PROFILES THE THIN MAN How Steve Buscemi became an indie icon. BY JOHN LAHR teve Buscemi doesn’t loom into my livelihood if you do that.”) “Steve is that you don’t deserve to be heard, that view. He’s not a looming kind of the little guy,” says the director Jim Jar- you don’t really have anything to say or guy.S On an overcast day in June, as musch, who cast Buscemi in his 1989 a point of view that’s interesting, because I waited on the designated corner of film “Mystery Train.” “In the characters you haven’t been properly educated. I Union Square to meet him for the first he plays and in his own life, he’s repre- was very intimidated, basically feeling time, I called his assistant. “He’s late,” I senting that part of us all that’s not on culturally inferior.” said. “Where is he?” Buscemi, it turned top of the world.” When Buscemi acts, his thinness out, was standing thirty feet away from When Buscemi and I finally found and his slouch—which seem a product me. Round-shouldered and wafer-thin, each other in Union Square, I raised the of that original shame—only heighten in a gray work shirt, black chinos, and a issue of lunch. There are more than his odd presence, which is a topic of weathered denim jacket, with a baseball twenty restaurants on Union Square, conversation in many of the seventy- cap pulled tightly over his forehead, he many of them excellent. Buscemi pon- eight movies he’s made since his first was virtually invisible in the crowd. dered for a moment, then chose the major role, in “Parting Glances,” in Five feet nine and forty-seven years coffee shop in front of us (“bad food and 1986. In Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Fargo” old, Buscemi could be almost anybody— worse service,” one review says). “Appe- (1996), the other characters repeatedly or everybody. Give him some tattoos and tite” is not a word that comes to mind in make fun of Buscemi’s Carl Showalter, a mane of shaggy hair, and he’s the squirt- relation to Buscemi. His boniness car- a dopey kidnapper turned killer. When gun-toting heavy-metal doofus in “Air- ries with it a hint of negativity, a kind of Frances McDormand’s beady-eyed, heads” (1994); put him in a blue se- rejection of the world. (In the course of homespun policewoman presses a quinned dress, a red pageboy wig, and our two-hour lunch, he didn’t manage hooker for a detailed description of high heels, and he’s the world-weary to finish a grilled cheese sandwich.) Showalter, whom she has recently bed- transvestite taxi-dancer in “Somebody to Likewise, although Buscemi has one of ded, all the girl can say is “The little guy Love” (1994); slick back his hair and give the most famous faces in modern cin- was kinda funny-lookin’ . He wasn’t him a pair of brown loafers, like the ones ema, he’s not afflicted with a star’s self- circumcised. Funny-lookin’ more he wore as Tony Blundetto in “The So- consciousness. He talks, but he also lis- than most people, even.” pranos,” and he has the gaunt, retro tens; he’s not watching himself go by, Buscemi’s persona is understated, lounge-lizard look of the director John and he doesn’t carry himself with the ex- opaque, bewildered, ironical. “You seem Waters. (In fact, the likeness is so un- pectation of being seen. As a result, he a little stoned. What are you on?” some- canny that Waters used Buscemi’s image often isn’t. He sat in a booth at the busy one says to his character in Terry on his Christmas card one year.) coffee shop for close to an hour before Zwigoff’s “Ghost World” (2000). He is Nothing about Buscemi’s physical someone spotted him. (“You were great in the hospital after having been be- presence suggests the poetic lineaments in ‘Desperado’—one of my favorite trayed, humiliated, and wrestled to the of masculine film glamour. He is pale, movies of all time.” “Thank you,” Bu- ground in a grocery store. “High on almost pallid—as if he’d been reared in scemi said. “Appreciate it.”) life,” he replies. “Steve’s a visitor in the a mushroom cellar. In a certain light, he Onscreen or off, Buscemi is never world,” the director Alexandre Rock- can look cadaverous. His eyes are large ostentatious. Still, with his simplicity well, who has worked with Buscemi on and bulgy, with a hint of melancholy. and restraint—an emotional as well as a five films, said. “His body, his face—ev- When he smiles, his mouth displays a physical minimalism—he manufactures erything