MEDIA > ARTICLES > THE LOST ROOM CHALLENGED KRAUSE

Peter Krause—who stars alongside Elle Fanning, Julianna Margulies, Kevin Pollak and Roger Bart in the upcoming SCI FI Channel original six-hour miniseries The Lost Room—told SCI FI Wire that the story and his character presented a variety of challenges. Krause plays Joe Miller, a detective who gains possession of a key that opens the door to a world of unimaginable power. Miller will need that key desperately as he searches for his young daughter, Anna (Fanning), who's disappeared into a mysterious motel room.

"It was a challenge for me, but also a welcome one, to establish chemistry with everyone I came into contact with, because I'm the one character who comes into contact with all the others," Krause (Six Feet Under) said in an interview. "So I had to find some kind of center for Joe Miller that made sense to me. A couple of things that came to me along the way were that Joe could only become so upset with any one person, that there's a general degree of annoyance in the six hours that he reaches."

Krause added: "It was a very collaborative effort along the way, and I argued and fought for Joe Miller to only fire his gun [once] during the entire six hours. That indeed was what happened. So the question is sort of buried in the six hours, but it's 'what is the price of one bullet?' And the price of one bullet is pretty high. It's also very entertaining, where we get you, and what Joe has to do to get his daughter back. I wanted Joe to be a good-hearted, but not heavy-hearted, guy. I wanted him to be somewhat lighthearted before he gets into everything with his daughter. They took out a sequence from the first night where I'm messing with my partner Lou [Chris Bauer]. That was just for time purposes."

As a result, particularly in night one, Krause said, it falls upon the relationship between Joe and Anna to showcase Joe's lighter side. "I think that Elle and I really kind of captured a nice, lighthearted father-daughter relationship in the midst of dealing with something very serious, and that is 'are we going to get broken up by mom?'" Krause said. "She's coming out of rehab and thinking that she can now take care of Anna herself. There was another scene between me and my ex-wife [that was cut]. So the relationship between Joe and Anna is key to the rest of the journey in terms of the audience buying into it and rooting for Joe to find his daughter." The Lost Room will premiere at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Dec. 11 and will continue on Dec. 12 and 13. —Ian Spelling

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