William Petersen (born 1953) is the American actor who played Will Graham in Manhunter and Gil Grissom on CSI.
Quick Specs
| Born | February 21, 1953, Evanston, Illinois (as William Louis Petersen) |
| Raised | Evanston, Illinois, then Boise, Idaho (Bishop Kelly High School, 1972) |
| Training | Idaho State University; Shakespearean training in the Basque country of Spain (from 1974) |
| Theatre | Co-founder of the Remains Theater Ensemble; Steppenwolf Theatre Company ensemble member since 2008 |
| Horror | FBI Agent Will Graham in Manhunter (1986); Steve Walker in Fear (1996) |
| Signature roles | Secret Service Agent Richard Chance in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985); Dr. Gil Grissom in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000 to 2015) and CSI: Vegas (2021) |
| Honours | Screen Actors Guild ensemble award for CSI (2005); Golden Globe nomination (2004); three Primetime Emmy nominations as a CSI producer; star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (2009) |
| Status | Retired from acting (stated October 2025) |
Who He Is
William Louis Petersen was born on February 21, 1953, in Evanston, Illinois, the youngest of six children of Arthur Edward Petersen, who worked in the furniture business, and June Petersen (born Hoene). His brothers are Arthur Jr. and Robert, and his sisters are Anne, Mary Kay and Elizabeth. The family is of Danish and German descent, and he was raised Roman Catholic. The name is Petersen, with an e, and early credits bill him as William L. Petersen.
His life splits between two places, and both halves count. He was born in Evanston, but he went to school in Idaho, graduating from Bishop Kelly High School in Boise in 1972, at 19. He went to Idaho State University on a football scholarship, took an acting course, and changed direction. In 1974, at 21, he left college with his wife, Joanne Brady, and followed a drama professor to the Basque country of Spain, where he trained as a Shakespearean actor. He studied the Basque language, Euskara, and when his daughter was born in Arrasate/Mondragón in 1975, when he was 22, she was given the Basque name Maite Nerea, “my beloved.”
Back in the Chicago area he earned his Actors’ Equity card and worked with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company from its early years, including Balm in Gilead in 1980. He did not co-found Steppenwolf. The company he co-founded was a different one, the Remains Theater Ensemble, in about 1979, and Gary Cole and Amy Morton are named among the fellow actors who founded it with him. He became a formal member of the Steppenwolf ensemble in 2008, while he was still on CSI.
His marriage to Joanne Brady ran from 1974 to 1981. In June 2003 he married his longtime girlfriend, Gina Cirone, and on July 5, 2011, when he was 58, they welcomed twins, a son and a daughter, through a surrogate. He has three children in all. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 3, 2009, at 55, a few weeks after his last regular episode of CSI aired.
He has retired. In October 2025, at 72, at a 40th-anniversary screening of To Live and Die in L.A. at Beyond Fest, he told People that he is no longer acting and not looking for roles, saying his agent “hasn’t done anything in 15 years… I’m like, ‘No, I’m not doing anything.’” He is content to have ended his screen career with CSI: Vegas and lives back in Chicago, near his children and grandchildren.
The Work, and What He Did in It
His film debut was a bit part as a bartender at the Katz and Jammer bar in Thief (1981), directed by Michael Mann. He was 28. The same director gave him Manhunter five years later.
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) was the breakthrough. William Friedkin directed and co-wrote it with Gerald Petievich, from Petievich’s novel. Petersen, 32, plays Richard Chance, a Secret Service agent working counterfeiting cases. After the counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe) murders his partner, Chance drags his new partner, Vukovich (John Pankow), across every legal line to get Masters, and he is shot dead before the climax is over; the film ends without its hero. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and wrote that Petersen, “a Chicago stage actor,” came across as “tough, wiry and smart,” with “some of the qualities of a Steve McQueen.” It cost $6 million and made $17.3 million in North America.
Manhunter (1986) is the horror centrepiece. Michael Mann wrote and directed the first adaptation of Thomas Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon. Petersen, 33, plays Will Graham, an FBI profiler who has retired because catching the killer Hannibal Lecktor nearly destroyed him, physically and mentally. Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) pulls him back to hunt Francis Dollarhyde, the killer the press calls the “Tooth Fairy,” and the hunt forces Graham to consult the man he caught. Brian Cox plays Lecktor. The film spells the name with a K; Harris’s novel, and every later film, spell it Lecter. Tom Noonan is Dollarhyde, Joan Allen is Reba McClane and Stephen Lang is Freddy Lounds.
It is the first screen Will Graham and the first Hannibal film of any kind, five years before The Silence of the Lambs. Mann cast Petersen after seeing To Live and Die in L.A. The producer, Dino De Laurentiis, changed the title from Red Dragon, after the flop of Year of the Dragon and to avoid the film being taken for a martial-arts picture, over the objections of Mann and Cox. The film cost about $15 million and made $8.6 million in the US, a failure on release that home video and later reappraisal turned into a cult classic.
In the HBO film Long Gone (1987) he played Cecil “Stud” Cantrell, a minor-league player-manager, opposite Virginia Madsen as Dixie Lee Boxx. He was Russell in Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987) and Tom in Cousins (1989). In 1990 he played Joseph P. Kennedy, the ambassador father, in the miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts, and Pat Garrett, the lawman hunting Billy the Kid, in Young Guns II. Then came Joey in Hard Promises (1992), which he also produced, Frank Scanlan in Passed Away (1992), Gideon Walker, a former Ranger, in the miniseries Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), Whip Dalton in the TV film The Beast (1996), and Juror No. 12 in the 1997 TV remake of 12 Angry Men. He also turns up, uncredited, in Mulholland Falls (1996) as a mobster beaten by the police squad.
