Nestled in the Catskill Mountains, Margaretville, New York (population: 596) still boasts a video rental store and an eight-lane bowling alley. Cell phone service is scarce. The Sunoco sells live bait, and it’s tough to get a meal or even a drink after 9 o’clock on a Sunday night. Yet at least one Margaretville resident maintains a tennis court, a pool and a farm. His name is Kelsey Grammer.

Despite living in such a small town, Grammer is tricky to find. His 500-acre property boasts six separate houses—all facing different directions and decorated with American flags. As I reach out to knock on the correct door, it opens wide, revealing neither a maid nor an assistant, but Frasier Crane himself.

Twelve years have passed since Grammer completed his beloved, two-decade tenure as Dr. Frasier Crane, the opera and caviar-loving psychiatrist-turned-radio host that propelled him to stardom on Cheers and then Frasier, the series that had more Emmy wins than any other until Game of Thrones stole its crown this year. But rather than retiring to bask in residual goodwill and residual checks, Grammer has entered a fascinating new phase of his career this year, popping up seemingly everywhere: cameos on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and in Neighbors 2, a voice role in Storks, and a turn in Nest 3D, a horror collaboration between China, Australia and spiders. Amazon has placed a full-season order for Grammer-starring The Last Tycoon; weeks after he returns to that set in November, Netflix will debut the animated series Trollhunters. It features Grammer and his baritone, the most recognizable this side of Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones, as Blinky, a six-eyed troll guiding protagonist Jim on a supernatural quest.

Searching for for arachnids and cave-dwellers, appearing in the Entourage movie and The Expendables 3—Grammer is having fun these days. After years of trying to settle into another sitcom, he now prefers “short burst[s] of activity” to the traditional television grind. (The Entourage appearance required two hours of work; Neighbors 2 took a day). And though he appreciates that in the current entertainment landscape, “there’s more opportunity to do something we think is good,” Grammer remains nostalgic for bygone times—not only in the industry, but also in the nation. He loves John Wayne, quotes James Cagney, and laments how family time has been overtaken by the temptation of solitary viewing on tiny screens.

Because Grammer’s coffeemaker is broken, we have breakfast on the patio of Two Old Tarts, a café and bakery in neighboring Andes, New York. (“The Two Old Tarts are a couple of gay fellas,” he informs me.) We’re seated near a sign that reads, “How far ‘off Broadway’ can you get?” Grammer is actually a 2016 Tony winner for co-producing the current revival of The Color Purple, and he was on Broadway himself as recently as March in Finding Neverland. Among other productions, Grammer also starred in a Macbeth revival on Broadway in 2000—but it closed to poor reviews after just 13 performances. Despite the premature curtain call, Grammer says, “Macbeth is a show I’m going to do again someday…If [a project] goes really well, then I’m inclined to say, ‘Oh, I don’t need to do that again.’”

Yet after Frasier wrapped in 2004, he did attempt to go back to television—four times, in three quickly-canceled sitcoms (Back to You, Hank, Partners) and one dark antihero drama (Boss, which earned Grammer a Golden Globe—though it was also axed after 18 episodes). In hindsight, Grammer considers it a blessing that he is not currently stuck in a long-term TV contract. “I’ve got this great home life I want to keep living, and I don’t want to neglect it,” he says. “Were I in the midst of a television series now and trying to attend to my family in the way I like to, I’d be frustrated.”

Even when he leaves his family behind to travel to a set, though, he’s continuing to seek out the good life. Grammer is downright giddy to discuss Nest 3D, which he filmed in Queensland, Australia. In the film, the lethal venom of funnel-web spiders is determined to be the key to eternal youth. The cast goes in search of a nest that once belonged to an ancient Chinese emperor; chaos ensues. Somehow, Grammer makes even this B movie seem like a project fit for a Juilliard-trained actor such as himself: “It’s anthropology, archaeology, science and history and current day...”

Really, though, the location sold Grammer on the role. “Somebody told me, 20 years ago, that Michael Caine only picked movie scripts based on where it was going to be shot,” he says. (In Caine’s 2010 memoir, the English actor does indeed describe “one of the cardinal rules of bad movies” thusly: “if you’re going to do a bad movie, do it in a great location.”) This same selection process led Grammer to make Breaking the Bank, a straight-to-DVD comedy about an inept London banker; as Grammer says, “This is not the best movie you’ll see this year, but you won’t see 10 that are better.”

