Peter Krause Can’t Believe He’s the Grown-up Now

9 min readPeter Krause isn’t sure exactly how this happened, but somewhere along the line he became Mr. Responsible. It seems like yesterday that he was breaking through as the prodigal son Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under, where for five seasons he was the family mortuary’s wild child, valiantly defying commitment and respectability in all its forms. The prevailing theme of that show, which premiered 25 years ago now, is that time goes fast.It sure does. From there, Krause starred in Dirty Sexy Money as an idealistic lawyer who becomes a fixer for a corrupt wealthy family, then he was the warmhearted and dependable Adam Braverman on Parenthood, and after that he was the gallant firefighter Captain Bobby Nash on the rescue drama 9-1-1. Each step of the way, his characters seemed to become wiser, stronger, and more honorable. Now his journey to dignified moral authority has reached a new level with another family-focused drama.On NBC’s Line of Fire, Krause costars with Hope Davis as the parents of grown children who all work in various branches of America’s protective services. He’s in the Secret Service, she’s a U.S. marshal, their son is following his dad’s footsteps in the service, their daughter is an obsessive FBI agent, and their youngest is just starting his career in the Justice Department. When Krause looks back and connects the dots, he gets it. But it still feels strange to be the grown-up.“There was some article a few years ago that referred to me as ‘TV veteran Peter Krause.’ I thought, Veteran …? I just got here,” he says. “It reminds me of that Kurt Vonnegut line, ‘Don’t look at me, I just got here too.’ It’s true. You feel that way.”The progression happened in real life as well as onscreen. His son, who was born when Six Feet Under was just starting, is now 24. “I know that as a parent, it’s a strange transition to go from the rule breaker, the teenager, and the guy in his early 20s to the rule maker,” Krause says. “You suddenly have to set some boundaries for your kids, where you were pushing all the boundaries when you were younger. I don’t know … it just kind of happens.”Zackery MichaelJacket, shirt, and trousers by Bottega Veneta. Shoes by John Lobb. Socks by Falke. Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune watch by Van Cleef & Arpels.Real life was good prep for playing Line of Fire’s Mike Hollingsworth. “It’s a little bit easier if you are a parent, if you have kids, to play the dad,” Krause says. But like the actor, his Secret Service alter ego also feels like he still has something to prove. As the show begins, Mike is being pushed out by the agency’s mandatory retirement policy. He compensates by vicariously living through—and meddling with—his son Micah (Tommy O’Brien), who is assigned to the detail protecting the U.S. president’s daughter.This plotline struck Krause, who’s now 61, as maybe too close to his real life. “I had a little moment of panic when we started and Mike is being forced out of his job,” Krause says. “This panic was: Oh gosh, I guess I am at this point of life where, all right, you’re heading towards retirement—not that I want to in the acting world. But there is this progression of, okay, it’s not your time anymore.”Suddenly, Krause’s work-life flashed before his eyes. “Going back to Sports Night and thinking about sports,” he says, “for baseball players, unless you’re a specifically skilled and durable pitcher, you’re not going to be playing the game past your mid-30s. The young guys in their 20s are going to come up and they’re going to be faster. They’re going to see the ball more clearly, and you’re just getting pushed out by the next generation.”Then he thought of 9-1-1, where he was an action-hero first responder for eight seasons before meeting a noble, self-sacrificing end last year. “I’m racing up ladders, and jumping on fire escapes, and going by exploding balls of fire, and diving underwater and doing all these things,” Krause says. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be put out to pasture on [Line of Fire]. I want some action and some things to do.’”But as he made his way to the end of the Line of Fire pilot script, Krause discovered that—spoiler warning—his character has a fourth child, the outcast of the law-enforcement family, whose dark deeds will bring his father back into active investigation. “So my moment of panic passed pretty quickly,” Krause says.Zackery MichaelJacket and shirt by Brunello Cucinelli.Most fathers would be grateful if their real-life children talked about them the way the actors who play his kids on Line of Fire talk about Krause. The characters themselves might have various quarrels with their old man, but the performers portraying them adore Krause not just as a colleague but as a mentor.“I’ve made the entire job of this role giving Pete as much shit as I possibly can,” notes O’Brien, but they have a much different relationship as colleagues. “He really does feel like a father figure,” he says. “This is our first time really stepping into this kind of exposure, and to get to learn from somebody who went through a very similar thing in his 30s has been amazing. He and Hope have been so protective and supportive of us.”Kat Cunning, who plays FBI agent daughter Clare, is the live wire of the Hollingsworth family, similar to the role Krause inhabited as Nate in Six Feet Under’s Fisher family. “It’s crazy to watch the similarities,” Cunning says. “I learned so much from him, the stillness of his performance, the confidence, the way that he holds his voice in his throat. I mean, he’s just a master of craft and of character.”