Magazine Articles

MACHO MANNER
Rolling Stone Magazine
May 22, 1986 by Ross Wetzsteon (article and photographs copyright Rolling Stone)
William Petersen's tough-guy roles set the stage for a brilliant career.

(Photos from article in The Gallery)

"Here's what I want," William Friedkin told his casting director for To Live and Die in L.A.  "I want a guy who could piss on his mother's grave and you'd still like him."

The casting director hopped a plane to Canada, where a young Chicago actor named William L. Petersen was appearing in the Stratford Festival revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.  He gave Petersen a script and told him to fly to New York the next day for an

audition.  Petersen did, and after he'd read less than a page for Friedkin, the director threw the script to the floor.  "That's it," he said.  "I don't need to hear any more. You have the part."

Miami Vice executive producer Michael Mann recalls his own double-edged reaction the day he cast Petersen in his forthcoming movie Red Dragon: "Billy came on like this wholesome, all-American boy.  But beneath that likability there was something going on, some kind of nervous consciousness, some kind of been-around-the-block quality that was absolutely fascinating.  He's gonna be a huge star."

As Stanley Kowalski in the Tennessee Williams classic, as convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott in the stage adaptation of In the Belly of the Beast - roles that made his reputation as one of the most talented actors in the American theater - Petersen conveyed bloodcurdling brutality without losing the audience's compassion for a moment.  And as federal agent Richard Chance in To Live and Die in L.A., as investigator Will Graham in Red Dragon, Petersen plunges into the disreputable side of his characters yet makes the audience root for him every minute of the way.

Like many young actors with choirboy faces, Petersen often affects a hoodlum look.  In playing roles characterized by moral seediness, Petersen, 33, exemplifies a new breed of actor - the WASP as outlaw, the all-American boy as rebel, his sexual charisma based on a kind of seething interior behind the boy-next-door facade.  Petersen, however, simultaneously represents another new breed of actor - the community-based, ensemble-oriented performer who is as committed to theater as to film and who is more dedicated to the long haul of a career than to the quick hit of stardom.  And the interaction of these two seemingly contradictory strains - rebelliousness and the work ethic - guarantees that he'll remain one of the leading actors of his generation long after this year's "new breed" has been replaced by its equally doomed successors.

"Wouldn't live anywhere else!" Billy Petersen shouts gleeully through the sleet as he crapes the ice off the windows of his Toyota, parked across the street from the Remains Theatre, on the North Side of Chicago.

Billy and his girlfriend, Amy Morton, have just performed the Sunday matinee of an obscure play about an East German political prisoner before a half-empty house.  But what the hell, if you run a small experimental theater, you gotta take chances.  And anyway, Amy's parents drove in from the suburbs to take in the show, they're going out for a bite to eat - that's what it's all about.  Billy grins, brushes the sleet out of his curly hair and hops into the driver's seat. "This is my kinda town!"

Billy is trying to raise $100,000 to finance the company's next couple of productions, beginning with Bertolt Brecht's Puntila - not exactly a box-office bonanza - and doesn't seem aware of the irony that that's only a day's budget for any one of a dozen films in which he could probably star by making a single call.  "Gotta see Marshall Field's this week," he says, referring to the department store.  "Maybe they know my name, maybe they don't but we're going to get that damned play on, even if I have to hit a liquor store."

Billy, Amy and her family gather at a nearly empty hamburger-and-salad-bar joint - there's no Ma Maison on the North Side."Hey, you guys were great!" Amy's father says.

"Yeah, but can you get your hands on $100,000?" Billy asks.  "We gotta fix up that theater - did you hear the karate class upstairs?"

There's no sex symbols on the North Side either, just a couple of kids out with the parents.

"The trouble with our company," Billy says with a kind of wistful exuberance, "is that when we finally do get a hit, we get bored and close it down so we can do some far-out avant-garde play instead."  He pauses for a moment.  "We're getting to the age when we're starting to see that responsibility isn't such a bad thing, when we see maturity as the key to sustenance."  Billy talks like that when he isn't horsing around.

"How were the reviews?" Amy's father asks.

"Aw, come on," Billy says, pulling out of his responsibility reverie.  "It's more important performing for family than for critics.  That's why I'll never leave this town."

Billy Petersen had been acting for six years before he decided to become an actor.  July 1983. A Chicago director offers Billy the Jack Henry Abbott role, and Billy tells him he's too busy with his own theater.   "Do me a favor then," the director says.  "Look at the script and tell me who you think would be good for the part.", That night, Billy picks up the script, skims a couple of pages - looks pretty good - goes back to the beginning, reads it through in one sitting. He's blown away.  A fantastic role.  Why the hell'd he turn it down? Sure, he's been busy, but doing what?  Producing, directing, publicity, even cleaning the god-damned toilet, and the last thing he does every day is actually work on his own part.  But is that just an easy out?  Has he been getting by on his looks, his charm?  No way he can coast like that with the Abbott role.  Maybe it's time to find out if he's really an actor or what.   Find out if he can really dig deeply into himself for a performance.   Maybe he's been too scared to give it a try.   Scared?  Billy Petersen scared?  He calls the director the next morning, tells him he know who'd be perfect for the part.   And goes on to win raves, from Chicago to Washington, D.C., to London.

