Rise to Fame
A morally compromised plastic surgeon on a medical drama doesn't sound like a star-making role. The Juilliard-trained son of a Chicago news anchor had spent two decades doing Shakespeare in the Park, David Mamet at the Atlantic Theatre Company, and recurring Law & Order spots before House M.D. made that calculation irrelevant. He played Dr. Chris Taub for 98 episodes. Yahoo TV called the character 'the sole voice of reason among these misguided doctors,' which is either a compliment or a very specific kind of curse.
In the Spotlight
After House wrapped in 2012, the work didn't slow down, it just got stranger. Three seasons as Proxy Snyder on Colony cast him as an alien-occupation collaborator with enough self-serving charm to make the character genuinely unnerving. The credits since read like a casting director's speed dial: Ray Donovan, WeCrashed, Ahsoka, Fly Me to the Moon, and Smile 2 in 2024, each a different genre, none obviously connected. Smart casting directors keep finding him because he can play authority figures who are subtly, specifically wrong.
Side Notes
His father Walter Jacobson was one of Chicago's most recognizable news anchors, which means Peter grew up watching someone build a public persona for a living. He went to Brown for political science before pivoting to Juilliard, then added improv training at Second City, which is a notably methodical approach to becoming a TV character actor. He appeared in Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile in its original New York run and decades later got cast in Ethan Coen's A Play Is a Poem at the Mark Taper Forum. The stage never entirely let him go.