Insects, Roller Coasters And...Letters From Jail?

William Petersen (Gil Grissom) and Jorja Fox (Sara Sidle) talk about their characters and the show they create each week.

For Petersen, playing Grissom has allowed him to explore science--something that he was never very good at himself. "I was terrible in school at science," he told WOWOW. One of the things that attracted him to the character in the first place "was that he was so different than me, and so it was interesting for me to be able to try and do something that I was not familiar with. Since then, I've become very attracted to science, so it was a good thing for me." Petersen also admitted to picking up another trait from the scientist. "I don't kill insects anymore," he said. "I used to swat flies and my wife used to make me chase the spiders. I have a whole backyard full of spiders now, webs everywhere. They're just crawling around the house. She won't even go outside in the back. She only goes out the front door because I won't kill spiders."

Petersen also explained that Grissom is "very in touch with his childhood." This child-like spirit allows him to remain distanced from the reality of what he does for a living. "[H]is imagination and his creativity led him into science, so for him science is like playing childhood games and I think that that's always a big part of how he views his work. For him, it's all just wonder, you know, and he doesn't allow himself to become too adult about it." If he approached the job that way, "it would be too difficult for him to do it because it's all tragedy, and there's so much violence and inequity." When the city of Las Vegas was made more family-friendly, Petersen thought that it was interesting to see a "casino, which was basically a gambling house, you know, and then there'd be this roller coaster with kids riding around the outside of it." Petersen said that he thought Grissom would be "interested in being able to release things by going back to a child-like state and letting the roller coaster just clear his brain."

"I actually have a hard time remembering the episodes because we do so many," Petersen admitted. "I sort of only just can think of the episode I'm working on, the case that I'm working on." He said that the first season was special because "it was all fresh and new and we didn't really know what we were doing, we were just making it up as we went along." As a result, he felt that the first season "was very creative." Petersen said that one of the great things about CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is that the fans don't know where it's going or what's going to happen when they're watching it. Instead, the viewers "have to try and figure it out themselves," he said.

Fox said that she feels very lucky to play a character like Sara. She and Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) are "strong women, and they're professional," she said. "They're completely intellectual and at the same time they feel very real. They feel like real people to me. It feels like a person that somebody could actually be." Fox also said that Sara is "so much smarter than I am, number one, which is really fun. You never get tired of doing that." When it comes to fan mail, Fox said that she gets "a lot of letters from teenagers, which is really nice." However, that wasn't what she anticipated when the show first began. Back then, she "thought we were going to get a lot of mail from jail, from prisoners...I don't know, I thought the mail would be more eccentric than it's been. It's been really nice, supportive, very sane fan mail, which I would have never expected."

Fox had nothing but good things to say about Petersen. "He's incredibly charming and wonderful," she said. "He's an amazing listener. Creatively, I think he's absolutely brilliant." She explained that Petersen's background in the theater led to an environment of collaboration on CSI. "[T]he only way that he really knows how to work is collectively and communally and where people develop ideas together," she said. She added that "[h]e listens to everyone and everyone's got an opinion that he values." For Fox, "[i]t's been really exciting to take this journey, not only with everyone, but specifically with him. And I think that he and I both feel very, very invested in our characters and wishing that our characters at some point way down the road have a happy ending someway, whatever that looks like."

The original video interviews are from WOWOW Online.

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