Steve Buscemi names the greatest experience of his career: “He was really funny”
The irony of that famous meme featuring Steve Buscemi carrying a skateboard and wearing a backwards cap while saying, “How you doing, fellow kids?” is that it’s probably the way that most people under the age of 20 know the legendary actor.
But of course, Buscemi has been a supreme performer at the top of his game for a long, long time now. To be honest, even if he’d just done Reservoir Dogs and called it a day, you couldn’t have blamed him.
Even before the Quentin Tarantino masterpiece, Buscemi had been making films of the utmost quality. The Brooklynite former firefighter started off in theatre around New York before he was picked by cult filmmaker Jim Jarmusch to appear in two movies, firstly Mystery Train in 1989, the comedy-drama set in Memphis, Tennessee and co-starring The Clash frontman Joe Strummer, and then another anthology movie two years later with Night on Earth.
He then popped up in a string of low-budget films and some TV before Tarantino came calling and changed things forever—Buscemi’s ‘Mr Pink’ going down in history as one of cinema’s great characters. He worked consistently for the Coen brothers on Hudsucker Proxy before he began what can probably be seen as his golden era, beginning with Fargo in 1996.
Consistently named as one of the best films of all time, Fargo was a revelation on release and picked up an Oscar for Frances McDormand and for the Coen brothers, who wrote and directed. Buscemi was equally superb in it however and it sealed him as a character actor of choice for casting directors in Hollywood. That was in evidence when Buscemi put in a movie-stealing turn as a psychopath in the action classic Con Air the following year.
He wasn’t done there though, because just a year later he appeared in another Coen brothers classic, The Big Lebowski alongside Jeff Bridges and repeated the trick in a more comedy-based role with Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer.
Over the next 20 years, he put in more memorable performances, from voicing a sleep-stealing bad guy in Pixar’s Monsters Inc to a stint as Tony Soprano’s cousin on The Sopranos, for which he earned an Emmy nomination. He also began to take on some work as a director, helming Casey Affleck’s Lonesome Jim and the remake of a Dutch film, Interview, in which he starred with Sienna Miller.
He continued to work for HBO with a lead role in Boardwalk Empire, winning a Golden Globe for his performance, and over the next ten years focused on voiceover work in addition to a recurring role on comedy 30 Rock and the occasional appearance in a comedy, including 2017’s Armando Iannucci-directed The Death of Stalin.
But when you ask Buscemi about his favourite experiences as an actor, he goes almost all the way back to the start and making the influential Mystery Train with Jarmusch, saying: “Just being in Memphis, in the summer, shooting at night and getting to work with Joe Strummer and Rick Aviles, a standup who I admired. I used to see Aviles doing his comedy in Washington Square Park in the late 70s. He was really funny.”
Buscemi has most recently been appearing alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones in the hit gothic Addams Family spin-off Wednesday and in Happy Gilmore 2 with Sandler. He’ll also be seen in the new film from In Bruges director Martin McDonagh, currently titled Wild Horse Nine.
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