Fear (1996) brought him back to the genre. James Foley directed what the producer Brian Grazer described as a teen Fatal Attraction. Petersen, 43, plays Steve Walker, a Seattle father who distrusts the charming older boyfriend, David McCall (Mark Wahlberg), of his 16-year-old daughter, Nicole (Reese Witherspoon). When nobody believes him, he digs into David’s institutional past, and in the home-invasion climax he defends his family; David is killed. The film cost $6.5 million and made $20.8 million in the US, a sleeper hit.
In the HBO film The Rat Pack (1998) he played President John F. Kennedy, the son, eight years after playing the father. He was Jeff in Kiss the Sky (1999), Senator Ames Levritt in The Skulls (2000) and Governor Jack Hathaway, the vice-presidential candidate with a buried scandal, in The Contender (2000).
Then came CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000 to 2015). Petersen originated Dr. Gil Grissom, the night-shift supervisor and forensic entomologist of the Las Vegas crime lab, and he was also an executive producer. He was 47 at the premiere and played Grissom as a series regular for nine seasons. In the 2006 to 2007 season he took a break for the stage, doing Dublin Carol in Providence, while Liev Schreiber stood in. In July 2008 it was announced that he would leave as a regular with the tenth episode of season 9, which aired in January 2009. He stayed on as an executive producer and agreed to come back as a guest, because he wanted to return to the stage. In his own words, “I’m afraid I’m becoming too comfortable… I didn’t want to be on the show [just] because they were paying me money.” He came back as Grissom in the season 11 episode “The Two Mrs. Grissoms” (February 3, 2011) and in the 2015 series finale, “Immortality.” The show brought him a Screen Actors Guild Award for the drama ensemble (2005), a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a TV drama (2004), and three Primetime Emmy nominations as one of its producers (2002, 2003 and 2004).
The stage is what he left for. He did Dublin Carol at Trinity Rep in 2006 and at Steppenwolf in 2008, Blackbird at Victory Gardens in 2009, Endgame at Steppenwolf in 2010, Slowgirl at Steppenwolf and the Geffen in 2013 and 2014, and The Minutes at Steppenwolf in 2017, in the cast of its pre-Broadway premiere. Earlier he had played Jack Henry Abbott in In the Belly of the Beast in Chicago, Edinburgh and at the Kennedy Center (1983 to 1985), Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Stratford Festival of Canada, and The Night of the Iguana on Broadway (1996).
On screen in the 2010s he was Sarge in Detachment (2011), Glenn, the trucker who gives the leads a ride, in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012), and Colonel Emmett Darrow in ten episodes of the second season of Manhattan (2015). His last screen role was Grissom again, in the first season of CSI: Vegas, which premiered on October 6, 2021, when he was 68. He and Jorja Fox returned for ten episodes, and he was again an executive producer. The deal was one season as an actor: when CBS renewed the show on December 15, 2021, he did not return to the cast but stayed on as an executive producer. In August 2021 he was taken to hospital by ambulance after feeling unwell on set, reported as exhaustion after 12 weeks of filming, and was released soon after.
Cool Verified Facts
- He was the first actor ever to play Will Graham, in the first Hannibal film of any kind.
- In Manhunter the killer’s name is spelled Lecktor, with a K. The novel spells it Lecter.
- He played Joseph P. Kennedy in 1990 and John F. Kennedy in 1998.
- He trained as a Shakespearean actor in the Basque country and learned Euskara.
- Michael Mann gave him his first film role, a bartender in Thief, and then Manhunter.
- He shares a credit with Virginia Madsen: Long Gone (1987).
- He left the top drama on American television as a regular to go back to the stage.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
Will Graham cost him something. Petersen has recalled that playing Graham was so emotionally draining that once filming wrapped he did everything he could to get rid of the character. He shaved off his beard, cut his hair and bleached it blond, partly because, rehearsing a play back in Chicago, he found his lines coming out in Graham’s voice, and he needed the mirror to show him someone else.
His death in To Live and Die in L.A. was Friedkin’s plan from the start. Friedkin has said he thought about killing Chance from the day he cast Petersen. MGM executives found that too bleak, so an alternate ending was shot, in which Chance survives and he and Vukovich are punished with a posting to Alaska, watching their boss on television. It was previewed, and Friedkin kept the death. A hero who dies before the end is a large part of why the film, and the performance, are remembered.
The through-line of his career is theatre, and he shows it in what he does. He left a football scholarship for a drama course and then college for the Basque country. He co-founded a company instead of waiting to be cast. He took a mid-run break from CSI to do Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol in Providence, and he left the show as a regular at its peak to do Blackbird and Endgame in Chicago. In retirement he counts about 40 plays alongside the films and television.
To colleagues he is Billy. In TV Guide’s 2008 farewell interview, Marg Helgenberger calls him Billy throughout.
Why He Matters
For horror, William Petersen is the original screen Will Graham, and Manhunter is the foundation stone of the whole Hannibal screen universe: the first Harris adaptation and the template for the profiler who thinks like the killer. Television later industrialised that idea, with some irony in the forensic-procedural empire Petersen himself went on to front. His Graham, sweating, haunted and marked by the last killer he caught, is still the performance later Grahams are measured against, and his scenes opposite Brian Cox’s Lecktor are the first draft of one of horror-crime’s defining relationships.
Fear adds a second pillar: the father as the family’s final defender, a decade before that became an industry of its own.
Beyond the genre, he headlined two eras of American screen crime, the neon 1980s of Friedkin and Mann and the network procedurals of the 2000s, and kept walking away from the machinery at its peak. The Grissom decade made forensic science a prime-time grammar; Manhunter made the profiler an archetype. Both rest on the quality Ebert named in 1985, tough, wiry and smart: an actor who underplays while the genre overplays around him.