Grammer is plenty satisfied with his less critically-acclaimed roles; he sounds genuinely pleased when he later ends a brief lull by interjecting, “Oh I won a Razzie!” The worst supporting actor award was announced on his 60th birthday, for his work in a quartet of 2014 films: The Expendables 3, Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return, Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, and Think Like a Man Too. He was unable to attend the ceremony, but he’d very much like to get the statuette (even if “I thought I was pretty good in Transformers”). A dubious honor, his Razzie doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest: “I’ve never really allowed anyone else to tell me whether I’m good or not.” Incidentally, he claims that the best movie where he was passed over for a part was Star Wars. During a meeting with George Lucas, Grammer remembers, “He said, ‘Yeah we’re looking for a young guy, I don’t know, about your age. There’s two roles; there’s these two guys”—Luke Skywalker and Han Solo—“that come kind of rescue a princess in space.’”

Grammer has had a home base in Margaretville—“such a redneck place,” he says fondly—for the past 20 years. (He and his wife, Katye, also have a home in Los Angeles; their third place, an apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, is currently on the market for $9.75 million). The idea of leaving his rural compound is “devastating”: “What happens here is after the first week or so, you settle in to a different kind of rhythm,” he explains in the car, steering while maintaining startlingly good eye contact.

That rhythm allows Grammer to concentrate partially on his second career as a producer. He helped oversee both Medium and Girlfriends, as well as The Game, a Girlfriends spinoff. While in Margaretville, he focuses on scripts currently in development, like a 10-part history of the Donner Party. “Maybe we’ll sell it to The Weather Channel,” he says—and he’s serious. Naturally, Grammer would play George Donner: “It’s my way of doing a Western,” he says. “It was seeded in that movement in American history where everybody’s got [dreams of], ‘We can do bigger, we can go better, we can find paradise.’”

Grammer is in the midst of expanding his own paradise in Margaretville. He plans to open a brewery, Faith American Brewing Company, here in the next 12 to 18 months; he’s also starting “a home for young women who’ve decided to have their babies,” Grammer says, “so that they’re not just tossed out into society.” Back in 2010, when profiled in New York, Grammer identified as pro-choice with this caveat: “I don’t advocate for abortion.” As the decade progressed, he seems to have grown more conservative on this issue. In October, he and his wife, who suffered a miscarriage in 2010 and is now expecting their third child, made headlines for respective Instagram posts in which they wore t-shirts endorsing a pro-life website. This summer, in a Times of London article that Grammer described to me as “an awful hit piece,” he was quoted saying, “It gets a bit dishonest to call something reproductive rights when you clearly have a choice well before a baby is conceived.”

Audiences who don’t know or care about how Grammer votes are probably also unaware of the tragedies he faced prior to his television career: when Grammer was 13, his father was shot and killed. At age 20, his sister Karen was gang-raped and murdered. Five years later, his two half brothers died while scuba diving in St. Thomas.

Grammer also spent years struggling with drug and alcohol abuse. He went to jail and rehab—but he doesn’t understand why reporters continue to bring up this time in his life. “The things that happened to me that are still sort of what you would call tabloid fodder [were] 20 years ago,” he says—although that isn’t entirely true; this decade began with a very public third divorce for Grammer. “Those days, I like to look at it this way: I was in the midst of a powerful healing,” he laughs, his chuckles resonating like a massive door swinging on its hinges. “As you wrestle with life . . . you’re going to come out on the other end healed . . . I’ve fallen short sometimes, and I’ve risen pretty high a few times.”

Though he remains a fixture of modern pop culture, Grammer has more affection for the past; he likes to watch old movies—last night, it was The Thin Man—and when it comes to modern television, he admits, “Honestly I haven’t watched a thing.” An icon of an era when there were fewer TV choices, when families were likely to watch shows like Frasier together, Grammer isn’t a fan of watching shows alone on phones and laptops, even though this is how most people will consume The Last Tycoon and Trollhunters: “I don’t think it’s good for society.” He starts to laugh, but cuts it short. “I think enjoying art is a communal effort. It should remain that way.”

By the time we return to his house, Grammer has asked almost as many questions as I have. When he learned that I’d stayed in a motel the previous evening, he lamented not being able to put me up on his property. Both generous with his time and through with his answers, he will follow up via email several hours later to see if he needs to expound on a specific point. He strikes me as a tad insecure, worried that I’m going to write about his last hurrah in Hollywood; coming from that famous, sonorous baritone voice, it’s endearing.

Grammer insists that I use his kitchen landline to call a car service. From where I wait, I can see small rock bridges, a white gazebo and a single ornate streetlamp perched underneath a gnarled tree. Grammer is delighted to see his blue-eyed children run up to us; inside, his wife’s just made fresh banana bread. This is the great home life he doesn’t want to neglect: he even has a car and a coffee maker to fix. My ride arrives, and he hugs me goodbye. Waving through the window, Grammer picks up his son, and beckons his daughter inside.