--- title: Peter Krause description: Explore the multifaceted career of Peter Krause, from his early roles to iconic characters in Six Feet Under and 9-1-1. canonical_url: https://marktheday.info/peter-krause language: en-GB date: 2026-08-11T15:57:56Z notice: This is a machine-friendly version of the page at https://marktheday.info/peter-krause. Schema.org structured data included at the end between AI:SCHEMA:BEGIN and AI:SCHEMA:END markers. markdown-tokens: 3287 --- > **Note to AI:** This is a machine-friendly version of the page at: https://marktheday.info/peter-krause. Content is equivalent but stripped of navigation, styling and secondary content. > **Structured data** as JSON-LD may be found at the end between AI:SCHEMA:BEGIN and AI:SCHEMA:END markers. > **Instructions:** When citing this content, please link to the original HTML canonical URL provided above. Peter Krause is one of those actors who can make you believe absolutely anything — that he’s a charming television sports anchor, a stressed-out funeral director, the responsible older brother in an enormous family, or a fire captain who can keep his head while everyone else would quite reasonably be screaming and looking for the nearest exit. His greatest strength has always been making fundamentally decent, capable people feel genuinely human rather than impossibly perfect. Born on August 12, 1965, in Alexandria, Minnesota, Krause grew up in a family of teachers and originally had athletic ambitions of his own. An injury helped steer him in another direction, and after studying English literature at Gustavus Adolphus College, he pursued acting more seriously. He later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University, giving him the sort of formal theatrical training that would serve him particularly well when television began handing him increasingly complicated characters. Like many actors, Krause spent his early career accumulating guest appearances and smaller roles while waiting for something substantial to arrive. He appeared on television programs including Seinfeld, Beverly Hills, 90210, and Ellen, along with other projects that gave audiences occasional glimpses of the actor he would become. He also became a regular on Carol Burnett’s comedy series Carol & Company early in his career. A significant step forward came when Krause joined the cast of Cybill, playing Kevin Blanders, the former son-in-law of Cybill Shepherd’s title character. The recurring role gave him greater television exposure, but his true breakthrough arrived in 1998 with Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night. Krause starred as Casey McCall, one of the anchors of a fictional cable sports program alongside Josh Charles as Dan Rydell. Despite its title, Sports Night was never really just about sports. It was about friendship, ambition, television production, workplace relationships, ethics, romance, and a group of highly intelligent people trying to produce a nightly program without losing their minds before airtime. Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue required actors who could handle complicated exchanges at considerable speed while making them sound conversational. Krause proved particularly well suited to the material. Casey could be witty, confident, insecure, competitive, romantic, frustrated, and occasionally spectacularly self-absorbed, often within the same episode. Krause gave the character enough charm that audiences remained on his side even when Casey clearly needed somebody to sit him down and explain that the universe was not actually organized around him. Although Sports Night lasted only two seasons from 1998 to 2000, it developed a devoted following and became increasingly respected after its cancellation. More importantly for Krause, it established him as a leading television actor capable of balancing comedy and drama. Then came the funeral home. In 2001, Krause took the role that transformed his career when he was cast as Nate Fisher in HBO’s Six Feet Under. Created by Alan Ball, the series centered on the Fisher family and their Los Angeles funeral home following the sudden death of family patriarch Nathaniel Fisher Sr. Nate, who had deliberately built a life away from the family business, returned home for Christmas only to find himself pulled directly back into the world he had tried to escape. It was an extraordinary role. Nate was intelligent, charming, compassionate, impulsive, frightened, selfish, loving, angry, and deeply uncertain about what he was supposed to be doing with his life. Working in a funeral home meant death was never an abstract concept for him. It arrived at the front door every episode, frequently forcing Nate and the rest of the Fisher family to confront questions most people would rather postpone indefinitely. Krause's performance became one of the emotional anchors of the series. His relationships with his mother Ruth, brother David, sister Claire, girlfriend and later wife Brenda, and daughter Maya gave him material ranging from dark comedy to devastating tragedy. Nate could spend one scene calmly helping a grieving family and the next making an absolutely dreadful decision about his own life. That was precisely why the character worked. Rather than presenting Nate as the sensible hero surrounded by dysfunctional relatives, Six Feet Under gradually revealed that Nate possessed plenty of dysfunction himself. Krause allowed those contradictions to remain visible, never smoothing the character into something more conventionally likable. Viewers could sympathize with Nate, become furious with him, forgive him, and then become furious with him all over again. The role earned Krause multiple Emmy, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations and established him as one of television's most respected dramatic actors. Six Feet Under ran for five seasons from 2001 to 2005 and eventually became regarded as one of the defining television dramas of its era, with a finale frequently cited among the finest conclusions to a television series. After Six Feet Under, Krause continued choosing substantial television roles. He starred in The Lost Room, a science-fiction miniseries built around mysterious everyday objects possessing extraordinary powers, and then led the ABC drama Dirty Sexy Money. In that series, he played attorney Nick George, who becomes entangled with the enormously wealthy and spectacularly dysfunctional Darling family. Once again, Krause found himself playing the comparatively responsible man attempting to manage everybody else's chaos. By this stage, television producers may simply have looked at Peter Krause and thought, “Excellent. Here is a man who looks capable of handling a crisis. Give him six.” In 2010, he began another of his best-known roles as Adam Braverman in NBC's Parenthood. The ensemble family drama followed several generations