The first thing Steve Buscemi will always “flip to the end of a script” to find out
Even though every actor who receives a script will read it at least once, they don’t all do it the same way. Some might even be indignant at how Steve Buscemi approaches the latest screenplay to land on his desk, but he’s got his reasons.
Some thespians read the story from beginning to end once before agreeing to make the movie, while others pore over every detail multiple times. Some of the greats, like Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Walken, read them hundreds of times, so the lines are seared into their memory by the time they step on set.
However, Buscemi constantly looks out for number one. While every performer focuses on their character and lines when weighing up whether or not to sign on, the versatile character actor has another reason. Having died so often onscreen, he frequently makes his choices based on how, when, why, and if he meets a grisly demise.
That’s fair enough, with Buscemi being killed in a variety of grisly ways dating back decades. He slowly bled to death in Reservoir Dogs, got put through a wood chipper in Fargo, and he’s been shot and stabbed into oblivion countless times, never mind getting scalped in Lonesome Dove, being gunned down by Roger Daltrey in Tales from the Crypt, or immolated in Rick and Morty.
There was one particular death that encouraged his unusual script-reading habit, with Buscemi’s Tony Blundetto taking a shotgun blast to the head from James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano in a mercy killing in the seminal TV show’s fifth season finale, ‘All Due Respect’.
“When I get cast, I always flip to the end of the script to see if my character gets beaten up or killed,” he admitted to The New York Times. “I really thought that after getting killed on The Sopranos, I should not accept scripts where I die. I mean, there’s nowhere to go after getting killed by Tony Soprano.”
Needless to say, Buscemi didn’t heed his own advice. Since Gandolfini shuffled him off his mortal coil, he’s been killed in at least half a dozen other films and TV series, and not long after his memorable Sopranos exit he reunited with his Armageddon director Michael Bay in The Island, where he “didn’t even make it a third of the way through the movie” before being bumped off.
“I have been surviving a lot more lately, though,” he added, which is true. To put the actor’s survival rate into perspective, his characters died either on or offscreen upwards of 15 times prior to The Sopranos, and that number has been reduced by almost half in the two decades since. Maybe people got wise to his habit and knew they had less chance of snagging Buscemi for their movie or TV show if he didn’t make it to the end credits.
Some actors make a career out of dying, as Danny Trejo, John Hurt, Sean Bean, and Christopher Lee can attest, but Buscemi didn’t want to join them in the upper echelons of those who are rarely still breathing by the final page.
