Petersen Is No 'Science Guy'

William Petersen might not have excelled at science in high school, but he's enjoying getting down and dirty with bugs and blood in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

On Friday, April 30th, Petersen joined Bob Costas on his show On the Record (via Elyse's CSI Site) and spoke about his quirky character and his own aptitude (or lack thereof) for science. "I was a terrible science guy," Petersen said. "In fact, I got out of high school with two D minuses." Apparently, Petersen was nineteen at the time, so rather than fail him and force him to stay back, his teachers gave him the two minuses. "Now, to be sort of the poster boy for lab science, is pretty interesting," Petersen says.

Costas queried Petersen about his character's many quirks, including his odd predilictation for insects. "Well, all of the real guys we've met with who do this for real, they're an interesting breed of cat," Petersen said of real-life CSIs. "They do things that normal people would not do. ... Actually during the course of playing this [character], I've been able to do things I wouldn't do. I've been able to have spiders crawl on me, you know, tarantulas, and all kinds of blood, gore and guts that I don't think that I normally would have, just because of being able to be Grissom."

Times have changed a great deal since the show first premiered and the network executives feared some elements of the show would be too graphic. "When we first started the show, CBS was very concerned about what we would show, and what we wouldn't show," Petersen explained. "I remember taking shots of maggots out of the pilot episode, because the network kept saying 'we got to get rid of the maggots. Nobody's going to watch the show.' So we reduced it down to a very specific and important maggot...." The best looking maggot? Costas queried. "Yes, he was very well lit," Petersen confirmed. "In fact, that's pretty much what we do all day long is make sure our maggots and our hair fibers are in their proper light."

Petersen also answered a query from Costas about his much publicized objections to CSI's spinoffs. "I just think that it went too fast," the actor said. "There wasn't enough time for us to really make, to possibly make, these shows different than our show." Petersen feels the plethora of CSI shows might be overkill. He said to Costas: "You know, it's like if you have your show on at nine o'clock on Monday night and then Bryant Gumbel has one on at nine o'clock on Tuesday night and Jeremy Schaap has one on at nine o'clock Wednesday, you know, at some point it is like, why am I doing this? It seems like everybody is doing it."

For more from Petersen on corpses and his movie choices, please read the transcript at Elyse's CSI site.

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