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November 3rd, 2026 · 10:45pm GMT
It’s easy if you’re not a big-name Hollywood actor to look over at those few fortunate enough to make movies for a living and tell them they should prioritise artistic integrity over personal gain.
But sometimes stars like Steve Buscemi are honest enough to say that they’ll happily take on a script if it means putting a million in the bank.
Not all of them will admit it, of course. Few are open enough to follow Michael Caine’s lead when talking about the risible fourth Jaws movie, saying he’d never seen the film and had heard it was terrible, but that he had seen the house it built him. Buscemi’s story is a similar one, and even more understandable when you think about the movie he’d made just a year before the example we’ll look at.
Buscemi had been at the acting game for a long time, but it was 1996’s Coen brothers’ black comedy Fargo which really put him on the map. He was one of the standouts in a superb cast, and it helped him land a role the following year in a proper Hollywood blockbuster, the chaotic plane-set prison breakout thriller Con Air alongside Nicolas Cage and John Malkovich.
On the back of Con Air, Fargo, and 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, Buscemi had shown he was one of the best character actors in the industry, if not the best. So, when the opportunity came to follow Con Air up with a similarly sized popcorn film and a matching pay cheque, it was not something he had to think about for long. Armageddon was a Michael Bay-directed summing up of movies in the 1990s: an established action hero, a young up-and-comer, a stirring string-laden soundtrack and a plot that required massive special effects to signify just how much peril the Earth was in.
“I wanted a bigger house”
Steve Buscemi
And that’s exactly what you got. The story of a group of drillers hilariously signed up to become astronauts on a near-suicidal mission to break up a gigantic asteroid before it cripples life on Earth as we know it, Armageddon packed Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler and Owen Wilson into the cast, and tapped up Tyler’s dad, Steven, to provide a chart-topping song to go with it in ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’.
Buscemi, who said he took the film simply because “I wanted a bigger house”, played the role of Rockhound, one of those high-functioning science bods they put in films like that to hammer away at computer keyboards trying to access security systems while the hunky stars stand around asking, “how long is this gonna take?” and receiving an irritated reply in response: “we’re in”.
Critics weren’t particularly impressed by the film on release, but audiences went absolutely wild for it. The film brought in more than $500million at the box office and sent the Aerosmith-led soundtrack double platinum. It also didn’t do Buscemi’s career any harm at all, coming in the midst of what was probably his most commercially successful period, with both The Big Lebowski and Adam Sandler’s hit comedy The Wedding Singer arriving in the same year.
Over the past few years, Buscemi has mostly focused on voiceover work, but he seems to have ramped up his productivity considerably in front of the camera, with roles in Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, the new Martin McDonagh comedy Wild Horse Nine, and the Netflix musical Don’t Say Good Luck all arriving in 2026.
Next year seems to be shaping up in the same fashion for him, as he teams up with Sandler again for Grown Ups 3 and takes a part in Ryan Coogler’s intriguing reboot of The X-Files.
