US Magazine – 1986
US Magazine
September 8, 1986 Volume 3, Number 32
William Petersen: Wanted Man by Lynn Hirschberg
(Photos from article in The Gallery)
The deal with William Petersen, star of To Live and Die in L.A. and Manhunter, is that he’s a guy’s guy, a man’s man, and a would-be cowboy. He’s got all the cowboy stuff – the boots (“my Sam Shepard boots”), the skills (he can even rope) and, most of all, the cowboy attitude, an attitude that can be surprisingly complicated. Petersen also has the cowboy stories, only his stories have a twist: they usually take place in a theater.
“I had a time doing Fool for Love,” Petersen begins one such theater-cowboy story as he’s driving toward Bridger Canyon, Montana. Petersen’s shooting a movie near here titled Amazing Grace and Chuck, and while most of the cast and crew are staying in town at the Holiday Inn, Petersen’s rented a cabin. Hotels, it seems, drive him crazy.”I had a time,” he says again, smiling. “I played Eddie, the cowboy in Fool for Love, in Chicago, and the director called for a midnight rehearsal. He gave me a bottle of tequila before the run-through and said, ‘Why don’t you drink this during the rehearsal,’ because Eddie is supposed to be drinking a bottle of tequila in the play.”Well, I don’t have to be prodded, so I say, ‘Okay!’ and during the course of the show, I drank about a pint of tequila straight. I don’t remember the last ten minutes of the run-through. In fact, I had to ask, the next day, if we finished the play. I just blanked out, but I did get through the run-through and it was wild. Wild, wild, wild.
“I was so wound up by the end of it – and I don’t remember this – that I started kicking the s–t out of every man in the room. Then I jumped in my car, pulled out of the place, parked in the middle of Lincoln Avenue and walked into the 2350 Pub. I still had my costume on – my hat and my spurs and the rest. That have this huge mirror – and I was going to take out the mirror. They were trying to talk me out of it, trying to seat me in the restaurant, anything to keep me from punching out my reflection in the mirror. Finally, they got me out of there. Petersen laughs and pulls into the drive of his house. There’s a strange look in his eye and he seems lost in the story – as if he were back in that Chicago restaurant ready to take that mirror out all over again. It’ that look, that added dimension of something dark, something edgy, that makes Petersen a great actor. He’s not just your basic cowboy. This guy is going to be a star.
Michael Mann, the director of Manhunter and the creator of Miami Vice, understands the complications. “Petersen hides out behind that let’s-go-fishing-or-play-football-in-my plaid-shirt stuff,” he says. “You don’t turn in the kind of performances he has if you grew up on just outdoor life and Popular Mechanics.”
In Actuality, Petersen, who is thirty-three, did have something of an idyllic childhood. The youngest son in an upper-middle-class family, he grew up in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago. He lived in daydreams, intermittently pretending he was an outlaw, a hero or a spy. “I might pretend I was a great football player in the morning and then in the afternoon I was a great secret agent,” he recalls. “I’d be at the dinner table, but I’d be plotting how to catch a killer. Or I’d pretend my mom and dad were the Soviet premier and his wife.” At fifteen, Petersen ran away to Idaho to live with an older brother. He went to Idaho State, played sports and, in the early Seventies, moved to Spain with his girlfriend, Joanne Brady. They were married, and had a baby girl, Maite, who is now eleven and a half. (Petersen and Brady were divorced in 1981.) Petersen didn’t stick around Europe long – he headed back to Chicago and decided to give acting a shot. He and some friends formed Innisfree, an ensemble theater group. And when that group split up, the members who were were left retitled themselves Remains and staked out a very particular territory: experimental theater.
“At first,” Petersen explains as he sprawls across the couch on the first floor of his cabin, “I wasn’t interested in making movies. I was only interested in the theater. Part of it may have been the fear of the risk, of failure. I had a very safe way to express myself with my friends, doing experimental theater. I mean, who could challenge it? It was experimental.”
In 1983, though, Petersen took a part that broke his career wide open. A director was looking for someone to play killer Jack Henry Abbott in the theatrical version of In the Belly of the Beast. The part scared the hell out of him, but Petersen decided to take it on anyway and, by all accounts, his performance was remarkable. The play toured to Washington, D.C. and Europe – and Hollywood became well aware of William Petersen.
The timing was perfect. John Malkovich and Aidan Quinn, two other theater actors out of Chicago, were becoming know, and the Chicago theater scene, which had been around for years, was beginning to attract national attention. The next logical step for Petersen was the big screen.”The greatest thing that ever happened to me in terms of my acting,” says Petersen, “was the audition for To Live and Die in L.A. I’d just done A Streetcar Named Desire in Toronto, and I landed in New York to meet Billy Friedkin, the director of To Live and Die in L.A. I was takin’ the ride in there just to meet Billy Friedkin. After I read, he put down the script and said, ‘You got the part.’ I really thought it was a joke. I went back to my hotel room and took a bath, and they called and wanted to make a deal. I still didn’t believe it, but his faith stuck with me all the way.”
