|
| Click on picture for full size |
|
The Petersen Principle. "I'm a drinker and a smoker and damned proud of it!"
Bill Petersen is starved. He's spent a hectic day in New York, negotiating with David Mamet about staging Speed-the-Plow
in Chicago, the home turf of both Petersen and the playwright. He hasn't had a bite for hours and now he's devouring smoked
salmon, tossing back white wine and talking about his new film, Cousins (a remake of the French romantic comedy Cousin, Cousine),
all at a breakneck pace.
"I burn myself out," sputters the 35-year old actor. "Football coach Vnce Lombardi once said, 'Man's finest
hour comes when he has given himself totally in a just cause and lies exhausted and wounded on a field of battle, victorious
[sic].' I read tht when I was 12; I cut the thing out and put it up on the wall. I played football like that every time,
and that sort of carried over into the theater and everything else."
In his effort to give himself totally, Petersen has frequently lain wounded on the stage (in A Streetcar Named Desire
and In the Belly of the Beast) and in movies in which he did his own stunts, such as 1985's To Live and Die in L.A. and Manhunter,
tough action thrillers that cast him in the macho screen-hero mold.
I'm not really all that tough," Petersen demurs. His Cousins costar Sean Young, with whom he carries on an illicit
onscreen affair, agrees with that assessment. "Bill is very dynamic, very sexy, very givng," she reports. A real
nice guy."
Isabella Rossellini also had some kind words for the man who plays her two-(and three- and four-) timing roue' of a husband.
"He can switch so easily from one mood to another," she says. "I've never seen anything quite like it. He
had the most difficult part in the movie, because it's an unsympathetic character, but he brings a comic touch to it, such
energy, and such an endearing quality."
But Petersen doesn't see his Tom Hardy, an adulterous car salesman, as unsympathetic. He is, he says, someone "most
of the men in America will relate to, unfortunately, because he's a very unhappy man, which is why he's womanizing. He's
a guy who got married too young to the only woman he couldn't have, and now he's terrified of losing her, without knowing
why he even wants to be with her.
The actor speaks from experience. "I feel that I was this guy, you know?" he says. "I got married [to
Joanne Brady] when I was only 21, and there were many things I didn't know. I'd had a a baby [a daughter, Maite, who is now
13], and I was trying to do theater and wasn't sure how to be intimate. I was trying to be a man and I wasn't ready for it.
The couple split up after four years. Petersen filled the void in his life by founding a Chicago theater company, which
now calls itself Remains, with a group of friends (including Midnight Caller's Gary Cole). Petersen sees the group as "an
extended family to whom I could commit, an ensemble I could be intimate and vulnerable with. It's easier than marriage because
you don't have to be there all the time.
"After my divorce," he continues, "I was like a kid in a candy store, trying to find the kind of candy
I liked best, which of coure just makes all the candy taste worse."
Fortunately, Petersen quickly outgrew his sweet-tooth phase and settled down with a fellow Remains member, actress Amy
Morton, with whom he's been living for three years. "I feel most comfortable in this relationship," he says, "but
we're apart a lot and, for the kind of people we are, it helps. We have different talents and ideas. I'm not able to control
her; she tells me what the hell she thinks about things, and it's very good for me. We have a very solid thing."
And it's firmly planted in Chicago: "If I lived in L.A., I'd be a raving lunatic," says Petersen. "The
industry sucks you in. I don't want to do a movie for some gratuitous purpose, like fame and money. Of course, you can say
no enough times and nobody will ask you anymore."
| Click on picture for larger view |
|
| click on picture for larger view |
|
| from To Live and Die in L.A. |
But Hollywood does keep asking. Now that he's done with his Cousins cad, Petersen is going back into hero mode, playing Joe
Kennedy in the ABC miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts, scheduled to air next fall. The actor would probably be the
first to admit that he's a sucker for good-guy parts. This is a guy who imitated the derring-do of Errol Flynn, battling
imaginary adversaries in the basement of his parents' Evanston, Illinois, home (Petersen's parents are furniture retailers).
He was a guy who cut classes whenever a new Eastwood spaghetti Western opened. "I saw him as a swashbuckler cowboy,"
he says. "I wanted to be Clint Eastwood for a day. I'd walk out of those movies and nobody could touch me."
Old habits die hard, and Petersen still enjoys "pretending to slay the bad guys, but it looks a little funny when
you're 35."
He could always take on the real bad guys. "But what's the most effective way to reach people?" he wonders
aloud. "Could Bill Cosby be a better Jesse Jackson? Cold Paul Newmn be a better Michael Dukakis? Reagan did what he
believed in and became president, and he wasn't even a good actor!"
Petersen empties his glass and lights up a cigarette. "I know I should do something," he says with a wave of
his match. "Now I have to find out if I'm man enough to do it."
| click on picture for larger view |
|
Cousins costar Sean Young has
affection for Petersen: "Bill
is very dynamic, very sexy,
very giving."
Back
|
