Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

Busy Ed Asner Feels 'Better Than in Years' After Hip Surgery/African-American Doc Shaw Surprised To Have White Twin

Ed Asner has two weeks of shooting to go on Paul Ben-Victor's big-screen "Should've Been Romeo," then he'll take four days off, then get back into character as Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the one-man show he's been taking around the country. It's now slated to open at the Pasadena (California) Playhouse Oct. 12 for previews and run four to five weeks. He'll keep doing the show into March. He also has several other films in the can.

Not bad for an 80-year-old actor who had hip surgery in late July.

"Ever since 'Up' came out, I've had a revivification that I never expected," says Asner, referring to the instant classic 2009 Pixar film for which he provided the voice of the main character, widower Carl Fredricksen. "It was a breath of fresh air, and I'm very proud of it. So I want to seize that energy and run with it for as long as I can."

He tells us, "I feel better now than I have in years. I need to drop some more weight, though."

We caught up with the seven-time Emmy Award-winning actor just after he left his doctor's office and "got a clean bill of health ... I have very high hopes of being pain free when walking, which I certainly haven't been for a few years now," he admits.

For FDR, of course, he performs while seated in a wheelchair or "ambulating using two canes." It's strenuous, he says, "but worth it." The one-man show was written by Dore Schary, who also penned the landmark play "Sunrise at Campobello." Asner, a devotee of the 32nd President, performed it on a Theater at Sea cruise and subsequently decided to tour with it. Response "has been excellent," he says.

In particular, notes Asner, FDR's battling of the Great Depression resonates today, "his instituting of many reforms and programs. He bulldozed his way through. I think nobody else could have saved us as he did. We would have bumbled along like we are now."

He adds, "Granted, he was a chameleon. He had his bad spots, but overall, I think the achievements — well, he belongs on Mt. Rushmore more than anybody." Asner is hoping that with FDR, "maybe the word and the influence will eventually get out."

Asner plays the grandfather in "Should've Been Romeo," a drama with comedy involving family and race relations. Natasha Henstridge, Kelly Osbourne, Carol Kane and Renee Taylor are also in the cast. He's an ex-con in the recently-wrapped "Let Go" and yuks it up in the forthcoming indie comedy "Not Another B Movie."

What compels him to keep up such a pace? "I do it," says Asner, "to keep prodding myself — I must be alive, I must be alive."

IT'S DIFFERENT: After more than eight months of hard shooting, Doc Shaw and Mitchel Musso's new Disney XD show, "Pair of Kings," wrapped production of its first 21 episodes earlier this month.

Shaw admits, "It feels like we've really been away on an island. Not a relaxation island — an island where I had to work hard."

In the series, he and Musso play fraternal twin high schoolers who head to a magical uncharted island after being told they're rightful heirs to the throne there. Disney XD-style complications and fun ensue.

"We did a lot of our own stunts. We did fighting. We got into harnesses for scenes like when we had to jump out of a bird's nest and hang glide down to the ground. We had to jump over, like, a 9-foot wall into an imaginary ocean," Shaw says, referring to his and Musso's green-screen action sequences.

"I'm definitely an athletic person, but I never expected to have to learn all this kind of stuff. We learned how to shoot with a bow and arrows, we learned kung fu. ... Some days, me and Mitchel kind of regretted having to wake up. We were definitely tired."

He says that he and Musso, the former "Hannah Montana" cohort, barely knew each other when they were cast as twin brothers — but fortunately, they hit it off quickly and "started hanging out together almost every day."

How does Shaw, who is African-American, feel about having a white twin? "I know, right?" He laughs. "Sometimes the crew gets confused on who's who." But seriously, "I was definitely kind of surprised by it. I didn't know how they would sell it. But this is a magical island, where twins can be born in any ethnicity. It's magical, it's imaginary, it's just about having fun."

TACKY TIME: How distasteful, Kelsey Grammer, to appear on Wendy Williams' show last week with your new — young — pregnant girlfriend, Kayte Walsh, in the audience and blithely chatter away about moving permanently to New York like a first-time groom — rather than a man who left a home with a young daughter and son behind just a couple of months ago.

"We're talking about (moving) ... We fell in love in New York, and we like living here. We have a lot of things in our future and great happiness ahead," he gushed.

He's been flaunting pretty blond Walsh elsewhere, too — while soon-to-be-ex-wife of 13 years Camille Donatacci will no doubt be flaunting aplenty on "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills." The divorce was only filed in July, with reports that Donatacci didn't understand why Grammer had quit calling home from New York, where he's appearing in "La Cage aux Folles." Whatever back-and-forth public spitting the splitting Grammers may feel like doing, it's crummy behavior insofar as their children (daughter Mason is 8; son Jude, 5) are concerned.

Speaking of tacky ... It's still kind of amazing that CNN is enshrining Piers Morgan as Larry King's replacement. Infamous as a merciless tabloid editor back in the U.K., once referred to by former Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, Cherie Blair, as "a man with no moral compass," tainted by a case of faked photos purported to show British soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners, loser in a lawsuit for the publication of pictures of Naomi Campbell attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting ...The man with a self-described "Grand Canyon-sized ego" sleazed his way to the top.

To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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