To Live and Die in L.A. met with an almost hostile critical response, although Petersen received enthusiastic reviews for his portrayal of a morally corrupt Secret Service agent on the tail of a counterfeiter. The making of To Live and Die in L.A. was a whole new ball game for Petersen: not only was it his first starring role in a film, but it was also with a notorious director. “Friedkin will do stuff like say to an actor, ‘Do you trust me?’ and the actor will say, “Yeah, Billy, I trust you.’ And then Billy will hit the actor in the face as hard as he can and yell, ‘ACTION!'” Petersen shakes his head. “But we established a certain relationship,” he continues. “I think he thought I’d take him out if he tried anything like that.”
A great deal of To Live and Die was improvised (“I loved that,” says Petersen. “It was real cowboy”). Not so with Manhunter. In fact, where To Live and Die in L.A. had been easy, Manhunter was “a war. It took me two months to get that part,” says Petersen. “I mean, who the hell was I? I wasn’t going to sell that picture.” Michael Mann had wanted him for the film – the story of an ex-FBI agent and his search for a serial killer – but had to convince the studio of his chosen actor’s bankability.
“I had seen a TV interview with Petersen,” Mann recalls. “He hated the guy interviewing him. He was answering the questions but there was a secondary layer of emotions. He was twitching on the one hand, hating the interviewer, and cool on the other. The studio wanted a name, and it was a war and I won. It took lots of campaigning, lots of tactics, but basically it was selfish – I wanted Bill Petersen for the part.”
Mann thinks Petersen will be “a huge star” in the movies, but Petersen himself isn’t sure he’s actually all that interested in pursuing just that end of the business. It would be great, of course, but there’s still Remains and the theater and Chicago. He doesn’t want to live in Los Angeles or New York, and he’s more than slightly suspicious of the whole movie-star mystique, but he’s also hugely ambitious, both for his Chicago cronies and his own career. He wants to do it his way, on his own terms, so he’s set up a film development company aptly titled High Horse. He dreams about making westerns (and other movies) here in Montana. His plan is to buy a ranch and build “writers’ cabins” and some sound stages – he’s already looking at property. Then he’ll be able to spend half of the year in Chicago, the other half making movies out here. Somehow this all sounds possible when you hear Petersen tell it – his will and desire are remarkably strong. “I wanted to work with Friedkin and Mann because I wanted to learn,” he says. “One’s Hitler and one’s Napoleon, but what I like about Billy and Michael is nobody screws around with their work.
“But,” he continues, “I would give up movies long before theater.” He pauses, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the view, which just sits there looking like a postcard. That view seems to inspire Petersen. “I think you have to take a tremendous risk in saying that you’re special,” he says, still staring. “And you have to figure out a way to do it so that it doesn’t sound like you’re some guy who nobody would ever want to buy a drink for. There’s that phrase – Come down off your high horse, pal.’ People used to say that to me when I was a kid and I used to say back, ‘Look – I like the high horse. It beats riding a Shetland pony!'”
It’s a Sunday around 3:00 p.m., and Jamie Lee Curtis has shown up at Petersen’s door in her crash helmet, carrying bags of lettuce. Curtis co-stars in Amazing Grace and Chuck and she, like the rest of the cast and crew, is invited up to the Petersen abode every Sunday night for dinner. “I have twenty heads of lettuce,” Curtis says, removing her crash helmet. Petersen laughs. “When I first met Jamie Lee, she said, “Hi, I’m Jamie Lee Curtis. I make a great Caesar salad.'”
Curtis is quite serious about her salad and sets to cleaning and shredding in the kitchen along with Amy Morton, Petersen’s girlfriend (and fellow Remains actor), and his daughter, who has just come in from flying a kite. Everyone looks a bit weary – Petersen and crew shot eighteen hours straight yesterday, and he didn’t get to bed until 4:00 a.m. He’s waking up now, though – talking about going fishing, maybe driving up to Livingston, Montana, next weekend to convince novelist Tom McGuane that his book Nobody’s Angel would make a great movie. The phone keeps ringing, too – a reporter asking questions about Manhunter; the neighbor calling to say their dog fell in the septic tank but is okay; Petersen’s manager wanting to talk some business. And then there’s something about going to see Robert Redford about starring in his latest film.
Eventually, dinner is served. Grilled steak and chicken, homemade soup and enough of Jamie’s renowned Caesar salad to feed thirty-odd members of the Amazing Grace cast and crew. It’s quite a party – it’s someone’s birthday and everybody sings.
As people are starting to think about heading back to the Holiday Inn and home, Petersen buckles on a child’s toy gun holster. Amy starts to shake her head – “Oh, no, not this again” – but Petersen’s gone. He’s twirling his toy pistols, shooting people dead, striking cowboy poses. He’s got his hat on and those boots, and he’s starting to drawl a bit. As usual, there’s a real edge to his clowning.
“He does this all the time,” says Amy. “He’s going to be a cowboy if it kills him.”
Petersen hears this and fixes her with a highly theatrical don’t-mess-with-me stare, and she cracks up laughing. “Actors are always acting,” someone in the crew says. “They act until they believe.” Bill Petersen thinks this over for a second, takes aim and shoots the guy dead. “I do believe,” he says, blowing off his pistol. “There’s no other way.”
