Fran Kranz is one of those actors who began his career in his teens and worked hard for over a decade before he was cast by Joss Whedon for his show “Dollhouse.” It really wasn’t until his casting as the unlikely comic relief hero in Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods when Kranz started to get noticed, and it was only a matter of time before he would get a leading role that fit his style of humor.
That has finally happened with Gillian Greene’s Murder of a Cat, in which Kranz plays Clinton Moisey, an awkward guy who wakes up one day to learn that his cat Mouser has been murdered… with a crossbow bolt. But that’s not the strangest thing Clinton learns, because he soon finds a sign for a lost cat that looks a lot like Mouser which he traces to a woman named Greta (Nikki Reed of “The Twilight Saga”) who claims that the cat is hers. Trying to piece things together is the local sheriff (J.K. Simmons), but Clinton and Greta decide to do their own detective work in what turns into a modern-day twist on the crime noir comedy as they deal with a number of eccentric characters.
ComingSoon.net actually had a chance to talk to Kranz’s co-star Nikki Reed back at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival where Greene’s film premiered. We hadn’t seen the movie at the time, but she talked about her chemistry with Franz and how that helped to make the weird premise for the film work better.
Earlier this week, Kranz himself had a day off from his run on Broadway in “You Can’t Take It With You” opposite Rose Byrne and James Earl Jones and he used it to talk to ComingSoon.net and others about his leading role in Green’s film, working with J.K. Simmons and the film’s slightly odd premise. He also told us that his credit in Jonathan Kesselman’s Hebrew Hammer vs. Hitler sequel (playing Himmler!) was not an actual thing at this time, although he is friends with Jon, who was working on a pilot for a Hebrew Hammer television show.
You can hear all about both in the video interview below.
Murder of a Cat opens in select theaters and on VOD on Friday, December 5.
