Is This the End of the Road for Pete? Ghosts' Richie Moriarty Explains

What’s there left to fear after you’ve already died? For Richie Moriarty’s Pete Martino, the spiritual being of a 1980s travel agent and scout leader on the hit CBS comedy Ghosts, the possibilities are unimaginable.

As in, he can now actually stop dying and starting living. The nervous goody-two-shoes never really lived his own life because he was too busy making other people’s fantasies come alive (he even died by an arrow through the neck because he was helping a bunch of young scouts learn archery). Because the penultimate episode of the series’s third season, entitled “The Traveling Agent,” showed that Pete has a special power that none of the other ghosts who inhabit the show’s very haunted Woodstone Mansion seem to possess: the ability to leave the property.

“This guy is sending other people all over the world but doesn't even want to drive to Pittsburgh,” actor Moriarty — who, for the record, recently returned from a family vacation to Mexico — says in a phone call earlier this week.

It remains to be seen why Pete was afraid to go anywhere in life. Now that he’s dead, the character has spent nearly 40 years within the confines of one area and has been told by more-or-less every other ghost he meets that this is his destiny until he gets “sucked off” to what is presumably a heaven-like dimension.

“How terrifying would it be to step out into the real world and not have seen any of the massive changes that have happened in his city, state, country, world …” Moriarty says. (As proof to his point, the episode finds Pete puzzled to be at the literal crossroads of Barack Obama Avenue and Eli Manning Way and believes he’s being chased by a food delivery robot).

Moriarty adds that “I think in the [season] finale, especially, we get to see him experience the positive side of traveling and experiencing new things and meeting new people” and “I think there is a real character growth here and he's going to have the world open up to him.”

So, what does this mean for Pete’s future on the show? Will he still want to stay at Woodstone now that he’s been granted infinite frequent flier miles? And how do things like air travel factor into Ghosts’ rulebook of what ghosts can and cannot do? Moriarty doesn’t know if Pete could take a window seat on a plane. (Ghosts can stand on floors and sit on furniture but will walk or fall through walls. What if he fell asleep and leaned too far over mid-flight?). But he does have some thoughts on other parts of the show.

We see Pete board a plane at the end of the episode so that he can “be with” his daughter and grandson on their vacation. What does this mean for Pete’s presence on the show going forward?

In the finale, [the writers] found a really great way to show that he maintains this power, but it has limitations. It turns into this very physical reveal that I had a ton of fun performing on set. 

Just so I’m clear, we’re to believe that Pete always had this power, right? He didn’t just magically start having it.

That’s the first thing I thought. Why wouldn’t he have known that he could do this? But then I'm like, well this guy is like the ultimate rule follower. So of course when he died and was told there was this ghost boundary and we can't leave it, he's like great. 

Especially with the ghost whose powers we don't know yet, there is that element of like “but wouldn't they be aware of this power?” And the reality is that this one holds up well because he’s this nerdy rule follower. He had no idea he was capable of leaving until he mistakenly got chased by a bee and crossed the boundary by mistake.

Do your powers always coordinate with something that you would be good at or match your personality?

It goes with their history. So it can be directly related to their profession, like mine is. Thorfinn’s [the Viking ghost played by Devan Chandler Long] is that he can make the lights flicker and that's because he was electrocuted. So sometimes it has to do with the manner of how they died. Isaac [the Revolutionary War ghost played by Brandon Scott Jones] died of dysentery, so he walks through people and it smells like a fart.

Will we ever find out why Pete is afraid of everything?

I hope we do. I hope we learn more about where this fear of travel comes from. [The writers are] usually very smart in the bread crumbs that they leave and how some of those bread crumbs can lead to flashbacks where we learn more about the the origination of these different kinds of character quirks.

The show references the Tim Robbins-Morgan Freeman movie The Shawshank Redemption a lot because it’s a favorite of living Woodstone inhabitant Jay’s (Utkarsh Ambudkar). But this episode does an actual homage to an early scene in that film. Pete gets stuck in a big box store after dark and other ghosts torment him that he’s a “fresh fish.” That movie came out after Pete died, but do you think he’s now seen it and understood the parallels to his predicament? And why is this movie such a big deal on the show?

