Peter Krause
Peter Krause is an actor, born 1965.
Six series leads between 1998 and 2025, with barely a gap between them. Casey McCall on Sports Night, Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under, Nick George on Dirty Sexy Money, Adam Braverman on Parenthood, Benjamin Jones on The Catch, Bobby Nash on 9-1-1, with another network drama lined up after that. Very few American actors have held the front of a show that continuously, and none of it happened by being the most exciting person on screen.
His actual gift is playing decent men whose decency is unstable. Nate Fisher is the definitive case: the eldest son of a family funeral business, charming enough that everyone forgives him, selfish enough that they keep having to. Krause never signals the selfishness. He lets it arrive as a surprise in scene after scene, which is much harder than playing a bad man and far less rewarded. Casey McCall is the same instrument tuned for speed, handling dense overlapping dialogue while staying recognisably rattled underneath it.
Film never worked out what to do with him, which happens to actors whose real strength is duration. He has a small part in The Truman Show, a supporting turn in Beastly, and only We Don't Live Here Anymore gives him a role with teeth. The trophies he has are ensemble prizes, two Screen Actors Guild awards shared with a cast, which is a fair description of the job: he is the actor a large ensemble organises itself around. Adam Braverman on Parenthood and Bobby Nash on 9-1-1 are both that role again, warmer and more tired each time.
Movies (7)
TV (11)
Where to start with Peter Krause
Six Feet Under is the one, and it is not close. Nate is the part that uses everything he has, and the series is built so that his charm keeps costing other people something.
If that sounds heavy, start instead with Sports Night, a half-hour comedy where he handles the fastest dialogue anyone has written for him and is very funny doing it. Parenthood is the comfort watch, years of a man trying to be reasonable at people who will not cooperate. 9-1-1 is the late-career network job, and he is better in it than the format deserves. For film, take We Don't Live Here Anymore, where he plays a genuinely unlikeable man and resists softening him. The Lost Room is the oddity, a science-fiction miniseries with a premise good enough to forgive its budget.
Six Feet Under
Five seasons as a man who inherits a funeral home and spends the entire series failing to outrun it, and among the best things American television has produced.
The family dramas
Parenthood ran six seasons and is the warmest thing on his record, and 9-1-1 has been the steady network job since 2018. Both are network shows built on him being decent and slightly overwhelmed, which he does very well.
The films
A much smaller list than the television work, and mostly independent. We Don't Live Here Anymore is the one worth finding, a bleak two-couple drama that almost nobody saw on release and that gives him more to play than the network shows ever have.