What Happened To Niles Crane Actor David Hyde Pierce After Frasier?

Although he’d been acting on stage and screen beforehand, most people first were introduced to David Hyde Pierce via his role as Niles Crane on the NBC sitcom “Frasier.” Pierce was, in the long run, the secret sauce that helped differentiate “Frasier” from “Cheers,” as Niles quickly became a fan favorite and was one-half of the show’s long-running “will they/won’t they” romance, culminating in a marriage and baby between him and his father’s home health-care worker Daphne Moon. Aside from the way audiences loved Pierce as Niles, it was clear the industry did too: He was nominated 11 times for a Best Supporting Actor Emmy, winning four times, including for the show’s final season in 2004. But unlike Kelsey Grammer continuing to ply his trade in the world of sitcoms with countless (and far less successful) follow-ups, Pierce chose to mostly (but not entirely) step away from the on-screen limelight after the show concluded over 20 years ago. 

Although “Frasier” itself has gone through a requisite reboot on Paramount+, with a number of the show’s original cast members appearing for at least one episode, Niles has been notably absent. (Funnily enough, when he was asked about the likelihood of such a reboot years ago, Pierce assumed one would never happen.) While his character’s son is a regular on the new show, guaranteeing that both Niles and Daphne are mentioned in dialogue, we haven’t seen Pierce yet. And the actor has publicly acknowledged that he chose not to appear in the show. So it makes the question all the more pressing: What happened to Pierce after “Frasier” ended? Well, the short version is simple: For the most part, he chose to act on stage.

In some ways, it makes perfect sense. Pierce is far from the only cast member on “Frasier” to have acted on the stage; even Grammer did a post-“Frasier” stint in a Broadway revival of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” that got him a Tony nomination. But soon after “Frasier” ended in 2004, Pierce hopped to another famous comic property in the world of Monty Python. He portrayed Sir Robin, among other characters, in the original Broadway version of “Spamalot,” alongside cast members like Tim Curry as King Arthur and Hank Azaria as Sir Lancelot. Certainly, the presence of well-known film and TV actors on stage isn’t new, but Pierce had come from 11 years of doing a type of live play (when you think about the type of humor and storytelling in “Frasier”) to proving both his acting and singing chops on stage in a highly awaited and widely beloved stage musical. (It’s also to Pierce’s credit that you could easily see him playing King Arthur now that he’s aged a bit; he wouldn’t only be typecast as the more cowardly character type.) And unlike some big-name actors and actresses who do a stage show almost as a lark, for Pierce, it became almost a second life for him. He received his first Tony Award not for “Spamalot,” but for the next Broadway show in which he starred, “Curtains.”

Though you may not know “Curtains” as instantly as you may recognize “Spamalot” from its origins in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 2006 musical had a pretty impressive set of folks involved alongside Pierce, including composing team John Kander and Fred Ebb, best known for writing the music to the Broadway musical “Chicago.” In “Curtains,” Pierce played a detective on the case to solve a murder amidst the backstage of a Boston-set musical, while also indulging his own passion for musical theatre. 

Pierce would continue to work on Broadway afterward in shows like “La Bete” and the recent revival of “Hello, Dolly!”, co-starring Bette Midler in the title role. And what’s more, Pierce is returning to the stage this year in a new version of the iconic comic operetta “The Pirates of Penzance.” 

It’s not that David Hyde Pierce has fully avoided appearing in film and TV since the end of “Frasier,” but his choices have been few and far between and clearly speak to his own interests more than a need to work and collect a paycheck. Perhaps his most notable post-“Frasier” work was on the recent Max series “Julia,” in which he played Julia Child’s husband Paul as she began her notable career as a famous TV chef in the mid-1960s. (Fans of “Frasier” no doubt may recall that one of the show’s other regular cast members, Bebe Neuwirth, played Frasier Crane’s ex-wife Lilith.) Though Pierce looked the same, if somewhat older, on “Julia,” the type of character he played (a husband who has to grapple with the fact that his wife is becoming famous while his own artwork is being ignored) allowed him a level of complexity that wasn’t always present in his excellent work on “Frasier.” Though the series was canceled after two seasons, he specifically felt like a breath of fresh air to audiences who may not have caught him in his other few appearances. (Most notable among those would be a recurring role on CBS’s “The Good Wife”.) Of course, the other breath of fresh air was itself a reboot, as Pierce did return to one of his more famous roles in the Netflix reboot “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp” for a couple episodes, as well as the “Ten Years Later” follow-up briefly.

David Hyde Pierce made himself a star as Niles Crane on “Frasier,” and the fact that his Emmy-winning work feels like such an impossible standard for other actors to live up to speaks to his quality as an actor. It’s enviable to be one of the folks who have seen him flourish on the Broadway stage in the last two decades, because the success of “Frasier” enabled him to flex his muscles wherever he pleased. If you haven’t caught him in quick TV appearances over the years, or the indie thriller “The Perfect Host” (in which he plays something of a more murderous version of Niles), just know that he hasn’t fallen off the map completely and consider yourself lucky when he decides to pop up on the big or small screen again.