Interns swoon when you tell them Peter Krause's about to call. The forty-two-year-old actor is best known for his portrayal of Nate Fisher on the seminal Six Feet Under, and despite Nate's harrowing decline in the show's later seasons, the good-guy studliness of his first-season persona lingers in the mind. On the phone, Krause does not disappoint; he shares the emotional acuity and intelligence that made his famous character so appealing.



But beyond their shared intensity, Nate has little in common with Krause's character in last year's Tribeca hit Civic Duty, released in theaters last week. Krause plays Terry Allen, a high-strung accountant who, after he's laid off, grows increasingly suspicious of an Islamic neighbor.

The plot evokes Rear Window, but where Jimmy Stewart was stuck in a wheelchair, there's nothing to keep Allen from acting on his paranoia, with harrowing results. Krause, who co-produced and partially re-wrote Civic Duty himself, spoke thoughtfully with Nerve about his past and future roles. — Peter Smith

 

What drew you to this film?

Nobody had made a film concerning the emotional and psychological fallout following September 11, 2001, and that's initially what attracted me to it. There were some elements to the script that I wanted to change, so I got involved as a producer and got my hands in it creatively. And I also felt that the film provided an opportunity to address some concerns that I think have gone unaddressed for too long a time. What's the line between justifiable suspicion and racial profiling? What's the line in between justifiable fear and paranoia? Did the media serve to create an unhealthy psychological and emotional state in this country? Are we watchful enough, are we vigilant enough? If we had a window into the future, we could've seen what Mr. Cho was going to do at Virginia Tech, and if somebody had said, I think this guy's gonna snap, he's got to be stopped. . . if we had that window into the future and somebody had done something about it, we wouldn't have called it paranoid vigilantism, we would've called it heroism. But without knowing the future, we probably would've called it paranoid vigilantism. So it's tough knowing where to draw those lines, and obviously beneath all those sorts of questions in the film we want to be asking the question, do we really want to continue living in the world this way? Cause it's not healthy. [laughs] Obviously.



What did you change when you rewrote it?

We wanted to make it very ambiguous. Both things are true: people get profiled by race, and there are also people who commit acts of terrorism. The point of our film is not to lead the audience to feel that they should be more suspicious of their neighbors, or that they shouldn't be suspicious at all because racial profiling is a bad thing. If anything it's meant to lead the silent majority to have a different voice than the voice of Terry Allen. It's the voice of someone who basically wields a loaded gun above their heads, screaming "I don't care." That's the voice that's heard by people in other countries around the world. And hopefully if anything Civic Duty will serve to get some more people out there to vote. I heard recently that more people vote for American Idol than vote for their president, which is pretty disturbing.




Would you ever write a project of your own?

I'm working on a few things now. I'm a little bit more comfortable working with a writer and being able to have influence on the script. Partially just because I'm busy acting usually. But yeah, I was an English Lit major in college, I've done some writing. It's just, it's a lonelier job. The acting work is pretty social.



Talk about this pilot you just did for ABC with Donald Sutherland. Rumor has it it'll be picked up this fall.

Dirty Sexy Money is a fun piece about a very wealthy family in New York, and Donald Sutherland and Jill Clayburgh play the patriarch and matriarch respectively. Craig Wright, a writer from Six Feet Under, wrote it. The piece has a great tone. There's this scene where William Baldwin's character, Patrick, is going to run for the Senate, but he's in love with a transvestite. And I play the lawyer to the family. So he's trying to get my help to dispose of this transvestite, not to kill her but to get her a check, hit the road. But he says he can't do it because he's so in love with her, she'll cry, and it'll just tear him up inside. So I wind up saying to him — this is the tone of the film here [gets into character] — "Patrick. You're going to be a U.S. Senator. You're going to occupy one of the highest offices in the land. Don't you, as a future senator, at least have to have enough courage, enough integrity, to walk into a hotel room on your own and give a tranny hooker a check?"

It'd be nice to see you moving back to comedy.

Craig Wright is finding a way of being comedic while making a point. And that's sort of the spirit of the show.



You've done mostly TV over the years, and a few movies here and there. Was that a preference?