To me the understanding is it’s one of Jay’s favorite movies. So he must have had it on at some point and we've all watched with him. So it’s a common reference point for the ghosts.

This is an interesting question for us and we talk about it a lot on set. Now that [Jay and his wife Sam, played by Rose McIver, live in the house and the ghosts] do watch TV all the time, there's obviously a lot of pop culture references and a lot of new terminology that they may not have heard in their own time but they are slowly catching up with. Some slower than others.

If an older ghost is referencing something that's happening in the present day, the understanding is they've absorbed this from their time either watching TV or through Sam and Jay directly.

This is also the first time we’ve really seen mean ghosts on the show. This is a comedy, so all the ghosts who haunt the estate are pretty friendly.

Yeah, it’s a great horror element to the show. As I was reading it for the first time, I thought oh man, this is gonna be shot differently than we typically shoot things. I was excited for our director, Christine Gernon, and for our director of photography [Michel St-Martin] who got to light this thing. 

And then they cast this guy [as the main villain], Marc-André Boulanger. He’s a Canadian wrestler and his ring name is Franky the Mobster. I was like, this is so perfect. Of course this guy's got a cleaver in his head. It’s a fun way of being “Oh, I don’t need to act much here. This guy is intimidating as hell. And it's gonna be very funny to see Pete be scared to death by this guy who looks so menacing.”

Pete’s widow Carol [Caroline Aaron] recently died at the mansion and is also stuck in this purgatory. They have a contemptuous relationship. But she wasn’t in this episode. Do you think she even knows Pete’s gone?

In the finale, I don't think it's directly addressed whether she knows that Pete has this power yet, at least as far as we’ve seen on screen. She may have heard it through the grapevine from the other ghosts but I don’t know if she’s directly aware.

Does Pete have a fear of the living in the same way he’d be afraid of a dead man with a cleaver in his head coming after him?

I think he's terrified of the unknown. He has fashioned this life over the last 40 years at Woodstone where everything is predictable and comfortable … He likes knowing what he's going to encounter. He's naive in a lot of ways and he is risk averse … And this does really speak to the institutionalized nature of how these ghosts must feel. Theoretically, of course, they all want to leave. They all want to be able to have different experiences. But I think now that one of them is actually faced with that reality of being able to step out, it's scary to him. 

He's rightfully scared in this episode. And what's nice is that in the finale, he gets to experience more of the positive side of traveling and experiencing new things and meeting new people.

Ghosts is based on the UK show of the same name, but some changes to the characters have been made for the U.S. version. For one, the guy with the arrow through his neck in that version, Jim Howick’s Pat Butcher, has a mustache. Your character doesn’t. But Asher Grodman, who plays pantsless finance bro ghost Trevor in your show, posted on Instagram that you almost did have a mustache…

So, before you film a pilot for a television show, you go through usually a day or two of costumes and stuff. And for this show, it was really important that we got into exactly the right wardrobe that the creators wanted because we are stuck in these outfits forever. We did camera tests with Pete in this mustache and I think, ultimately, they decided there's something just too creepy about this guy with a mustache. He's got this troop of little girls that he's with. There's something about the 'stache that was just a touch too creepy. Which I was thrilled about because I would either have to grow a mustache or wear an itchy fake mustache all the time. No, thank you. 

And it somehow totally works on Jim Howick. It’s goofy and wonderful with him. And with me, people were just liking yeah, I don't know if we can trust this guy.

We’ve talked about the ghosts’ increasing knowledge of pop culture. Do you think Pete has ever seen The Americans? It’s a show set in the ’80s and they’re Russian spies whose cover is owning a travel agency.

I am guessing no. That doesn't feel like a Jay show and it doesn't feel like a Sam show either. I don't know though. But there's definitely never been a direct reference to it. That would be amazing. Can you imagine if he’d kept up the spy persona the entire time in his afterlife?

The Ghosts Season 3 finale airs May 2 at 8:30 P.M. ET on CBS. Join the discussion about the show in our forums. 

Whitney Friedlander is an entertainment journalist with, what some may argue, an unhealthy love affair with her TV. A former staff writer at both Los Angeles Times and Variety, her writing has also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Vulture, The Washington Post and others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, daughter, and two spoiled cats.