Movieline 1990
Movieline, 1990
Not his Kind of Town – by Teresa Lopes
(Photos from article in The Gallery)
“I have no interest in being a movie star….much to my agent’s chagrin,” says William Petersen. “I think the worst thing that can happen to an actor is to have a movie make a hundred million dollars. Your personal life is destroyed, and your choices get limited.”
Until now, the limits on Petersen’s choices have been partly self-imposed, the result of his having decided to live in Chicago, where 12 years ago he and his friends founded the avant-garde Remains Theater Ensemble. Keeping the stage as his first love, he’s never parlayed his remarkable film performances into a consistent screen presence. In the terrific, underrated Manhunter, he played the intense, haunted FBI agent who entered the ring with Dr. Hannibal Lecter long before Jodie Foster was ever accepted into the FBI academy. In Cousins, he played the unfaithful lover of Sean Young. And, in perhaps his best performance, he played the reckless Secret Service agent-living-on-the-edge in To Live and Die in LA. Not enough people saw these films, however, to make Petersen a household name. To date, his most successful movie was Young Guns II, where ,as Pat Garrett, he earned praise for hunting down Emilio Estevez.
Now, finally, Petersen is in L.A. for a spell. It is early in the morning and, downing coffee and chainsmoking in an effort to shake off the effects of a late night spent listening to the blues at the King King, the actor from the Windy City looks out over Hollywood from the patio of his manager’s house (which happens to be one of John Barrymore’s former love nests) and talks about his hometown. ” Chicago is such a blue-collar, middle-American city, it’s just real people, you know? Nobody has an agenda that fits into yours. I get recognized and stuff but they don’t give a shit about that. They just want to know whether or not you’re going to buy them a beer.”
Along with Petersen’s appreciation of Chicago comes a predictable disdain for L.A. “Here people build their careers around lunch. It’s like, ‘Okay, we’ll meet at Le Dome for lunch and then tonight we’ll have to go to…..Citrus and have some lemon wedges.'” But Petersen realizes he’s going to have to make the best of it – at least for the immediate future. He has just formed his own production company, High Horse Films, and is searching for permanent digs in L.A. First entry out of the High Horse stables is Hard Promises, a romantic comedy about a roving husband (Petersen) who finds out that his wife (Sissy Spacek) has divorced him and is planning to remarry. The story is, the actor says, loosely autobiographical: In real life, Petersen’s first wife ended up with one of his good friends, and although he claims he’s outgrown the phase he went through after his divorce (during which his Remains friends took to calling him Studmo), he proudly explains that the Harvard ring he wears – a trophy from his role as Joe Kennedy in the miniseries “The Kennedys of Massachusetts” – is “great for impressing chicks in bars.”
Next up for High Horse is a movie for TNT called Keep the Change, based on a Thomas McGuane novel. “I’ve always wanted to make one of his books into a movie,” says Petersen. “He’s my favorite writer, but his novels are very literate and it’s hard for Hollywood to understand why anyone would want to make a movie about some man’s mind in Montana.” Petersen hopes to bring some of the idealism of his Chicago stage experience to filmmaking projects here. “It’s either that or I have to go and work for the homeless or something. I would be very unhappy if I was just trying to get parts and get rich. And I’m not sure I’m suited for volunteer work in the breadlines. I’d like to think that I was, but the Mother Teresa thing hasn’t happened to me yet.”
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