Cue the Agonized Guy

By John Cloud

Peter Krause isn't as attractive as people say. His jaw is too square; his face is too long; his upper lip sweats a bit. In 20 years, he will be great for a John Kerry biopic. But Krause's face, at once Teutonic and boyish, is perfect for what directors ask it to do again and again: express agony. Krause, who has a new film out this week, a Broadway play that opened July 29 and a leading role in HBO's Six Feet Under (Sundays at 9 p.m.), is having the time of his life playing men who are in hell.

Consider the pageant of misery Krause has brought to life: in just three years, Six Feet Under's Nate Fisher has lost both his father and his wife--whom he had to bury with his own hands to keep the evil mother-in-law from burning the corpse. In After the Fall, a revival of a 1964 Arthur Miller play and Krause's first turn on Broadway, he plays Quentin, a man whose two marriages break under the weight of the first wife's endless hectoring and the second's endless pill popping. Along the way, two characters commit suicide. As Quentin asks at the end of the first act, "Good God, can there be more?"

You bet. In We Don't Live Here Anymore, Krause (it's Krau-zuh) plays Hank Evans, a writer navigating his way through a convulsing marriage. The new film features partner swapping, late-night screaming and a child who sleeps in his own dried urine because the mother (Laura Dern)--a woman with whom Evans has an affair--is so distracted by her gin and her suffering that she forgets to change the sheets.

When Krause and I met a few hours before After the Fall's opening performance, I wondered how one actor channels so much pain without letting it sweep him away. How do you turn the emotional spigot on and off when pure bile is running through it? Krause has two answers. One is the practical response of a mature dad who grew up in Minnesota (Krause turns 39 this week and has a 2 1/2-year-old son, Roman): "Sometimes I do what I do just because it's my job." And like any job, getting up at 4 a.m. to shoot a scene can require "the sheer will just to pick my bones up." Krause is hot now, but he has actually had regular TV work for 14 years (ever since 1990, when he was on Carol Burnett's sketch comedy Carol & Company).

The other answer is that Krause believes his portrayals of laceration fulfill some moral obligation: "I think a lot of people are in agony, and if we only tell stories about ourselves that help us escape our lives, I don't think I'm doing my job. If you can be open about the agony and the anguish, maybe people can talk about it a little more freely and not be all alone. The less alone we all feel, the better off we all are."

Which sounds a little solipsistic--the actor as national counselor. Krause is at his worst when he philosophizes, which is often. He issues such impenetrable platitudes as, "Some people are hanging onto 'I'm a Republican' or 'It is Allah's will.' But they have to realize, it's all just happening, and it's all just consciousness." Huh?

But Krause knows something about loneliness. When he was young, his father battled depression and, later on, behaved like "an adult child," Krause says. "He was tantrum filled." When Krause was a high school sophomore, he began to deeply question "the world that was created inside [his] little house." Questions ran through him so fast he couldn't sleep, but he kept them bottled up to fit in. Eventually, Krause contemplated suicide. Therapy brought him back to balance. "Suicide is a temporary solution to a permanent problem," he says, upending the old cliche. "Your soul is not going anywhere. So you learn to relax."

He learned well: some of Krause's best scenes in Six Feet Under have him playing the easygoing dreamer who helps his tightly wound TV brother come out of the closet. The square jaw covered by a few days of beard, his perfect grin flashing, the California attitude--"He's a guy you're instantly prepared to like onscreen," says John Curran, who directed Krause in We Don't Live Here Anymore. With luck we'll see more of that guy--and less of the tortured victim--when Krause's blue period ends.