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.’”