In sad news, Lauren Graham’s rep has confirmed to People Magazine that she and Peter Krause broke up “quietly” sometime last year. We first heard that they were a couple in 2010 when they co-starred on one of my favorite drama series, Parenthood, although they’d known each other for a long time. Peter is now starring on 9-1-1, which films in LA, and last year Lauren is on The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, which films in Vancouver. People’s reporting makes it sound like their work kept them apart and that this was a covid-related split.
Lauren Graham and Peter Krause are going their separate ways.
The Gilmore Girls alum’s rep confirmed the breakup news to PEOPLE exclusively, noting that Graham, 55, and Krause, 56, “quietly ended their relationship last year.”
The two actors first met in 1995. However, their relationship didn’t become romantic until nearly two decades later when they co-starred as siblings Adam and Sarah Braverman on Parenthood from 2010 to 2015.
in 2021, Graham explained that she couldn’t “come and go” back to her home with Krause because of quarantine rules while filming the new Disney+ series, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, in Vancouver.
“Normally that’s a two-hour flight and you come home on the weekends but I couldn’t do that. So we were separated for almost 5 months, which had never happened before,” she told Ellen DeGeneres.
Upon returning to her house, Graham said “there were more piles” than usual and Krause and his son, Roman, had “really bonded.” While Graham said it’s “fantastic” that Krause spent quality time with his son, she joked it made her “reentry more difficult.”
“It was more like they were the married couple … they were like, ‘We don’t do it that way anymore’ in the kitchen or whatever. They were like, ‘No, no, no, this is how things happen,'” Graham recalled…
The actress also revealed Krause’s latest addition to their home: the “COVID Corner.”
“Peter started a thing, I guess to make COVID life fun, where he’d go to the store and stock up on ridiculous amounts of whatever and leave it in the corner of the living room and then he’d call it ‘COVID corner’ as if that somehow made these piles of stuff fun, or a place to visit or a place to show the guests,” she shared. “He’d be like ‘Hey guys, have you seen ‘COVID corner?’ And I was like ‘It’s not an amusement park.'”
Still, Graham said she felt she needed to “respect” Krause’s space and “allow it to exist because these times are tough and everyone just dealt with it their own way.”
That interview Lauren did with Ellen that People excerpted hints at problems they had with day-to-day issues like clutter. I remember covering interviews early in their relationship where they gushed about each other. So many couples break up over minor problems that pile up and it’s not one big thing. When I was married it was the little things we never resolved that got on my nerves like that. While I have no idea why they split, this is sad and I hope they’re both doing OK. I like them as actors and people and was hoping it would work out.
This is so sad to me. I really want the best for her.
Awww rats!
I really liked them together
Peter looks great, age appropriate, some fillers I bet but expertly done. Favorite role was in Six Feet Under. That’s all I got.
Yeah, I’m a big Sports Night fan. He’s very likable and versatile.
Ten years but they never married. That does makes splitting up easier and since it happened last year and we are just learning about it now more private. After you get past your child rearing years marriage just doesn’t make any sense anymore.
I think she sounds awful here, jealous & selfish.
That part about her “re-entry” was strange. She sounds controlling & unpleasant.
My takes are usually the opposite of the majority though, so who knows.
I think he got to breathe, with her gone, & was like “don’t touch my corner!”
ETA: “allow it to exist “. Girl.
I stand by my initial response: she sounds selfish, controlling & entirely unpleasant.
She is obviously kidding and just telling a story?
It sounds to me like the guys turned the home into something of a frat house – not that hard to understand during Covid and lockdown – and the aftermath, after five months apart, highlighted underlying issues the couple had, as suggested in the commentary. Different tolerances for messiness is common among any people who live together. After ten years together, it’s not likely the only reason they decided to split; maybe there’s been past issues around the relationship he’s had with his son, that don’t necessarily involve her. Or not. But “she sounds controlling and unpleasant” is a bit of a stretch from what she’s said here.
I agree, she sounds like a bitch in that interview. And these are rich people, how hard would it be to hire someone to tidy up? I get that at the height of quarantine you couldn’t have people in and out but that’s been over for a while. I think that like a lot of people, COVID made them reevaluate stuff and realize life is too short for the b.s. Or somebody met somebody else they liked better, that’s a possibility too.
What Krause and his son were doing might make me feel alienated. It seems to be saying ‘there’s no room for you here anymore.’ Perhaps they were drifting apart before COVID and then the pandemic made the wedge between them permanent.
So the part where they are telling her what to do in the kitchen and what’s not allowed doesn’t sound controlling on the part of the men?
