Playboy's 20 Q: William Petersen

He stares death in the face as the star of TV's top show. But is he ready to leave the morgue behind?

1

[Q] Playboy: For CSI forensics honcho Gil Grissom, severed heads, maggots and putrefied innards are just part of another day at the office. Would an actual festering corpse break your stride?

[A] Petersen: I can't say that I'd be a good crime-scene investigator, but I could handle death pretty well. The first season, standing on the autopsy set between takes and looking at this brilliant decayed skeleton made by the special effects guys, I said, "There's something I like about this." Death teaches me that there's a soul. Having had family members pass away over the years, I've always felt it's so obvious that once they're dead they're gone--probably to a much cooler place.

2

[Q] Playboy: That doesn't sound much like your character, who believes only in hard science.

[A] Petersen: For 10 years before CSI they threw me TV series about the cop, the lawyer, the ex-husband. I wanted to play someone the diametric opposite of me. Otherwise I'd get bored. I'm very American and attached to the physical, but there's another side, too. I mean, I believe in reincarnation, and I have thoughts of doing the whole go-to-the-mountain thing, of becoming a priest or a sensei. But then I'm like, "Nah, I like my beer and my Chicago Cubs, so I'm not gonna do it." At least the science on the show helps me not to feel like some cross-legged freak. There's a practical explanation when you watch the body decay, when you watch the maggots and the flies.

3

[Q] Playboy: Are you now more likely to swat bugs or study them?

[A] Petersen: I've become fascinated by them. My wife and I have an unfathomable number of spiders in the house and yard, and now I won't even squash one inside unless she says, "Kill that." When we first started the series, I caught about 30 minutes of this PBS-type series about every kind of insect and animal having sex. I was so fascinated, I found tapes of the series on the Internet. If I'd seen that before CSI I'd have gone, "Hmm, interesting," without pursuing it. It's one of the sexiest things you'll ever see. It would be Grissom's porn.

4

[Q] Playboy: Do fans purposely try to gross you out to test your stomach?

[A] Petersen: No, because I don't think anyone is really sure how I'd react. But I was invited to receive an award at an American Society for Clinical Pathology convention in New Orleans. It's the best award I've ever gotten--way better than an Emmy. These are the nerds who basically invented forensic science. What's great is that now when people ask what they do and they say they're a pathologist or a coroner, the response is, "You mean like on CSI?"

5

[Q] Playboy: Ever had a brush with death?

[A] Petersen: Years ago, doing a play in Chicago, I cut my finger in half onstage. We obviously had to stop because, well, I didn't have a finger. By the time they got me to the ER I'd lost a lot of blood and had passed out. I could hear the doctors working on me, saying they'd lost my vital signs. I was on the All That Jazz escalator with a long tunnel and a lot of white light. Then I specifically remember a male, dominant voice saying, "It's not your time. Get off the escalator. You've got shit to do." I came to and got sewed up. Something in me changed, a sort of knowledge that somewhere on the other side it's good. For weeks, the more I talked about it, the more freaked out people got. Some of them were like, "Okay, whatever. You took too many drugs."

6

[Q] Playboy: Had you?

[A] Petersen: That was hippie time--rock festivals, dropping out of high school, Vietnam. I was politically active, but it was mostly politics for women. The more political you were, the more girls you got. Clinton knew that. Then in 1969 a really close friend of mine was shot to death in a drug deal. I was supposed to be with him that night but ended up at a Santana concert instead. At five A.M. I found out that he'd been shot. His death was the cold slap that told me I'd better stop going down the hippie road. I cut my long hair, went to live with my older brother in Idaho and finished high school there. I played football, basketball and tennis, which I hadn't done for two years because I'd gotten into this other scene.

7

[Q] Playboy: Did that other scene involve any scrapes with the law?

[A] Petersen: I've been in jail overnight a couple times. One time I forged a bunch of checks and ran away on a bus before getting pulled over by the state police. There was also a big political protest where we all got hauled away in a paddy wagon, but if that didn't happen to you in those days, you weren't going outside. I also got busted for the Mann Act [a federal statute that prohibits, among other things, transporting underage females across state lines for "immoral" purposes]. We were going to rock festivals, and this one time I was 18 and the girl I was with was 15.I lost her at this festival, and she got arrested and blamed it on me, saying I'd brought her from Wisconsin. I was facing time for a federal offense, but as an upper-middle-class white kid I was always able to get off. If I had been born black on Chicago's South Side, I'd probably still be in jail today.

8

[Q] Playboy: You played the first guy to take down Hannibal Lecter in 1986's Manhunter. Do you think Grissom would be as good a serial killer as an investigator?

[A] Petersen: Grissom is a Hannibal who found a different outlet.

9

[Q] Playboy: How did you feel about Red Dragon, the remake of Manhunter?

[A] Petersen: Never saw it. When I found out it was the same script we'd used, I was like, "What? Silly." Producer Dino De Laurentiis couldn't get Manhunter into many theaters at the time because he was in litigation with theater owners. He didn't make any money from it and didn't own The Silence of the Lambs, so he got pissed off and did Hannibal. Then he still had the rights to the book Red Dragon, so he said, "We'll just do that again." If he could get away with it he'd make the same movie every year.

10

[Q] Playboy: Who would you most like to cast as a guest corpse on CSI?

