Something of a Faustian journey’ is how Peter Krause describes his role in Dirty Sexy Money, Channel 4’s new US drama series, which starts on Friday. This is a significant understatement – Faust merely made a pact with the Devil. Krause’s character Nick George makes a pact with the Darling family, and that, he soon learns, is much more complicated.
An amalgam of the Kennedys, the Hiltons and the Osbournes, the Darlings – who are the richest family in New York City – will soon become the most monstrous family on television. Patriarch Tripp Darling (an imperious Donald Sutherland) is as close to a functioning human being as the clan possesses. The rest of them forcibly insert the filthy into filthy rich. Tripp’s wayward scions include Patrick (William Baldwin), who’s running for Senator while seeing a transsexual lover; Reverend Brian (Glenn Fitzgerald), a Torquemada-style man of the cloth; the giggling, vacuous twins Jeremy and Juliet (Seth Gabel and Samaire Armstrong); and the serial divorcee Karen (Natalie Zea).
Nick enters their charmed circle because his father Dutch had been their lawyer. The young Nick thus grows up with a healthy contempt for mammon, instead becoming a do-gooder attorney with a stock of pro bono clients.
But when Dutch is killed in a mysterious plane crash, Nick finds himself drawn back into the Darlings’ affairs by an offer of $10million a year to spend on his good works, and the chance to find out what happened to his father. Minutes after accepting, he’s on his way to bail out Jeremy, who’s just ‘won’ a yacht full of illegal immigrants on an all-night poker binge.
Even so, the casting of Krause is a surprise. Krause (it rhymes with ‘wowser’) turned down the role three times because, he says, ‘I was terrified of the show being successful and having to do it for seven years. I have commitment issues.’
His commitment issues arise from the fact that programmes with Krause in the lead have a habit of succeeding. After two years playing a television presenter in Aaron Sorkin’s much underrated Sports Night, he went on to five award-laden series of Six Feet Under, one of American television’s recent highpoints.
When that finished in 2005, Krause went off-piste. Rather than cashing in with, say, an action movie, he starred in a controversial indie film about America’s post-9/11 paranoia called Civic Duty (‘I got accused both of being anti-American and also a real right-wing American’) and then a science-fiction miniseries, The Lost Room. Craig Wright, who wrote some of the standout episodes of Six Feet Under, convinced him to return to series television.
‘Craig’s aim here was to conduct an exploration of wealth while providing an entertaining show,’ says Krause. ‘Craig has created a very complicated psychological world. In life, Nick’s father was practically dead to him already. He doesn’t want to see him. He doesn’t want to talk to him. Then when he dies, out of guilt he feels that he should be responsible for finding out whether something did happen to his father.’
In Six Feet Under, a drama about a family of undertakers, Krause’s character Nate had repeated imaginary interaction with his dead father and ended up – reluctantly – doing his job. Dirty Sexy Money has no dream sequences, but it does have a similar love-hate father-son dynamic.
‘I think that’s a universal theme – the desire to differentiate yourself from your parents,’ says Krause. ‘If there’s something in your father that strikes you negatively, then you say, “I am not going to be that way.” I was the same – I didn’t want to become my father. And yet you find yourself magnetically being drawn towards those very things which you so abhor.’
Wright has said he created Nick with Krause in mind. That’s quite a compliment – Nick is unfailingly altruistic, the model of probity. But Krause suggests that Nick will not prove beyond reproach. ‘This show wants to ask some very basic questions,’ he says, ‘such as, do the ends justify the means? Does power corrupt? And along the way, we’ll have fun exploring human desire, what people want, and how we foolishly go about getting it.’
Dirty Sexy Money is on Channel 4 on Friday, 21 March at 9.00pm
