, from Saturday until September 4