Actor’s latest audience: UIC students – May, 12 – 2010
William Petersen: “I make sure I can do the role in a way somebody else can’t.”
William Petersen, actor of stage and screen, including a leading role on CBS-TV’s long-running “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” owes his success to failure.
Petersen, now appearing in “Endgame” at Steppenwolf Theatre, visited campus recently for an on-stage interview with theater program head Yasen Peyankov before an audience of UIC theater students.
He grew up in Evanston, where his passion was athletics, Petersen said. He dropped out of high school and joined his older brother in Idaho, where he finished school and enrolled at Idaho State University, but his grades weren’t good enough to play football.
“So they put me in the theater department,” he said. “I worked on props and sets, and I fell in love with the people. It was like a team sport.”
Over the next few years he studied acting in Spain, started a family, returned to Idaho as a logger and returned to acting as a college student.
He came back to Chicago during the late ’70s, joining other ambitious young actors like Gary Cole, John Malkovich, Amy Morton and Gary Sinise, who formed such influential theater companies as the Organic, Remains and Steppenwolf .
In 1983, Petersen gave a legendary performance as convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott in Abbott’s autobiography, “In the Belly of the Beast,” with the Wisdom Bridge Theatre.
While researching the role, Petersen told the students, he decided to simulate solitary confinement by locking himself in a closet, expecting to stay for two days. After 15 hours, he was pounding on the door.
Yet the research paid off when Chicago Tribune critic Richard Christenson wrote that he couldn’t drive straight home after seeing the play — he had to pull over and weep.
This, Petersen said, became the gold standard for critical response among Chicago actors: “the pull-over review.”
Petersen became nationally known in the mid ’80s for his starring roles in Hollywood films like “Manhunter” and “To Live and Die in L.A.”
After that, he said, he was offered “every cop role in the world.” But he turns down roles that aren’t right for him without regret, including those later played by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street” and Willem Dafoe in “Platoon.”
“I make sure I can do the role in a way somebody else can’t,” he said. “I ask myself, where does my integrity lie?
“The most powerful word you have is ‘no.’ If you say no, they camp out on your doorstep,” he added.
“The trick is to say it and mean it.”
Petersen joined the Steppenwolf ensemble in 2008. He’s now starring in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” although he’d found Beckett difficult in an earlier try in Chicago.
“I was too young then to understand angst, getting older and the repetition of life,” he said.
The acting profession — with its emotional demands and the discipline required to survive financially — never stops being terrifying, Petersen said.
“The magic is being able to be somebody else,” he said.
“The bravest people I know are in theater.”
William Petersen in conversation with theater program head Yasen Peyankov