"I'd lulled myself into the insularity of competence," he says.  "I'd forgotten that, to do good work as an actor, you have to keep alive that part of yourself that's rebellious, that's an outlaw, that's ..." Billy pauses, gropes for the right word and suddenly gives that choirboy grin.  "That's stark, raving crazy."

Billy Petersen grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Evanston, just north of Chicago; his brothers and sisters were years older than he (one of his brothers, in fact, is already a grandfather).  Virtually an only child, Billy rebelled by slipping into a fantasy world of Robin Hood, John Dillinger and James Bond. ("I'd pretend I was 007 for weeks at a time - even my notes in Latin class were just a code involving the security of the free world.")  At fifteen, the black sheep ran away from home, went to live in Idaho with one of his brothers, lumberjacked awhile, attended Idaho State and Boise State, lived as a freak for a couple of months, then a jock, trying out roles, even landing in jail for "the usual shit - drugs, protest, general brattiness."  In the early Seventies, Billy and his Idaho girlfriend moved to Spain, got married, had a kid.  But Billy split again, back to Chicago, living on street corners, crashing in friends' apartments - the upper-middle-class beat-off, giving his adolescent angst a romantic aura, "anything not to get real."

Billy had always been interested in theater - that's what those James Bond fantasies were all about.  So what better way to keep up the Byronic pose and "get real" at the same time?  With a bunch of Chicago friends, he formed a company called Innisfree, after the Yeats poem.  This was during the Chicago Renaissance of the mid-Seventies, when theater groups like Steppenwolf were creating a gonzo, rock & amp; roll style that some critics have called the most important innovation in American acting since the Method; after Innisfree split up in the late Seventies, the members who wanted to continue renamed themselves the Remains Theatre and quickly became the avant-garde, experimental wing of the Renaissance.  No agents, no Broadway auditions, no waiting to be discovered: this was way off Broadway, where cleaning the toilet came before working on your role - until that July epiphany.

With his close-cropped hair, his suburban politeness, his ebullient grin, Billy Petersen could be a yuppie lawyer, but as he chain-smokes and recalls his dropout days, there's not even a hint that he feels he's "redeemed" himself.  "Sure, I always chose rebels to identify with - I still do - but to me a rebel isn't so much someone who breaks the law as someone who goes against the odds.  As a person - and as an actor - I don't want to do only those things I know I can win at.  There has to be a susceptibility to error innate in the rebel's character, a capacity to learn."  What he's learned is that if he lets that outlaw side of his character loose in his roles, he doesn't have to run away anymore.

"You know, my dad always thought I was immature, that I was just going through phases, but now he thinks I've turned out okay," Billy says. "It's kind of neat, because I admire my father more than anyone in the world."

"I'll tell you one thing," he adds, "I'm sure as hell glad all this movie stuff happened when I was thirty-two, when I'd had all those years at Remains to build a viable perspective.  If it'd happened to me when I was twenty-three, I would have been one helluva mess.  I'd hate to be Rob Lowe.  Poor bastard."

At Remains, Billy has found more than a use for his craziness, he's found a commitment - to an intellectually adventurous theater, to a home-town lifestyle and, most of all, to working with a small group of friends on a continuing basis.  "Sure, I want to make more movies," he acknowledges - his goal is six months a year making films, six months a year with Remains.  "But not so much because I want to move beyond where I am as because it'll give me the kind of leverage to do the theater work that fascinates me.  Some people think my coming back to Chicago is a sacrifice, but I see it as an opportunity.  And you don't get caught up in that star shit here   The guys in the bar where I drink, they're pipe fitters.  They have their jobs, I have mine; they'll tell me I sucked in that movie if that's what they think.  They keep your head on straight." (So do members of Remains, who've taken to calling him Studmo since the sex-symbol stuff started.)

"I want to live and work in Chicago for the rest of my life," he continues.  "You know when you were growing up and you wanted to become president?"  Billy flashes a self-mocking grin.  "What I want now is to be mayor of this damned town in ten years."

Until the inauguration, Billy is using that Chicago chauvinism just as effectively as he uses his craziness. Following the lead of his Steppenwolf buddies John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, he incorporated a film-development company called High Horse with four Chicago friends.  "Sure, we want creative control" he explains, "but mostly we want to take the ensemble principle that's been so successful in theater and apply it to films.  John and I were lucky, but I want to give everyone that opportunity, I want us to develop as a group.   We're going to bring in a wealth of ideas and talent from the Chicago community.  Hell, we could outfit an entire movie on seventy-two hours' notice.  Look at Red Dragon - it's full of Chicago actors: me, Joan Allen from Steppenwolf, Dennis Farina, who's worked with Remains."