Without more context, it sounds more like Peter and Roman decided that the milk should go on the fridge shelf instead of the fridge door, or that they were going to store glasses upright instead of upside down, then Lauren came home five months later and they kept saying, “Oh no, we do it this way now.”
And that’s not nitpicky and controlling?
Agree, Equality! They might as well have hung a “No Women Allowed” sign.
I’ve noticed that when women make even the most neutral observations about their own feelings, many people judge the women as rude, mean, and self-centered, because they only hear criticism and nagging when women describe interpersonal relationships. The interviewer probably asked about Life With Covid and how she’s had to adjust, and she answered truthfully: She’d had to adjust her own expectations, because home wasn’t the way she remembered it.
I’ve also noticed a lot of gen-x women with undiagnosed ADHD have perfectionist/OCD tendencies that give the impression of being Type A, which is why I’m not loving the idea that she’s a horrible, controlling person just because she’s uncomfortable with her boyfriend hoarding apocalypse supplies in the living room…
Thank you for bringing up undiagnosed ADHD in GenX women. I was just diagnosed this year at 46 and I am shocked about all the things that were labeled as depression that can also be symptoms of ADHD. I’m still shocked almost daily. It’s been a real emotional rollercoaster.
It sounds like Lauren and Peter changed in different ways over the course of the pandemic and since they couldn’t be together, their paths just diverged. I absolutely love LAUREN Graham and have always wanted to go have drinks with her. I hope she is happy and healthy wether she’s alone or with somebody new. I hope the same for him.
There doesn’t have to be a villain. We don’t have to go to Doose’s market and get a pink or blue ribbon.
Hey Jenn and Angelah – not sure if you’ll be back to this, but I’m a GenX woman who thinks she might have undiagnosed ADHD based on some things I’ve read on Twitter. Do you have any recommendations of websites/articles that might help me see if a diagnosis is worth pursuing? I can google, of course, but sometimes sifting through the results is overwhelming. Just if you had something that you found helpful – not asking you to search it out.
She sounds annoyed. Like when someone tells a “cute” story at a party about their partner and then everyone is uncomfortable and just kind of laughs nervously. But if this interview was just around the time they split up, that makes sense.
I have OCD and clutter is unbearable for me. When you live with someone, you learn to compromise on a lot of things, so I will stand a little. But when it gets too much, I take a walk or a drive, and my husband clears up. He has a room that is just his, where he can clutter to his heart’s content, but he prefers to hang out where it’s clean and tidy. Lol.
That makes much more sense. Having a big pile of stuff in the living room where guests are being entertained doesn’t sound so great. Wonder what the guests thought.
@Merricat — I’m a bit OCD too but really, I just love being organized. I need to know where something is, not spend an hour looking for it, and I don’t hang onto useless stuff. Mr. Jaded, on the other hand, was a pack rat and totally disorganized. When I moved in with him in 2016 he had literally tubs and tubs full of crap everywhere — stuff like dozens of old paint chips and bank statements going back 20 years and grocery/gas receipts from 2008. He understood that I couldn’t live that way so we went through every GD tub and drawer and closet and got stuff organized. So I kind of *get* what she’s saying about coming back into a completely different situation that she no longer felt part of.
I really like her in general but the story about basically finding it off-putting that Peter bonded with his son closely that they seemed “like the married couple” and brining that up in relation to their own separation doesn’t sound awesome.
Makes it seem like she did not like that he became closer to his son and it was threatening to her. Like it’s the sons fault.
IDK I’d stop telling that story and stick to the distance and COVID quarantines just drove them apart and they grew in different directions. It sounds better.
(To put it in GG terms: This is a very Christopher excuse, Lorelei.)
Well, the son is a grown man. Perhaps she thought that when things got back to being more normal, he should have returned to or started his own life.
I think it is SO Lorelai!!! Christopher was a douche most times, but Lorelai was always very selfish and egocentrical. She did NOT like to play by somebody elses rules and to fit in where she was not centre of attention? No way! I can totally see that scene, all with the music and the phone call to Rory discussing everything.
Love Gilmore Girls!
I don’t think she was describing the bonding as off-putting. It was just that because she wasn’t there to be a part of that, it was difficult to figure out her place in it.
I don’t know – lots of stuff we complain about (myself included) just sound bitchy from the outside but our space we deal with viscerally and it’s stronger than our own better judgement at times.
She is just saying that she did not find a space for her when she got back, which just means that probably the love wasn’t there anymore because she did not put in the energy to re-build her space and neither did he.
That said, there is a really weird unscripted interview between Graham and Steve Carell where she is super extra and he seems unnerved by her energy.
