Q 1

PLAYBOY: For CSI forensics honcho Gil Grissom, severed heads, maggots and putrefied innards are just part of another day at the office. Would an actual festering corpse break your stride?

William Petersen: I can't say that I'd be a good crime-scene investigator, but I could handle death pretty well. The first season, standing on the autopsy set between takes and looking at this brilliant decayed skeleton made by the special effects guys, I said, "There's something I like about this." Death teaches me that there's a soul. Having had family members pass away over the years, I've always felt it's so obvious that once they're dead they're gone--probably to a much cooler place.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: That doesn't sound much like your character, who believes only in hard science.

William Petersen: For 10 years before CSI they threw me TV series about the cop, the lawyer, the ex-husband. I wanted to play someone the diametric opposite of me. Otherwise I'd get bored. I'm very American and attached to the physical, but there's another side, too. I mean, I believe in reincarnation, and I have thoughts of doing the whole go-to-the-mountain thing, of becoming a priest or a sensei. But then I'm like, "Nah, I like my beer and my Chicago Cubs, so I'm not gonna do it." At least the science on the show helps me not to feel like some cross-legged freak. There's a practical explanation when you watch the body decay, when you watch the maggots and the flies.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: Are you now more likely to swat bugs or study them?

William Petersen: I've become fascinated by them. My wife and I have an unfathomable number of spiders in the house and yard, and now I won't even squash one inside unless she says, "Kill that." When we first started the series, I caught about 30 minutes of this PBS-type series about every kind of insect and animal having sex. I was so fascinated, I found tapes of the series on the Internet. If I'd seen that before CSI I'd have gone, "Hmm, interesting," without pursuing it. It's one of the sexiest things you'll ever see. It would be Grissom's porn.

Q 4

PLAYBOY: Do fans purposely try to gross you out to test your stomach?

William Petersen: No, because I don't think anyone is really sure how I'd react. But I was invited to receive an award at an American Society for Clinical Pathology convention in New Orleans. It's the best award I've ever gotten--way better than an Emmy. These are the nerds who basically invented forensic science. What's great is that now when people ask what they do and they say they're a pathologist or a coroner, the response is, "You mean like on CSI?"

Q 5

PLAYBOY: Ever had a brush with death?

William Petersen: Years ago, doing a play in Chicago, I cut my finger in half onstage. We obviously had to stop because, well, I didn't have a finger. By the time they got me to the ER I'd lost a lot of blood and had passed out. I could hear the doctors working on me, saying they'd lost my vital signs. I was on the All That Jazz escalator with a long tunnel and a lot of white light. Then I specifically remember a male, dominant voice saying, "It's not your time. Get off the escalator. You've got shit to do." I came to and got sewed up. Something in me changed, a sort of knowledge that somewhere on the other side it's good. For weeks, the more I talked about it, the more freaked out people got. Some of them were like, "Okay, whatever. You took too many drugs."