It's just sort of the way things worked out, but over time I've discovered that I really enjoy both. I like the complexity of character development when it comes to serialized television work — you just can't do that in film. And it's more challenging to me than the film work. At the same time I really enjoy the film work, because you've got your beginning, middle and end, and you can really craft it. It's easier to be an artist in some ways working on film. Working on television, you just don't know what's coming next. You can't make choices in terms of how you're going to play something knowing what's gonna happen next, which I guess is a little more like life.



So how did you feel about the direction that Six Feet Under took Nate?

I've felt differently at different times, but now that I have some distance on it, I think that that show did something really amazing over time. Where we wound up by the finale was truly remarkable, and in keeping with the large theme of the show. We all die, and death is sudden, and it's final — get about the business of living your life the way you want to live it, now. Alan really found a way of delivering that simple but powerful message to people, and certainly with the final episode it comes across. It was simply hard for me, those last couple seasons, because life was hard for Nate. I had to live inside that myself. Everybody's got a difficult job once in a while, and that was just a tough stretch for me as an actor. It was hard to go to work and get inside Nate Fisher's life.



It's hard to think of another television character who starts out so loveably who's then punished so much.

Yeah. And there was really no way for me to separate my psyche from his while playing him, while having to deal with the things he had to deal with. I don't think I would've been doing a good job if I hadn't gone there as completely as I did. So I look back now that I have some distance on it and I recognize. . . it was difficult for me, that's all. I had to be in pain all the time! And at the time I just didn't have the kind of objectivity about it that I do now. There's just no way you can if you're going to really do it.



You'd been so heroic in the first season, and everybody and their mom had a crush on first season Nate. . .

Oh, yeah! I went from women being all over me to scowling at me on the street! [laughs]

Did you hope to see that heroism re-emerging as the seasons went on? I kept expecting him to pull out eventually, but it was just a continued downward spiral. Were you disappointed by that?

Um. . . no. I don't think that story had ever been told before. It was original, and I certainly get to play the hero in other work. The Lost Room, the mini-series I did on the Sci-Fi Channel, was refreshing for me — I got to play a classic hero, who knows right from wrong, and who has a clear objective: his daughter's lost in another dimension, and he's going to get her back, by God. And I see why Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford gravitate toward those roles. They're psychologically healthy to play, and they're absolutely nothing like life [laughs]. And then you go back to the complex, conflicted world of characters like Terry Allen or Nate Fisher. But there's a reason that those movies do well. It's nice to go to the movies and have a character appear on screen the way that you'd like to see your own life or feel in your own life.



Being in an iconic show like Six Feet Under is famously sort of a double-edged sword. Do you consciously worry about redefining yourself?

You know, I don't. Fortunately for me, Six Feet Under was more of a cult hit than a pop-culture smash like Friends or Cheers or Seinfeld. And I also had a body of work before that. Certainly Sports Night kind of falls into the same cult category. I've been very fortunate to escape that kind of typecasting, and I also will rage against it if it every starts to happen, and do other different things, because I'm capable of it. I probably will be seeking out some comedies in the next couple of years, just because I'm a little exhausted from the other stuff.

Do you ever worry that even if you're doing something completely different, that the audience will see Nate?

Yeah, I had a funny experience here in New York City. I was doing a revival of an Arthur Miller play, After the Fall, which. . . [rueful laughs] which was a tough summer.



Yeah, the reviews —

Well, in many ways, my personal life was rough, the play itself was hard, and then — funny story. . . the mother of my son, her father died the opening night of the play, and the next day, as I was traveling back from where they were staying to do the play, Rachel Griffiths called me and said [adopts Australian accent], "Peter, darling, I just had to call you — it's not true what they said about you in the New York Times!" I was like, oh God! That's just the cherry on the sundae right there. But they made up for it, their review of The Lost Room was very kind.

So I take my place on stage, and there were some young women sitting in the front row, and they see me sitting on this bench on stage, just as the lights are coming up, before the play really begins, and I hear [squeaky voice], "Oh, there's Nate!" And you know, if something's going to take you out of character it's going to be someone saying the name of another character you've played. "Oh, I'm Nate. All right."