Maybe she just takes up space and doesn’t read the room. Literally in this case.
I don’t know, if my husband kept piling things up in the corner of the main living area and wouldn’t respect my wish for him to stop, I think I’d find that pretty annoying. I’m a messy person myself, but in a compartmentalized way. I “collect” and now I sell on line, so I keep a pile of things……but in a separate area. There’s my “mess space” where I can close the door and he doesn’t have to look at it.
It seems like a fair complaint to me. That said, I do think she sounds a bit like the characters she plays, at least Lorelai and Sarah. Sarah always got on my nerves. So did Adam, for that matter. I think all of the siblings did except for Julia, lol.
At the risk of veering off-topic, Julia was the worst! But they were all at least a little bit annoying. Why did I like that show so much?? …..oh, thats right. Bonnie Bedelia. 🙂
BONNIE BEDELIA.
But seriously, what I liked about that show was that it was messy and none of them were perfect. It felt a lot like real like. I found them all irritating but lovable too. And Crosby was the worst.
Come to think of it, you’re right. Julia was annoying too.
I liked the parents (grandparents) the best, actually. And the kids.
I loved the idea of the show, and the cast and baseline characters but the show itself was frustrating… it felt like every time they had an interesting storyline set up, they’d drop it for a dopey one … eg Sarah’s love life … she’s reentering the workforce, a single mom on her own, trying to figure out who she is at this new phase of life … artist or steady provider or taking courses to finish her degree, trying to be independent while at the same time needing her FOO … super interesting to see how this is going to play out but BLAMMO! it turns into drama revolving around her boss hitting on her, or her kids teacher hitting on her or a love triangle. it wasn’t that Sarah was all about her love life, it’s that the writers kept ignoring everything else about her, then there were the silly cheating/temptation plots for just about every Braverman in a committed relationship.
I do have this show to thank for one of my favorite tv lines : Joel losing it in exasperation when Zeke’s riding him about home repairs “I’m a grown-ass man!” And also for introducing me to Michael B Jordan and reminding how much I love Jason Ritter (a fave since Joan of Arcadia)
Aww bummer news. Parenthood and Gilmore Girls are two of my favorite shows.
It came across like she returned and felt on the outside looking in at a life that she didn’t feel comfortable in. Married or not, he was her person; and to feel replaced by someone else whether it’s a brother, mother or son, that wouldn’t work for me either. Covid changed us all and she acknowledged that.
Team I hope their friendship survives and I wish them both the best.
“Her person”!! A Grey’s reference! lol (Damn, I loved Christina!). I kind of got that feeling as well. Nicely done, Twin Falls!
I think a lot of people with food/financial insecurity in their past were triggered by the pandemic. An overstocked pantry, or an abundance of toilet paper helped quiet the panic for a lot of people. While he might have jokingly shown people the pile of goods, maybe it symbolized a pile of pandemic anxiety.
I don’t know how to take her comments, tone can easily be misread, and this could go either way.
I had a crush on Peter during his Six Feet Under days. He was super hot back then.
She in the past joked about how he held on to old t-shirts, and still wore them and that she had a desire to sneak into his stuff and weed some out. So it could just be a fundamental disconnect with how they each view/keep stuff … with him more on the “keep it, it’s still useful” or “best have extra just in case”* end of things and her more on the “we’ve got new clothes why are you keeping this old stuff” or “we can go shopping again later, no need to stock up” end of things.
Differences like that can be just quirks you work around, and the ones you joke about, and maybe it’s easier to point to that and pandemic induced distance as the breakup “cause” instead of saying something deeper like after months apart you realized that you’d grown apart, reached the end of the relationship, just don’t love each other anymore.
She’s always been one to offer “funny” anecdotes about her life … like her bliss/obsession about coffee pods or her inability to leave her house in time to make a flight, she’s written books that are filled with stuff like that, it’s just her talk show/celebrity persona, so I don’t think this story about him shows anything negative about either of their characters, temperaments.
*my grandparents and some aunts and uncles always had a shelving rack in their cellars where they had a back up supply of stuff … my mother explained that it was a combo of them living through the Great Depression and having come from an Italian farming background where you put up stuff when it was in season, available to get you through the winter, lean times.
That’s a shame, they were friends a long time and were together a long time too.
I really liked these two together, what a bummer. And I feel like if I ever end up divorced, it would be for something like this. I think she’s over-sharing a little, but ultimately what she’s saying is that they grew apart.
They weren’t married and I always sensed that this was not her choice. Given that, and the fact that it was HER house after all, gave her the right to be as organized and neat as she pleased. Just my opinion of course.