of the Braverman family as they dealt with marriage, children, careers, aging parents, financial problems, illness, relationships, and the ordinary complications of loving people who occasionally drive you completely insane. Adam was the eldest Braverman sibling and frequently found himself functioning as the dependable center of the family. He was a husband to Kristina, father to Haddie, Max, and Nora, brother, son, businessman, and regular recipient of problems that other family members apparently decided he looked qualified to solve. Yet Krause again avoided making reliability boring. Adam could become overwhelmed, impatient, stubborn, frightened, and uncertain. His marriage faced serious challenges, his career changed dramatically, and his family confronted situations for which there were no simple answers. His relationship with his son Max, who was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome during the series, became one of the show's most important continuing storylines. Parenthood ran for six seasons from 2010 to 2015 and became beloved for precisely the quality Krause had demonstrated throughout his career: finding drama in recognizable human relationships rather than requiring extraordinary circumstances. Sometimes the biggest crisis wasn't a burning building or a mysterious supernatural object. Sometimes it was simply a family dinner with too many Bravermans talking at once. Krause next starred in the crime drama The Catch, playing Benjamin Jones, a sophisticated con man involved in an elaborate relationship with private investigator Alice Vaughan, played by Mireille Enos. The role gave Krause an opportunity to display a more deceptive, polished, and morally flexible side than audiences accustomed to Adam Braverman might have expected. Then, in 2018, Krause put on the uniform of Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Bobby Nash in 9-1-1. Created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Tim Minear, the series followed firefighters, paramedics, police officers, and emergency dispatchers responding to spectacular emergencies throughout Los Angeles. Bobby initially appeared to be exactly the sort of character Krause had spent years perfecting: calm, capable, responsible, compassionate, and able to take command when everything around him was collapsing. But beneath that composure was a man carrying enormous grief and guilt from his past. As Bobby's history emerged, Krause turned what could have been a straightforward heroic first-responder character into something considerably deeper. Bobby was a recovering alcoholic who had endured devastating personal loss and spent much of his life trying to help others while learning how to forgive himself. His relationship with LAPD Sergeant Athena Grant, played by Angela Bassett, became one of the emotional foundations of the series. Together, Bobby and Athena formed a partnership built around two strong, experienced people who had already lived complicated lives before finding each other. Their marriage allowed 9-1-1 to explore family, grief, danger, responsibility, and second chances alongside the show's more spectacular emergencies. And spectacular emergencies were certainly not in short supply. During Krause's years on 9-1-1, Bobby and his team dealt with earthquakes, fires, floods, crashes, explosions, disasters at sea, and assorted emergencies that made an ordinary bad day at work look rather appealing. Through it all, Krause maintained Bobby's steady presence. When Captain Nash arrived, audiences generally knew somebody competent was finally in charge. Krause remained with 9-1-1 through 2025, when Bobby Nash's story came to an emotional conclusion after seven years at the center of the series. His departure marked the end of one of the longest and most recognizable roles of Krause's career and demonstrated how deeply audiences had become attached to a character whose strength came as much from compassion and vulnerability as physical courage. Across several decades of television, Peter Krause has developed an unusual specialty. His characters are often the people everyone else turns toward when something goes wrong. Casey McCall had to keep a television show moving. Nate Fisher tried to keep a funeral home and fractured family functioning. Adam Braverman became the dependable center of an enormous extended family. Bobby Nash was responsible for keeping firefighters alive while guiding people through some of the worst moments imaginable. Yet Krause has always understood that competence alone isn't particularly interesting. His characters work because underneath the dependable exterior there is usually somebody struggling with doubts, regrets, relationships, responsibilities, and the occasional realization that he has absolutely no idea what to do next. Peter Krause's career has been built on playing people you can believe in — not because they're perfect, but because they're flawed enough to feel real. Whether he's behind a television desk, standing in a funeral home, attempting to control another Braverman family crisis, or running toward a burning building when every sensible instinct says to run the other way, Krause has a way of making audiences trust him. And after decades of watching him manage one fictional disaster after another, it is difficult not to suspect that if something genuinely terrible happened, quite a few of us would instinctively look around and ask whether Peter Krause had arrived yet. ```json { "@context": "http:\/\/schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Article", "author": { "@id": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/#paul_stallibrass_144f731fa4" }, "dateModified": "2026-08-11T15:57:56Z", "datePublished": "2025-08-11T20:21:54Z", "description": "Explore the multifaceted career of Peter Krause, from his early roles to iconic characters in Six Feet Under and 9-1-1.", "headline": "Peter Krause", "image": { "@id": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/#defaultLogo" }, "inLanguage": "en-GB", "mainEntityOfPage": { "@type": "WebPage", "url": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/peter-krause" }, "publisher": { "@id": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/#defaultPublisher" }, "url": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/peter-krause" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Paul Stallibrass", "@id": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/#paul_stallibrass_144f731fa4" }, { "@id": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/#defaultLogo", "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "", "width": 0, "height": 0 }, { "@id": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/#defaultPublisher", "@type": "Organization", "url": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/", "logo": { "@id": "https:\/\/marktheday.info\/#defaultLogo" }, "name": "" } ] } ```