around him is whirling, but shantytown of uneven, uncapped teeth. a truthfulness that always surprises. At you always feel in Steve a stillness, al- And yet that unprepossessing ordinari- lunch, as he tentatively told the story of most a calm.” This stillness plays vari- ness is what makes Buscemi captivat- his working-class upbringing (his father ously as anxiety, disconnection, and ing as a performer. It gives him the un- was a sanitation worker, his mother a threat. Sometimes, a single character mistakable stamp of the authentic, and hostess at Howard Johnson’s), he cast draws all three into a sort of trifecta of it helps to explain his emergence over an unexpected light on his own edgy in- tension, like the silent hit man Mr. the past two decades as an icon of inde- hibition. We were talking about the ter- Shhh, in “Things to Do in Denver pendent films. (Buscemi himself under- ror he’d felt at nineteen, when he first When You’re Dead” (1995). Buscemi’s stands the value of his rumpled looks. thought of moving from Long Island to look is deadbeat; his sense of humor is When his dentist suggested fixing his Manhattan to try to be an actor. What downbeat. He can play loss for laughs— teeth, he told her, “You’re going to kill held him back, he said, was “this feeling in “The Impostors” (1998) he was CORBIS 72 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 14, 2005 TNY—2005_11_14—PAGE 72—133SC. All Buscemi’s characters are stuck in a purgatory from which they may or may not escape. Photograph by Martin Schoeller. TNY—2005_11_14—PAGE 73—133SC.—LIVE OPI ART R14121_RD Happy Franks, a suicidal cabaret singer animation of Buscemi’s hapless, love- says, finally. The moment is at once sobbing his way through “The Nearness lorn youth. (“I remember kissing a girl at droll and desperate. Buscemi plays it en- of You”—or he can play it for real. a party and she threw up on my shoes,” tirely with his eyes, which are pleading In his screenwriting and directorial Buscemi said of his teen-age years.) at first, and then, when he is rebuffed, feature début, “Trees Lounge” (1996), For an actor, the challenge is to make fill with sadness. “Would you mind if I Buscemi starred as Tommy, a fiction- the ordinary look interesting. Buscemi is just sit here for a while?” Tommy asks. alized version of himself. Tommy, Bu- a master at this sleight of hand. “I sort of As he sits, Buscemi allows himself to do scemi said, “is truly directionless.” (“A get this intuitive feeling about what the nothing but live in the mournful bewil- story about one man’s search . for who character is, or how he talks, or how he derment of the character, whom he un- knows what” was the movie’s promo- says his lines,” he explained. “I feel that derstands all too well. tional slug.) “Any true passions he has— my impulses are really all I have.” In the anything artistic—are buried so deep he penultimate scene of “Trees Lounge,” hese days, Buscemi lives with his would never allow himself that.” The after finally being throttled by his furi- wife, the artist Jo Andres, and their movie was shot on the bland suburban ous friend, Tommy ends up at the hos- fourteen-year-oldT son, Lucian, in a streets of Valley Stream, Long Island, pital, where his ex-girlfriend has just three-story brownstone in Park Slope, where Buscemi lived as a teen-ager. (It given birth to a child that may or may Brooklyn. One bright morning last fall, takes its name from one of the bars that not be his. His face is discolored from Buscemi and I climbed into his gray were the hub of his existence after he his beating and his lip is split. He starts Volkswagen station wagon and drove graduated from high school.) At one out with some friendly teasing about five miles, to East New York, where point in the film, Tommy, after a dalli- the baby—“He’s a little old man. Could he spent his early years. “We’re going ance with his friend’s seventeen-year-old they take some of the wrinkles out?”— to a different neighborhood,” he said, daughter, is chased around a softball dia- and builds to a painful revelation of his with characteristic understatement. mond by the irate father wielding a base- own confused desires. “I don’t know Buscemi is a slow driver—a point of ball bat. He clambers up the backstop. what I’m doin’,” he tells his ex-girlfriend. some contention in his family and the For a moment, terrified, exhausted, hang- “I just feel like .