Ghosts' Asher Grodman Talks Trevor's Big Familial Surprise: 'I'm Thrilled We're Flying With This'
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Ghosts Season 4, Episode 19. Proceed accordingly.
Happy very early Father's Day to Trevor Lefkowitz!
On this Thursday's Ghosts, Pinkus (guest star Richie Keen) returned to Woodstone and revealed that he not only married Trevor's ex, Lorie, but also that the show's resident playboy is actually the biological father of his and the late Lorie's daughter, Abby (Gideon Adlon).
The college student was unaware of that info — until Trevor accidentally texted it to her from Sam's phone, intending to encourage Pinkus to tell Abby the truth. Trevor was able to mend the rift between father and daughter with a video montage of Pinkus and Abby's memories, set to Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)." The ghost also even found a way to connect with Abby via Sam, who relayed some factoids and questions between Trevor and his daughter. (Abby also loves The Cutting Edge!)
Below, star Asher Grodman talks about his reaction to the fatherly twist and how the newfound discovery will change Trevor.
TVLINE | Congrats on becoming a TV dad! How does it feel?
[Laughs] It feels great. It was a lot of fun. Gideon's amazing, who plays Abby, and she just really nailed it. It's very fun, especially with our show where these ghosts are, like, always watching. So getting to be able to watch someone craft a character that is partially connected to yours is so fun, and she did such a great job and works with such ease. It was really fun to kind of collaborate from beyond the grave and find little moments to mirror, and just a blast, and very cool of our writers and exciting as an actor to be able to kind of invest in this kind of a story. We kind of played with this in Season 1, Episode 5, with Trevor being a DILF, and got to see his world change for a hot second, and I just never knew if we would come back to it because we did that, and I was like, "It's been a while." So here we are, and I'm thrilled we're flying with this.
TVLINE | How did you first find out about this twist? And what was your reaction to it?
Joe [Port] and Joe [Wiseman], our showrunners, invited us, at different times, to come into our writers' room and visit the gang last hiatus, before we started shooting Season 4, and they kind of shared some things that they had brewing. Nothing was set in stone, but this was something that they had been toying with, and it wasn't even a daughter at that point. It was just he's going to have a son or a daughter. That, of course, was very exciting to me, because I think, especially for Trevor, who, both because of his power and just being the most recently dead, still has a lot of connection to the world that he left behind. So this is just another way that he is going to be connected, and of course, Trevor being the person he is, the likelihood of him having a son or a daughter that he doesn't know about out there, there's certainly a good chance that that would've happened. [Laughs] So it just seemed like it made a lot of sense, and it was just going to open up another avenue to kind of play with this character and show him in the good and bad lights.
TVLINE | As much as he is a playboy, there have been seeds planted of him wanting a family. There was that bottle service woman that he thought might have been his daughter at one point. So it's not completely out of left field for him to want this.
No. There is a side of him that actually is quite aligned with this and has been talking about this, and is a caretaker. At the same time, there is a big part of Trevor that is utterly unequipped to do this. And so, those two sides kind of, in this episode, go head-to-head, and you get to see him go purely off of his own impulse and feel very righteous in doing so, and then learning that he made a mistake.
TVLINE | One of the things I appreciated about this episode and Trevor's reaction is that he never gets jealous or angry at Pinkus for ending up with the woman that Trevor dated and for raising his daughter.
Isn't that such an interesting thing with Trevor? Jealousy has never really been a thing for Trevor, which may just be that he feels very good about himself, and based on the life he's lived, rightfully so. But yet, he doesn't have that jealousy. I guess even the thing with Trevor and Hetty, and her flirting with Thor, was never like he was jealous. It was just that she wasn't telling the truth. Yeah, I like that detail, too. It's not the kind of thing you'd expect. Something that I thought was really interesting in this story, for me, that I had kind of expressed to the writers, and I hope there's a little bit of a sense of this, is there's a realization, I think, in Trevor that [Pinkus is] a better father than Trevor would've been. Pinkus did a better job than Trevor could have done... Especially [in] a show where we're constantly yearning to be part of the world, for a character to look at that and say, "No, actually, it was better that I wasn't there." We're not saying that, like, outright, but I think those undertones are there. Abby's kind of the hero of the episode. This girl's lost her mother, and then Trevor throws her whole family dynamic for a loop, and she's the one who kind of has the maturity and is able to process all these incredibly difficult realizations and emotions and do so in a way that Trevor wouldn't have been able to. And so, I think there's something very humbling that happens to Trevor in this episode.
TVLINE | Does having a child out there change Trevor moving forward at all?
I'm sure there will be some realizations, but I also feel pretty confident that, with every growth, there is also a big snapback to the core of who he is, and I think it's with all the ghosts. Because of the dynamics in the house, they all perpetuate each other making mistakes. Something that's interesting about this episode is Trevor really gets to be wrong, and even as he's there trying to send that text, the other ghosts in the house are like, "I think this is a bad idea." He's kind of out on a limb on his own. So I'm sure he is going to see things a little bit differently, but I don't think he will lose his very particular signature point of view.
TVLINE | He has a very useful power. Is he going to be keeping tabs on Abby using his power?
I'm sure that everything the Internet can provide will be taken advantage of.
TVLINE | The scene where Trevor's watching Abby watch the Green Day video and then he's watching her have the conversation with her dad were very touching. There's much more emotional weight for you in this episode. What was that like to play?
It's fun. As crazy as this may sound, this is the first comedy I've ever done. I come from more of a drama background, and so, having those moments, it's a rare thing in this show. Having those moments where we kind of get to lean in a little bit to the fact that we're dealing with mortality on this show and we're dealing with what does someone leave behind... We had a chance to do that, at least for Trevor, with the work retreat earlier this season around the job and what he left behind in terms of his legacy, and we had a chance to do it with his dog when we dealt with the ghost snail, and it's a similar thing here, [but] for some reason, in this episode, it has a little bit of a different flair. It almost feels like the work retreat was very much about Trevor, and then the dog is kind of in the middle. All of us who are dog owners or pet owners, we think about them. And then this [episode] is kind of completing that process, where Trevor really goes from really just thinking about him to thinking about her, and it's a lovely transition point, and we'll see where that takes him, but it was fun to play. It was interesting for me to find the kind of humility, and it was an interesting thing to play, because these characters are very fallible, and that's part of the fun of them. So he learns something. We'll see what he does with it, but he learns something.
TVLINE | Kind of a bit of a family affair off-screen, too. Gideon's sister is Odessa A'zion, who plays Stephanie the attic ghost.
How fun is that?! Especially considering the dynamics between Trevor and Abby versus Trevor and Stephanie. That's a very fun little tidbit. Very talented family.
Ghosts fans, what did you think of the episode and Trevor as a father? Hit the comments!