“They’re a great bunch, all three of them,” Krause says, seeming a little chagrined by the adoration. He had his own mentors when he was starting out like them. His first series of major roles was on the early ’90s anthology comedy series Carol & Company, starring comedy legend Carol Burnett. “We did a different episode every week, with different characters. I quickly learned I had to think on my toes,” Krause says. “Carol was very sharp, very accomplished, but a very humble woman when I met her. I learned a great deal from her in terms of what it meant to be professional. I'm grateful that I had that early on.”He did 33 episodes of that show with Burnett, and in the years that followed he says he thought about her a lot as he made the crucial early decisions that would define his career. “I just always felt like, if I’m out there in the business, she’s watching somewhere,” he says.More than a decade later, he ran into her again, when Six Feet Under was just launching and building a fan base. “I was at Cedars-Sinai, where my son had been born, and I was getting the house ready and getting ready to bring him home,” Krause recalls. “I went to the elevators, the doors opened up, and Carol Burnett walked out.”Zackery MichaelJacket and trousers by SSSTEIN. Shirt by Canali. Loafers by Santoni.She recognized him, not just as her former costar, but as a fan of the new show. “She was very complimentary about how different that work was than the work that we did with each other in sketch comedy,” he says. “She asked me what I was doing [at the hospital], and I said, ‘Oh, I just had a child. I’m here to pick up my son and bring him home.’ She very quickly said, ‘Congratulations!’ and gave me a big hug and a kiss.”But there was a heartbreaking coda to this story that Krause didn’t immediately recognize. One life was beginning, another was ending. “It was later that I found out that she was there at the hospital to visit her daughter Carrie, who a short time later passed away,” he says. “But just in her graceful manner, she congratulated me and then moved on. She’s a really beautiful person, and I’m really grateful that I got to have the time with her that I did early in my career. I would say it set me up for success and deepened the work ethic for me.”Plus, she’s still out there, maybe still watching. “Yeah, she is,” Krause says. “Yeah, I know.”Krause’s younger Line of Fire costars speak about him with similar reverence—but that doesn’t mean he was immune to torment and mockery from them. Real dads know what that’s like too.Cunning recalls one such moment from the midst of the Line of Fire shoot. “We were in this amazing, gigantic Upper West Side apartment, but we were holding in this really tiny, super hot room on the third floor,” Cunning says. “We were pretty tired, and there was a lot of talking that day, and his birthday was coming up in a couple of days. I saw a little text chat, and [the other actors] were like, ‘What should we do for Pete’s birthday?’ At that moment, I also saw Pete across from me in his cast chair, initiating a gigantic yawn.”Cunning surreptitiously raised the phone. “I took a photo of him yawning, and I sent it to the text chat.”Taylor Bloom, who plays Russ Hollingsworth, the baby of the Line of Fire family, turned that awkward photo into the group’s homemade birthday card. “We gave him this birthday present of me spying on him,” Cunning says.The trio’s favorite “Pete story” was uncovered by Bloom early on in the production. “My first real day on set was a walk and talk with Pete,” he says. “We have this page-and-a-half scene, and this was my first day really meeting him properly.” A self-described “huge Aaron Sorkin fan,” Bloom decided to geek out about Sports Night.That’s when he learned about the actor and the writer’s true first meeting, in the mid-1980s. “He told me this amazing story about when he was a bartender at the Palace Theatre on Broadway, where Aaron Sorkin was the bar manager,” Bloom says.Zackery MichaelJacket, shirt, and trousers by Giorgio Armani.First of all, that’s a talented concession stand. “That’s who you want to be buying your $25 beers from,” Bloom says. Then came the dramatic twist. “One day Aaron came in and was like, ‘Hey, Peter, I'm putting together a reading of this play that I’ve written. I wonder if you would want to participate …’”Krause can pick the story up from here: He turned down the offer, citing his busy schedule as an NYU drama student, immersed in a scene-study class focused on Chekhov and working on staging a Shakespeare play. He can’t remember which one, maybe A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Macbeth? He definitely remembers the name of Sorkin’s work-in-progress, however.“A Few Good Men,” Krause says, still wincing like it’s happening now instead of four decades ago. But Krause got a job from it all the same a few years later when the play opened at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway in 1989. “I was bartending at A Few Good Men,” he says.His Line of Fire costars were mindblown. For some, it might merely be a cringe-inducing war story about a missed opportunity, but it actually highlights the circular nature of the industry. Acting is a small world, and the same people come back around again and again. Sorkin obviously didn’t hold a grudge, and a few years later offered Krause the breakthrough role as the workaholic broadcaster Casey McCall on Sports Night.Zackery MichaelJacket, trousers, shirt, and tie by Dolce & Gabbana. Loafers by Manolo Blahnik.“I’m still good friends with him, and I’d love to work with Aaron again. I would do Sports Night again, although it’s a long time ago now,” Krause says. Does that mean a reunion of the 1998–2000 series might someday be possible?He shrugs. “We talked about it very briefly once, and obviously he’s busy doing other things, but I would love to do Sports Night again,” Krause says. “I think it was intriguing to him. I don’t know if he’d want to return. It would have to be somewhat different. It’d have to be somewhat of a re-imagining. You’d still want to deliver sports highlights and show the behind-the-scenes team. And what are sports today? I mean, he is reexamining social media, going from The Social Network to The Social Reckoning, the film he has coming out. So I think he could reexamine the world of sports. I would love to be a part of it if he chooses to do so.”Asked what lesson he himself sees in that old story from the Palace Theatre bar, Krause answers firmly: “If you’re a young actor, make the time.”But then he thinks and adds: “And if anybody managing a bar says, ‘Come do this play reading’—do it.”Opening image credits: Coat, jacket, shirt, and tie by Dolce & Gabbana.Photography by Zackery MichaelStyling by Alfonso Fernandez NavasGrooming by Chelsea Gehr for Exclusive Artists using Baxter of CaliforniaEsquire Executive Design Director: Martin HoopsEsquire Visual Director: James MorrisEditor in Chief: Michael Sebastian