‘Frasier’ guest star and superfan Rachel Bloom on her role in season 2: ‘It was very surreal’

Rachel Bloom is a kid of the nineties. Her family would record all their shows of the week back when VCRs were still a thing and then at the end of the week, they would watch them together.

Frasier always held a special place in her heart because of the show’s inherent theatricality. But then a few years ago, the show became something of a security blanket. When she’s away from home and her family, she pops on a classic Frasier — the Lilith episodes are among her faves — to soothe her nerves.

By her own admission, Bloom has seen every episode of the original Frasier at least three times, so when she got a chance to guest-star on the revival, she heard the blues a-callin’, tossed a salad, and fried her up some scrambled eggs.

And then there’s the character she gets to portray. During a visit last year to the set of Frasier, her friends — showrunners and creators Joe Cristalli and Chris Harris (who worked on  worked on How I Met Your Mother with her husband Dan Gregor) — informed Bloom they “might have a part” for her if they were renewed for a second season.

“I play Phoebe Glazer and I couldn’t be more thrilled,” Bloom tells Entertainment Weekly.  “I got to work with Harriet Sansom Harris, who just, I mean — Bebe Glazer is one of the greatest characters ever created for television. I think I was very intensely fangirling around her, and she’s just such wonderful performer.”

Phoebe is the daughter of Frasier’s (Kelsey Grammer) longtime agent/the devil incarnate Bebe Glazer, played by Harris. While Frasier’s and Bebe’s relationship has always been fraught with the tension born of dealing with pure evil, Frasier and Phoebe get along like gangbusters.

“Phoebe is a very cultured kind of opera fan, and she and Frasier instantly hit it off in a way that he questions if maybe they’re related,” Bloom reveals.

Sharing scenes with Grammer and Harris was akin to a sitcom “master class,” though she feels that term is “cheesy” no matter how apt.

“It just feels like it’s such a gift,” the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend star says. “There’s a palpable energy when people are just that good at what they do. You can just tell they’re listening and they’re spontaneous.”

While Bloom had many a moment she’ll “cherish forever” from her time on the Frasier set, there’s one in particular that was captured for posterity.

“There’s a picture of me — there were Polaroids on the wall — and Kelsey Grammar and Harris went to Juilliard together,” she recalls. “And so they were catching up in the green room and I was just kind of there, silently. And someone got a Polaroid of them talking with me in the background like [she grins widely].”

While she was in awe of the Frasier vets, Bloom also reserves praise for the cast of relative newbies (“They’re just all such great people.”) who contributed to the overall “wonderful” vibe of the set.

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“And there was a lot of overlap of crew from How I Met Your Mother because of Joe and Chris,” she adds. “The first set I was ever on was How I Met Your Mother because when my husband and I were early in our relationship, he started writing for them. And I was just a working waiter at the time. And I would come to set and everyone was so kind to me and they didn’t have to be. Who has to be kind to the staff writer’s waitress girlfriend?”

Though Bloom had done multi-cam sitcoms before, Frasier was her first time filming in front of a live studio audience. For the eternal theater kid, it was a “really nice hybrid” of two worlds.

“I think what I realized early on, because I got to watch, is, ‘Okay, it’s live theater, but the camera’s here.’ So it’s like a mix of theater and being on set. It’s theater in that you can be bigger. But also realizing, Oh, the camera’s here so I don’t have to play to the back.

“And then of course,” she adds, “I watch [the original] Frasier all the time, so it was very surreal.”

Frasier returns for season 2 on Thursday, Sept. 19 on Paramount+.