Kelsey Grammer Raves About MCU Villain Actress: She’s Got Those Crazy Eyes

Kelsey Grammer is out hyping his new high-altitude thriller, Turbulence, and he cannot stop praising his co-star Olga Kurylenko. If you only clocked her as Taskmaster in Black Widow (and in Thunderbolts* — yes, the asterisk is actually in the title), he says she brings that same unnerving intensity here, too.

What Grammer told ComingSoon

In a recent chat with ComingSoon, Grammer leaned all the way in on Kurylenko's knack for playing dangerous and unpredictable. He even joked about the 'crazy eyes' she can flip on when a role needs it. The key pull:

'She's got the juice. She knows how to own being a nut, you know. She's a little bit wild, and she claims it pretty aggressively, and that made it easy to work with. Acting is reacting. That whole idea. She was so clearly disturbed, it was kind of okay to just sit back and think, "Where's this going?" and then you'd get to watch it. Then, of course, we all got involved.'

Translation: he loved playing off her energy, because she goes full mystery mode in this one and makes everyone around her react.

So what is Turbulence?

The setup is clean and kind of wonderfully odd: Zach and Emmy take a romantic hot air balloon ride, which sounds peaceful until a third passenger shows up mid-flight and hijacks the whole thing. This intruder has ties to Zach's past, and as pieces of Zach and Emmy's not-exactly-public relationship come to light, the cozy getaway turns into a tense mind game and a fight for survival way above the ground. The movie is directed by Claudio Fäh from a script by Andy Mayson, and it's being sold as a psychological thriller that plays coy right up to the last beat.

Who's in it

Grammer and Kurylenko lead, with a surprisingly stacked roster around them:

• Hera Hilmar
• Jeremy Irvine
• Lionel Robert Blanc
• Elena Bushueva
• Alessandro De Cominato
• Trisha Hughes
• Kevin Jarvis
• Mike Ray
• Jon Wennington
• Stuart Whelan

A quick MCU sidebar

Grammer and Kurylenko both have Marvel cred: she's Antonia Dreykov, aka Taskmaster, in Black Widow and Thunderbolts*, and Grammer is back in the mix as Beast. Turbulence puts them on the same side of the basket this time — and based on Grammer's comments, Kurylenko's bringing that same ice-cold focus to an original thriller premise you don't see every day: a balloon ride from hell.