Most 70-year-olds are easing into a quieter chapter. Kelsey Grammer is learning newborn sleep schedules again.

With four kids still under his roof — including a 2-month-old son — Grammer’s life today looks far more like a bustling family sitcom than anything you’d expect from a man who’s played an Emmy-winning snob for decades. When we connect over Zoom, the Frasier star talks about this chapter with the kind of clarity that only comes from living several lives before this one.

“When you have kids earlier in life, you’re still trying to survive,” he says, recalling his early days of waiting tables to make ends meet (and scarfing the occasional half-eaten steak left behind by a customer). “The kids pay a little bit of a price for that.” He pauses before adding, “You’re just more available now. And I don’t have to figure out who I am in terms of my career.”

Grammer is the father of eight kids: Spencer, 42, Greer, 33, Mason, 24, Jude, 21, Faith, 13, Gabriel, 11, James, 9, and baby Christopher. He’s the first to admit that the pressure of trying to build a career ate into his home life when he was a young father. These days, he has the flexibility to be more present. That shows up in the smallest rituals: his sons climbing into the little jacuzzi off his bedroom every night so they can talk for 20 minutes before bed, for example. There are bigger milestones too — like taking teenager Faith on her first real trip with just the two of them.

He’s also setting boundaries when it comes to how much time he’s away on set — anything over seven days and he’ll take the whole family.

“I need to be available as a dad. I’ve got a new baby and a pretty robust family,” he laughs. “Some of my older kids I don’t see much anymore — that’s natural — but we’ve got four kids at home, and it’s important for me to be the head of that home and to be around.”

His latest film, Turbulence, fit into that rhythm. While Grammer may be settling into a new season of fatherhood, he’s not exactly slowing down. The movie, which is in theaters and on demand Dec. 12, is a tightly wound psychological thriller that unfolds almost entirely inside a hot air balloon. It's a small, tense story that appealed to his instinct for adventure-driven projects. (If you're raising your eyebrows, remember: In addition to Frasier Crane, Grammer also played Beast in the X-Men movies.)

The film itself opens with a moment about “getting rid of the old guard,” a ruthless approach to change that feels familiar to anyone who has watched Hollywood reinvent itself again and again. Grammer has survived all of it — sitcom dominance, the cable peak, the streaming boom, the reboot era — and he has a theory why.

“I came up with a phrase a long time ago: Always keep them guessing,” he says. “Never let them quite see everything. Figure out how to be as complex as possible. Some people aren’t going to be complex or surprising, and they’ll probably have a limited shelf life.”

He pairs that with another personal rule he attributes to his longevity in the industry, one he developed long before fame found him.

“There’s not a polite way to say this,” he admits, “but it’s: Be able to say ‘F you’ without having ‘F-you money.’ I was really poor for a long time. I still needed the integrity to say, ‘No, I’m not going to do a part like that.’ I’ve stuck with that.”

Grammer knows he’s taken jobs he didn’t need to, turned down others he wishes he’d done (Mel Brooks's Dracula: Dead and Loving It) and followed his instincts even when they didn’t make sense at the time. But he doesn’t regret the path.

“Some things have been successes, some haven’t,” he says. “But there’s been enough success to have a roof over our heads, a healthy family and something to look forward to every day.”

But for all his years in the industry, Grammer doesn’t think of himself as someone who ever truly blended into Hollywood. If anything, he considers that distance a kind of survival strategy.

“I’ve been on the outskirts of Hollywood for a long time,” he says. “And I think that’s been a blessing.”

Some of that distance, he admits, may come from his politics. Grammer is a conservative voice in an industry that mostly leans liberal.

“Maybe that’s because of my politics, maybe it’s not,” he says with a shrug. “But I’ve never really been part of the insular culture here.”

When I point out he can’t be that much of an outsider — not when he’s returning as Beast in Avengers: Doomsday, one of the biggest franchises on the planet — he laughs.

“Yeah, that’s pretty good,” he admits. “I got it back, which makes me very happy.” He lights up talking about how "Beast is back."

“He’s just as cool as ever,” he says. “He was always my favorite. He’s the Martin Luther King of the mutants — a man of stature, a man of intellect, a man who’s been marginalized by how he looks, but he’s never let that stop him. He’s done extraordinary things. He’s worked in government. He was the Secretary of Mutant Affairs. I just love who he is. And I’d like to think that’s how I’ve lived my life.”

But if he could revive any character from the past, he doesn’t hesitate. He picks Tom Kane, the ruthless, larger-than-life mayor of Chicago that he played on Starz’s political drama Boss, which ran from 2011 to 2012. “He’s a tough bird and willing to do almost anything to make that city tick — but he loved that city. That was the key to him.”

At the end of the day, it’s Dr. Frasier Crane who Grammer is best known for playing. When asked what he remembers most from his time on Cheers, where the character originated, he doesn’t mention ratings or the show’s now-mythic status. He talks about foosball.

“We’d finish a show at 1 a.m. and still be there until 3:30 in the morning — Woody [Harrelson], George [Wendt], Ted [Danson] and me — just playing foosball. We said some of the best things we’ve ever said on those evenings. Some of it wasn’t particularly polite,” he laughs, “but it was all good-natured.”

The spinoff Frasier brought a different kind of magic, one that evolved as the character did. Even the recent revival, which ended after just two seasons, echoed the emotional architecture of the original series.

“In the new one, he was going to establish a relationship with his son that he hadn’t had,” Grammer explains. “And that’s exactly what happened in the first Frasier with his dad. It was a role reversal.”

He wishes they’d had more time to play that out. “I’m sorry we’re not coming back with that," he says. "Frasier is a fascinating character — as fascinating as life itself.”

He has mementos from those years, though fewer than he once did. A few divorces — from Doreen Alderman, Leigh-Anne Csuhany and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum Camille Grammer — have rearranged his belongings, he jokes. (Grammer is now married to Kayte Walsh, with whom he shares his four youngest children.)

“I kept the microphone from Frasier,” he says. “It’s sitting somewhere around here.” He also kept some of the African art from the original set — “silly,” he admits, “but indicative of who Frasier was in that period of his life.”

But the item he doesn't have haunts him, recalling a night when composer Stephen Sondheim handed him a handwritten song — “Sundays Were Made for Soldiers” — written just for him. “I can’t find it. It’s been driving me nuts.”