FISHERMAN-ACTOR TAMES BENCHLEY'S `BEAST'

By Eirik Knutzen for The Morning Call

April 28, 1996

Nothing, absolutely nothing, makes William Petersen happier than to work and/or play outdoors. Particularly if it involves riding a horse on the windswept plains or bobbing in boat on the storm-whipped ocean. It took approximately 30 seconds for the land-locked Midwesterner to accept the male lead in "The Beast," a swashbuckling adventure set somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and shot entirely on location in the Tasman Sea near Sydney, Australia. The miniseries airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday nights on NBC.

Based on Peter ("Jaws") Benchley's best selling novel, the yarn revolves around "a monstrous sea creature" that terrorizes the small fishing community on Graves Point Island and threatens the tourist trade. (How does Benchley comes up with a steady stream of such unusual ideas?)

The bearded Petersen, 43, plays Whip Dalton, the roughest, toughest widowed fishing boat captain this side of Robert Shaw, the very man gorgeous Coast Guard Lieutenant Kathryn Marcus (Karen Sillas) commissions to destroy the giant squid with an appetite for sperm whales and people.

"I had a wonderful time for four months making a popcorn movie for the entire family," says the handsome actor from the seafaring state of Illinois.

"And I was either driving a boat or what I called "basement acting" as a kid --pretending in front of blank blue screens and battling with latex monsters."

He had his hands full when working in a 51,000 gallon open tank fending off a giant calamari (Architeuthis sux) made from 400 gallons of fiberglass resin, 375 gallons of polyurethane and yards of chicken wire attached to 10,000 feet of cable and 42,000 plastic washers enabling 30 puppeteers to operate the creature's 300 moving parts. The squid's head alone weighs more than 200 pounds and is pneumatically driven by 2,000 pounds of hydraulic pressure.

"It was a perfect situation for me because I'm a big fisherman in real life and just love being on the ocean," says Petersen, who got a change of pace when he opened to fine reviews as the tortured Reverend Shannon in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' "Night of the Iguana" last month. (The Robert Falls production continues at the Roundabout Theater, Broadway at 45th Street).

"A third generation fisherman, I'm in heaven catching fat trout in the rivers and streams of Idaho or fifty-pound salmon of the coasts of Oregon and Washington."

One of Petersen's favorite fishing stories goes back seven years when he was fishing for marlin in a tiny wooden boat off the coast of Ixtapa on Mexico's west coast. "It was just me and a Mexican kid, a poor local fisherman," he recalls, "and when I looked up there was no land in sight. The boat was pretty primitive with no fisherman's chair or anything else to hang on to.

"Suddenly, there was a heavy strike! I spent the next hour or so struggling with this huge fish to the point where I thought our boat might capsize," he continues, chuckling. "It wasn't quite like `The Old Man And The Sea,' but close enough. When I finally railroaded him in, he probably measured about seven feet in length and weighed about 150 pounds. It was a beautiful beast, but lost its color in about 20 minutes. That's when I felt terrible about the whole thing."

The youngest of six siblings born in Evanston (on the outskirts of Chicago), Petersen more or less sleep-walked through his early years. Much to the consternation of his well-heeled parents, he showed no interest whatsoever in the family furniture business created four generations ago by Danish immigrants. He ran away to Idaho at the age of 15 to live with an older brother.

An indifferent student and very good athlete, he enrolled at Idaho State University in 1973 in search of a football scholarship. Terrible high school grades prevented an immediate athletic scholarship; he was assigned a number of theater classes in an effort to radically improve his grade point average. Two months later he was awarded a drama scholarship.

Restless and bored after a year of acting in campus productions buried deep in America's heartland, he moved to Spain with his girlfriend, Joanne Brady, and studied Shakespeare with a British reacher named John Woodward. The couple was married during their stay near San Sebastian in the Pyrenees and had a daughter, Maite (Basque for "my little love"), before returning to the U.S.

With solid training as a stage actor in Spain, the Petersens (who were divorced in 1981) returned to Boise, Idaho. He soon discovered that there was little call for his unique education and talent locally and drifted to the northern section of the state to try and cut it as a logger. Six months later, cut and bruised, he managed to wangle a Boise newspaper job as a "special projects coordinator."

He spent most nights, however, taking part in theater productions at Boise State University and Lewis & Clark College, despite the fact that he was not enrolled at either institution. Poverty-stricken and living in a trailer, Petersen finally packed his little family into beaten-up wreck of a car and returned to Chicago in 1976. He was cast immediately in a community theater production of "Darkness At Noon." It was an unpaid role; he paid the bills working as a tree surgeon.

Three years later, he co-founded Chicago's highly respected Remains Theater Ensemble, but didn't retire his chainsaw until 1983, when his acting took a turn for the better with a string of Chicago stage hits. In swift order, he dispatched critically acclaimed roles in "The Belly Of The Beast," "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Balm In Gilead." A year later, he made his feature film debut in "To Live And Die In L.A.," followed by such movie projects as "Manhunter," "Passed Away," "Cousins," "Young Guns II" and the new psychological thriller "Fear."

A handful of large-scale television projects, including "The Kennedys Of Massachusetts" and "Return To Lonsome Dove," also enables Petersen to maintain homes in Los Angeles and Chicago. "I'm officially a Chicago resident and always hope to be," he says, laughing. "My life wouldn't be complete without watching the Chicago Cubs play baseball at Wrigley Field, which hasn't changed since I was a kid. Our masochistic battle cry is, `Wait 'til next year!'

Although linked to a number of women over the years, Petersen now claims to be the complete bachelor without attachments. "I have no marriage plans, maybe because I already have a 20-year-old daughter," he says, with a deep sigh. "I'm grateful it all worked out well for her, but I'm not sure I could go through it again. Maite is studying at a Los Angeles college right now. She's a dance major, which will probably entitle her to work as a waitress. It's rough out there. I'm not really encouraging her 'cause I'm just one of the fortunate ones."