Peter Paige looks back on his journey from Queer as Folk actor to The Fosters creator and Station 19 boss
It took achieving his Hollywood dream to make Peter Paige realize he wanted something different.
The Connecticut native was just 6 years old when he decided to become an actor, eventually graduating from Boston University's theater school before entering the audition grind. ("I was the other choice to play Jack on Will & Grace," the actor reveals. "There were some near misses that were painful, but kept me in the game.")
And then came Queer as Folk.
The groundbreaking Showtime series centered on a group of gay friends living in Pittsburgh, and Paige was a breakout as the vivacious Emmett Honeycutt when the drama premiered in 2000. At a time when most gay characters were one-dimensional, if existent at all, Paige was provided a sandbox that allowed him to explore not only Emmett's dating life but his many, many career paths — from porn star to local news correspondent. The series was a cultural conversation piece, skyrocketing the actor into notoriety. But while he fondly recalls collaborating with Queer as Folk co-creators Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman to create Emmett, Paige realized he wasn't fulfilled.
Everett Collection
"Being an actor is really being of service to someone else's vision," Paige reflects. "I was on a hit TV show and as soon as that happened, I realized I wanted to be writing and directing. I wanted the agency to put my voice more purely out into the world."
In retrospect, the signs of his true passion had always been bubbling up to the surface — though maybe not in ways he had been ready to accept. When graduating from BU, the head of the acting track suggested Paige was destined to be a director. "I heard it as some sort of passive-aggressive way of saying I wasn't handsome enough, or 'You're too gay,' as opposed to an objective statement which was in fact true," he recalls now.
As the Folk series finale approached in 2005, Paige began plotting his next move. He found himself ruminating on the criticism his Showtime series faced over the lack of diversity among the all-white main cast during the show's five-season run. "It was absolutely correct," he says of the critique. "My character was the one who was supposed to be Black. The other person who screen-tested for that role was Billy Porter. They picked me, and then it was just this all-white group of friends."
The aspiring writer-director committed himself to doing better when he got the chance to tell his own stories — a pledge he made good on when co-creating his first series, The Fosters.
Randy Holmes/Walt Disney Television via Getty
Debuting in 2013, the ABC Family (later Freeform) series centered on a multicultural family unit with two lesbian matriarchs (Teri Polo and Sherri Shaum) raising their biological and adopted children. "It was a traditional family drama about a non-traditional family, and that was its genius," Paige says of the drama, which portrayed a young gay kid coming out and dealt with issues including immigration and the harsh realities faced by children in the foster care system. "It was resonating with people who had never felt seen in media before."
It resonated so much that, after five seasons of The Fosters, Freeform asked Paige and his collaborators Bradley Bredeweg and Joanna Johnson to use the 2018 series finale to spinoff two of the Fosters — sisters Callie (Maia Mitchell) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez) — onto their own series, Good Trouble.
The Good Trouble team continued the fresh and necessary storytelling of The Fosters with arcs following Mariana fighting against a sexist workplace and calling for justice after a young Black man is killed at the hands of police. Paige says Good Trouble is able to pull off authentic, diverse stories because they prioritize diversity and avoid tokenism in both the writers' room and on camera. "We make sure that each character has people in their lives that look like them and come from similar backgrounds," he explains of their approach — pointing to Callie and Marianna's friend Malika (Zuri Adele), who had a group of Black friends outside of her bond to the central duo, as an example.
With Good Trouble still going strong as season 5 airs on Freeform, Paige aims to continue that sort of inclusive storytelling as he steps into his new role as co-showrunner of the upcoming seventh season of ABC's Station 19. Paige began as a director on the Grey's Anatomy spin-off in season 4 before stepping into an executive producer role for season 6. "The show is wrapped in a candy wrapper of flames and acts of heroism, but at its core is a show about Black, brown, and queer people trying to navigate systems that were not set up for them to succeed," he says of what drew him to the series, "and I can write that s--- all day long."
John Fleenor/ABC via Getty Images 'Station 19'
While he's proud of all the work he's done on cable, Paige is grateful that Station 19 presents him the opportunity to tell complex, diverse, and inclusive stories on network TV — presenting the representation he never saw on the Big Three back when he first dreamt of entering the entertainment business. "That's the whole point of what I do," he says with a smile. "If I can be a little bit of inspiration for a few people out there, then I've done good."
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