Peter Jacobson is the man a scene sends for when it needs a doctor, a lawyer or an agent with a sour line ready, and he has spent thirty years being that. Whether he can be anything else we have seen too little to say.
Fi1m perspective
In Smile 2 (2024) Peter Jacobson sits in a dim room as Morris and explains the rules. He has studied the grinning thing, he knows how it moves, and he has a plan for beating it. The first film had the same scene with a different man in the chair. It exists to be believed, and it needs an actor who looks as though he has done the reading. That is what Jacobson has been supplying since 1993.
He began with guest parts in NYPD Blue and Law & Order and small film roles, among them Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and Transformers (2007). Then came House, and Dr Chris Taub, from the fourth season to the eighth, ninety-eight episodes of standing near Hugh Laurie while Laurie was rude to someone. After that he was Proxy Snyder in Colony (2016 to 2018), then Ray Donovan, The Good Doctor and Fear the Walking Dead, and in 2024 both Smile 2 and Fly Me to the Moon.
The pattern is plain and he knows it. He is cast as professionals, and usually as the neurotic or sarcastic one, the colleague who says the thing the hero was too busy to say. He has put it better than we could: "Hollywood has very specific ideas about who you are and what you do, especially when you look a very specific way. I am the agent, I am the lawyer, I am the doctor." What he brings to those men is a comic timing that survives being dropped into drama, science fiction or horror. On House, the sour humour and the friendships are what have lasted better than the show's repeated promise that Laurie's doctor might change, and Taub was one of the people that humour was aimed at and came back from.
We should be honest about how little we have to go on. In Smile 2 his scene did not frighten us and was not meant to; what we felt was recognition, because the shape and most of the rules were the first film's, and by then we were checking the time. None of that was Jacobson's doing. He was asked to be the one man at the table who has done the reading, and he was.
Colony gave him an antagonist rather than a colleague, a governor rather than a consultant, and it is the work of his we would most like to see more of. He has spent three decades being the man the scene trusts. It would be worth somebody's while to write him one it should not.
Biography
Peter Jacobson is an American actor. He is best known for playing Dr Chris Taub on the Fox series House (2007–2012).
Born on 24 March 1965 in Chicago, Illinois, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 and from the Juilliard School. He is the son of news anchor Walter Jacobson. His other television credits include Proxy Snyder on Colony and roles in The Good Doctor, Fear the Walking Dead and Ray Donovan. Film appearances include Transformers (2007), Cars 2 (2011) and White House Down (2013).
In 2024 he played Morris in the horror film Smile 2.