[A] Petersen: The big three would be [CBS chairman] Les Moonves, [Alliance Atlantis Entertainment Group CEO] Peter Sussman and [CSI producer] Jerry Bruckheimer, all of whom are getting filthy rich off this show. They should spend a day on the slab while we poke and prod them. You'd have to ask their wives if they'd be convincing as stiffs.

11

[Q] Playboy: Do we sense resentment over the decision by those parties to treat CSI as a franchise and spin off CSI: Miami?

[A] Petersen: And they're going to do another CSI next year. Hey, they can do the show five nights a week with five different casts, but as long as they don't have my guys, they're not going to do it as well. CSI: Miami doesn't have our chemistry. Taking a blueprint of something that was organically conceived and trying to synthesize it is the difference between organic chicken and chicken jerky. There's nothing I can do about that. That's Viacom, big American capitalism and ratings points.

12

[Q] Playboy: You were the Colin Farrell of your day, getting cast as the lead in Manhunter and 1985's To Live and Die in L.A. before audiences knew who you were.

[A] Petersen: I didn't even have an agent when William Friedkin cast me in To Live and Die, so I had to call John Malkovich, whom I knew from Chicago theater, and ask what he got paid for The Killing Fields. Basically, I was a rube who'd go to meetings with studio heads in a football jersey and cowboy boots because I didn't know that restaurants like Mortons weren't burger-and-beer joints.

13

[Q] Playboy: Did that work in your favor?

[A] Petersen: Yeah, because I also didn't care what anybody else's status was. Michael Mann asked me to screen-test for Manhunter, and when I said no, he said, "I don't know if you can have the part unless you screen-test." I said, "Then I won't have the part. Simple." I was 31 when I did my first movie. I already had a life and a 10-year-old daughter. Making Young Guns II with Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland and Christian Slater when they were young stars running around like chickens with their heads cut off, I thought, Thank god this didn't happen to me at their age or I might not have made it to 31.

14

[Q] Playboy: So did you purposely keep your movie career on the down-low?

[A] Petersen: After Manhunter and To Live and Die, there were all these cop movies that came my way, but they weren't any good, so I didn't do them. Then there was talk about my doing Platoon, but I didn't want to sit in a ditch in the Philippines for eight weeks for no money. Instead I did an HBO baseball movie for more money and more fun, and I got to play ball. I enjoy watching great movies like Platoon, but I don't have to be in them. I never fell in love with movies. I didn't want to spend all that time and effort. I've had it pretty good. I've had it my own way.

15

[Q] Playboy: What about now? Are movie producers interested in you again?

[A] Petersen: My agents tell me, "They're lining up with all these movie offers," but I say, "When do you think I'd make them? When I get done with this show, I'm taking a long break." I have 10 months to do 23 episodes, and with my eight weeks off I want to take my wife someplace, see mydaughter and some ball games. The thing is, there's not a lot of shit I want to do except go back to the theater and direct young actors and someday play Falstaff.

16

[Q] Playboy: You're not talking about quitting a huge hit like CSI, are you?

[A] Petersen: We're just finishing our 81st episode. That's a lot. I'll do CIS until I legally don't have to do it anymore, which I think is at the end of next year. Right now, that's as long as I can foresee doing this show.

17

[Q] Playboy: You were divorced at a young age and didn't get married again until last year. Did you sow a lot of wild oats during those 24 years?

[A] Petersen: When I was younger, women wanted to sleep with me because of whatever movie or play they saw me in, and for about 15 years I certainly took advantage of that more often than not. I got married to my wife, Gina, last summer. I'd been working on the marriage thing with her, trying to get to a place where that was a good thing as opposed to a bad thing. Fidelity was hard when I was younger, but with maturity I got to a mind-set of, What's with all this running around to get girls? Now for me it's the old case of, Why go out for hamburger when I've got steak at home?

18

[Q] Playboy: Are there Grissom groupies?

[A] Petersen: There are people who are obsessed with me and write letters. I have this one girl in Germany who sends me tarantula items, like stuffed tarantulas. I just got a tarantula clock from her. It's relatively harmless. I've sent her thank-yous, but you've got to be careful. I pretty much have all the mail done by CBS now.

19

[Q] Playboy: Beyond the town's obvious advantages for a crime show, are you a Las Vegas guy at all?

[A] Petersen: The only good thing about Vegas is watching horse races and football games and being able to throw some money down on them. I don't play the tables, because they're just a sucker's game. Actually, the whole thing is a sucker's game. I'm not a huge Vegas fan, but it's the perfect milieu for the show. Every one who goes there, even if they're old ladies from a Bible group in Mississippi, they go there to stick nickels into slots and feel a little dirty and dark. Shit happens when you get into that world. Guys lose their wives and money, women end up deciding to stay and become strippers. It's the dirty playground for the Darth Vader in all of us.

20

[Q] Playboy: We need to know: Why are you so damned bowlegged?

[A] Petersen: Yeah, they are seriously bowed. And I'm pigeon-toed. I can't quite hide it on CSI, and you can really see it in the Westerns I've done. Some of it is from playing a lot of ball as a kid. I also like to pawn it off on riding horses. But I'm afraid it's genetic. I think it was Shakespeare who said it best: "What manner of men are these who wear their balls in parentheses?"