Coming from the "theater of the poor," High Horse doesn't have a lot of money; its first option, for a novel called The Soloist, about a pianist, set the company back only $7,500.  But Billy argues that "a community-based package like that could really shake up the Hollywood system, decentralize the film industry exactly the way regional movement cracked the monolith of the theater."  The Soloist especially turns Billy on: "It's about a guy who wanted to be the best in the world.  I cried three times just reading the screenplay.   It'd be perfect for Redford to direct."  High Horse hopes to obtain three to five more options within a couple of months - including, Billy hopes, a couple of westerns - then work with independent Chicago backing or within the studio system.  "We can help MGM or Dino De Laurentiis as much as they can help us," he says.   "Michael Mann told me there's only five great support crews in Hollywood - the rest is accountants and lawyers.   And who says you have to be geniuses?  It really comes down to hard work, and we can work as hard as anyone.  We can make things happen with our enthusiasm alone!  Look, we chose our name for a reason - if you want to accomplish anything in this business, instead of getting off your high horse you have to get on it."

Okay, so Billy Petersen's high horse these days is the integrity of ensemble theater, an exuberant idealism aimed at the tottering structure of the film industry.  But how appealing is a half-empty house on a sleeting Sunday afternoon going to look after Red Dragon opens and the "next Newman, next Nicholson, next Redford" hype from Hollywood builds to a crescendo?  (Those who've seen the film, a psychological thriller in which Billy plays a former forensic specialist for the FBI who is lured out of retirement to track down a serial killer, say that  his performance has a kind of risky edginess that will captivate critics as well as audiences.)

"I know it's easy to take an idealistic stance now," Billy admits with cheery candor.  "But don't forget, the offers are already flooding in, and that 'next whoever' crap... I mean, how can those guys saying that stuff live with themselves?  Are they going to personally see to it or what?  If anything," he adds sardonically, "I'll probably be the next Cliff Robertson.  Right now, what I'm more concerned with is those people who might misinterpret what I'm doing and say, "What a jerk, doing those meathead roles."  To me, Friedkin and Mann are brilliant directors, and I loved those films - especially the chase scenes in To Live and Die in L.A.  Those were for real, man, there wasn't any acting there.  What I'm saying is that I want to work with guys like that whom I can learn from, not with someone who only pays me.  And I'd much rather live in a place where I can disappear, where I can get back to reality every now and then."

Billy's biggest concern in moving back and forth between theater and films, in fact, isn't going from $200 a week to $200 lunches, or from mixed reviews in suburban weeklies to mash notes from giddy groupies, but making the psychological adjustments between acting in the two mediums.  "One of the things I love about theater, one of the reasons I'll never give it up," he says, "is that it's fifty percent the audience's responsibility.  Those vibes, that energy - you don't get that in movies.  And in theater, you can get rid of your character every night, but in films you have to live with him twenty-four hours a day for five or six months.  There's no release.  Anyway, that obsessive living inside the character's skin starts affecting our personal life - I'd say things and I'd wonder, 'Who's saying that, me or my character?' And after the wrap, you're still the character, only now there's no place to go.  I'd get confused, depressed, and I couldn't share it with Amy because I didn't know who I was.   After To Live and Die in L.A., I cultivated a Mephistopheles look for a couple of months.  And after Red Dragon, I had to actually kill off the character.  I cut off most of my hair and dyed it blond - I changed my whole look - just to get rid of him.  I had to get my feet back on the ground in Chicago, where we can run a cutting-edge theater, where we can build a future based on doing what we want to do instead of on somebody else's phony idea of success - that's the kinda life I want."

This isn't a guy whose goal is Carson, this is an actor.  An actor whose box-office persona - the boy next door as rebel - perfectly coincides with his home-town personality.  In fact, he had this perfect Billy Petersen fantasy just a couple of weeks ago.  He was out jogging on the North Side one morning when he saw a movie crew on location.  He'd heard that Paul Newman was shooting part of his next film in Chicago.  He'd been on location himself; he could spot the star's trailer - Paul Newman was sitting inside that trailer right there.  "Excuse me, Mr. Newman," he imagined himself saying.   "You don't know me, but I've made a couple of movies myself; some people have even called me the next Paul Newman.  But me and my friends, we run a small experimental theater in Chicago, our next production is Bertolt Brecht's Puntila, and I wonder if you'd consider playing the lead."

"I almost did it," Billy Petersen says with a grin.  "And damn it, next time I will."  Now who'd come up with a crazy, against-all-odds idea like that but a clean-cut, all-American boy?