What happened to Niles Crane actor David Hyde Pierce after Frasier?

Although he has acted on stage and screen before, most people are first introduced to David Hyde Pierce through his role as Niles Crane on the NBC sitcom Frasier. Ultimately, Pierce was the secret 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 that culminated in the marriage and birth of a child between him and by his father’s home health worker, Daphne Moon. As well as audiences loving Pierce as Niles, it was clear the industry did too: He was nominated 11 times for Best Supporting Actor at the Emmys, winning four times, including in the series’ final season in 2004 year. But unlike Kelsey Grammer, who continued to ply his trade in the world of sitcoms with countless (and far less successful) follow-ups, Pierce decided to mostly (but not completely) step away from the screen and limelight after the show ended more than 20 years ago.

While “Frasier” itself underwent a much-needed reboot on Paramount+, and a number of the show’s original cast members appeared in at least one episode, Niles was notably absent. (Oddly enough, when he was asked about the possibility of such a reboot years ago, Pierce suggested it would never happen.) Although his character’s son is a regular on the new show, ensuring that both Niles and Daphne are mentioned in dialogue, we have yet to see Pierce. And the actor publicly admitted that he decided not to appear in the series. So that 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 a way, it makes perfect sense. Pierce is far from the only cast member in “Frasier” to perform on stage; even Grammer was in the Broadway revival of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels after Frasier, which earned him a Tony nomination. But shortly after Frasier ended in 2004, Pearce jumped to another famous comic in the world of Monty Python. He played Sir Robin, among other characters, in the original Broadway version of Spamalot, alongside actors such as Tim Curry as King Arthur and Hank Azaria as Sir Lancelot. Of course, it’s nothing new for famous actors from film and television to appear on stage, but after 11 years of performing in live games (if you think of the type of humor and storytelling in “Frasier”), Pearce is proving his acting and singing abilities on stage in the long-awaited and everyone’s favorite musical. (It’s also to Pierce’s credit that now that he’s aged a bit, you could easily see him as King Arthur; he wouldn’t just be cast as a more cowardly type of character.) And unlike some famous actors and actresses who performing on the stage of the show almost like a lark, it became almost a second life for Pierce. He won his first Tony Award, not for Spamalot, but for the next Broadway show in which he played the title role, Curtains.

While you might not know “Curtains” as instantly as you might recognize “Spamalot” from its origin in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 2006 musical had a pretty impressive cast of people to star alongside Pierce, including the composing team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, best known for scoring the Broadway musical Chicago. In “Curtains,” Pierce played a detective investigating a murder behind the scenes of a Boston musical while indulging his passion for musical theater.

After that, Pierce went on to work on Broadway in such productions as “La Bete” and the recent revival of “Hello, Dolly!” starring Bette Midler. Moreover, this year Piers returns to the stage in a new version of the cult comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance.

It’s not that David Hyde Pierce has completely avoided appearing in film and television since Frasier ended, but his choices have been few and far between and clearly more in line with his own self-interest than the need to work and get paid. Perhaps his most notable post-Frasier work was on Max’s recent series Julia, in which he played Julia Child’s husband Paul as she began her notable career as a celebrity TV chef in the mid-1960s. (Frasier fans will no doubt remember that another series regular, Bebe Neuwirth, played Frasier Crane’s ex-wife Lilith.) Although Pierce looked the same, if slightly older, in “Julia,” the type of character he played (a husband who has to deal with his wife becoming famous while his own works are ignored) allowed him to achieve a level of complexity that wasn’t always present in his excellent work on Frasier. ​Although the series was canceled after two seasons, it especially felt like a breath of fresh air for viewers who may have missed it in its other few appearances. (The most notable of which would be a recurring role on CBS’ The Good Wife .) Of course, the reboot itself was another breath of fresh air, as Pierce did return to one of his best-known roles in the Netflix reboot of Wet . Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp” for several episodes, as well as the short-lived sequel “Ten Years Later”.

David Hyde Pierce made himself a star as Niles Crane on Frasier, and the fact that his Emmy-winning work seems like such an impossible standard for other actors to live up to is a testament to his quality as an actor. It should be envied to be one of the people who saw him flourish on the Broadway stage for the past two decades, because the success of “Frasier” allowed him to play his muscles wherever he wanted. If you haven’t caught him in brief TV appearances over the years or in the indie thriller The Perfect Landlord (in which he plays something of a more murderous version of Niles), just know that he hasn’t completely disappeared from the map and consider yourself lucky if he decides again will appear on the big or small screen.