At the New York premiere of Ryan Murphy’s Halloween entry for FX, a whirling psychological crime thriller starring Niecy Nash-Betts and Courtney B. Vance called “Grotesquerie,” the co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, Dana Walden, made it only one sentence into her introduction before talking up a certain Kansas City Chiefs football star.
“On behalf of everyone at Disney, I really want to welcome you,” Walden said. “We’re so excited about this show, and — I don’t know if you heard this or not — a very special person named Travis Kelce is making his acting debut in this show.”
Walden teased Kelce’s appearance at the premiere before welcoming his emissary instead, mother Donna Kelce. She stood up and gave a wave. Then came introductions of the cast and production.
“Grotesquerie,” which also stars Nicholas Alexander Chavez of Murphy’s “Monsters” and Broadway’s Micaela Diamond, is a murder-thriller kaleidoscope in true Murphy form: brutal gore, crippling social dysfunction, catholicism, psychosexual perversion, a murderer on the loose, indecipherable plotting and one crucial ingredient — irresistible celebrity.
In “Grotesquerie,” Kelce joins the cast as a charming — if not porny — bed nurse. As expected, he was all anybody talked about on Monday evening.
“I mean it would be one thing if he wasn’t a nice guy,” Vance, who is also an executive producer on the show, told Variety. “But really, he’s a nice guy.” According to Vance, Kelce’s casting “just helps us. It helps everybody. Ryan is all about publicity, and he does it better than anyone.”
Murphy gave the audience at Spring Studios on Monday a brief synopsis of the show before screening the show’s third episode, where Kelce first appears.
“There’s this crazy serial killer on the loose,” he began. “Niecy is a detective who doesn’t have time for it anymore. She’s a blackout alcoholic. Meanwhile her husband, Courtney B. Vance, is in a COVID-induced coma, and she doesn’t want him to wake up. He is being attended to by Lesley Manville, who wants power of attorney so she can continue to give him sponge baths. This is all very true,” he chided.
“Chaos ensues when Micaela Diamond shows up,” Murphy continued. “She is a true-crime fanatic nun, who’s covering this case for the local papers. Her boss, played by Nick, is an equally true-crime obsessed priest, who’s also a Peloton instructor on the side. This show has it all.”
Kelce picking up a several episode arc in “Grotesquerie” should come as no surprise to the average Murphy viewer. Celebrity is Murphy’s muse, and fame is more often his subject. Stardom — and the kind of terrifying fandom around Kelce and Taylor Swift — are tools to be used.
“Television moves in weekly increments. Our small bites are like a series of appetizers, psychologically. And so television can bear the traffic of guests,” summed co-creator Jon Robin Baitz, who inked a five-year deal with 20th Television after serving as writer and showrunner on Murphy’s “Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans.”
“Ryan and I were talking a lot while we were making ‘Feud’ about the state of being in the world,” Baitz told Variety about the show’s making. “We just wanted to write something on spec. It was this thing about the zeitgeist, about how dark the zeitgeist was. Post-pandemic terror in the world. Ideas about society breaking apart. We just made a collage of it.”
That gets to the heart of it: Like all things Murphy makes, “Grotesquerie” is only a mirror of ourselves. Murphy casts fame and celebrity like the Romans used bread and circuses. If, this fall, Murphy serves up Kelce as a sexy hospital attendant — then that’s what we’ve earned.
“This was Ryan’s thing, and, well,” Baiz trailed off, “Travis Kelce’s mother is standing right behind me.”
For mother Kelce — who continued her internet celebrity on Monday by peppering the red carpet with answers to questions about Taylor Swift — her son’s turn in a Murphy series doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
“I know he wanted to do this, and I know he can manifest things,” she told Variety. “He has no fear of trying things, and he has no fear of failure.”
Kelce said she was preparing to watch the show for the first time that evening — and offered her son some advice.
“You know, sometimes parents want to fix things for their kids,” she told Variety. “But sometimes it’s better to just let them fail. You learn the most from things you don’t do well. Hopefully, if this is something he wants to do, he’ll get better at it.”
(Pictured: Courtney B. Vance, Niecy Nash-Betts and Donna Kelce)
