'Tremors' brings Michael Gross back to TV
By Bridget Byrne
Associated Press
Michael Gross has "Tremors" — and he's delighted.
"This is the sort of thing I did at age 7, for nothing," the 55-year-old actor laughs. "I'm being paid to run around with guns and hunt monsters."
Gross wears fatigues and boots to portray rough-and-tumble survivalist Burt Gummer, the central character in "Tremors: The Series," premiering on the Sci Fi Channel at 7 p.m. today.
The series is capitalizing on the cult following of the original 1990 feature film "Tremors," starring Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, and its direct-to-video sequels. It picks up where "Tremors 3" concluded, continuing the quirky adventures and antics of paranoid "Monster Hunter" Gummer and the folks who dwell in Perfection, Nev.
In this tiny desert town, the local monsters, even though they occasionally kill and eat people, are considered a useful deterrent against a predatory real estate developer who wants to turn the place into one big housing tract.
Gross, who starred for seven years as the compassionate, free-thinking dad on NBC's Emmy-winning sitcom "Family Ties," has played Gummer in all three "Tremors" movies as well as the fourth film that's being made — a prequel set in the early west in which he portrays Gummer's great-grandfather, Hiram.
So he's fully familiar with the quirky monsters — part tourist attraction, part death threat — with whom Gummer has a love-hate relationship. The major monster is a giant albino worm known as a graboid and nicknamed El Blanco.
Gross believes "Tremors" is "good family entertainment ... kind of a throwback to the monster films of the '50s," of which he's a fan.
"I think there's a kind of innocence about it that is hard to find in this day and age. People have said to me, 'How can you justify having all these weapons — walls full of them?' It's very simple: Burt doesn't shoot other people, Burt shoots monsters. The humans are the good guys. The monsters are the bad guys. Like what I grew up with."
When he auditioned for Gummer for the first movie, Gross says he asked the producers: "Why am I here? I know I'm an actor. I know I'm capable, but why are you having me here, because it's so against what is commonly my type? For seven years I've been the kindest, gentlest, most understanding father on American television and you've got me as this grenade-throwing, survivalist misogynist!"
"Michael was perfection by accident," says Nancy Roberts, one of the series' executive producers and a producer of the movies.
Based on his "Family Ties" role in particular, Gross indeed seemed an unlikely choice, but he quickly proved he had "the chops to deliver," she said.
After "Family Ties" ended in 1989, Gross, a Yale drama school graduate who won an Obie in 1982, felt the need to walk away from series television.
"I was an actor who had spent a lot of time in repertory theater," he says. "I was more accustomed to playing seven characters in one year than one character in seven years."
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