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Tue 15 September 2026 3:30, UK
The recent 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks must have brought back some very vivid memories for Steve Buscemi, an actor who has had some ups and downs over the years but none comparable to when, during the defining event of modern times, he went back to his former life as a firefighter in New York City.
Buscemi had been appearing in TV and movies for some 16 years before that fateful day, but even further back, in the late 1970s, he had passed the qualifications needed to become a fireman and joined up with Engine Company 55 in Manhattan’s Little Italy.
He worked there for four years before he decided to make the switch to acting, but he stayed closely tied to his home city even then, performing on stage in the East Village and then making movies like the comedy Slaves of New York and a period film called Bloodhounds of Broadway. Around that time in 1988, he missed out on Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, but the legendary director was sufficiently impressed by his audition to put him in the New York Stories anthology, and Buscemi was beginning to become a buzzing presence in the industry.
Once more, he stayed at home for Abel Ferrara’s gritty King of New York in 1990, but when he really made a breakthrough, it came from stepping away from the Five Boroughs and heading to a small town for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. He was superb as Mr Pink in the blood-soaked heist movie, and after receiving a couple of industry awards, he never looked back.
Over the next decade, he made a string of hit films, proving himself to be one of the best supporting character actors in the business, working with directors like the Coen Brothers and genre-hopping between Adam Sandler comedies like The Wedding Singer and mega-budget box office smashes like Bruce Willis’s Armageddon and Con Air with Nicolas Cage.
By the turn of the century, he was a fully-fledged movie star, but none of that occurred to him whatsoever when New York was attacked in September 2001. On the 12th of that month, as lower Manhattan was in smouldering ruins, Buscemi quietly got his old firefighting gear and reported for duty at his former firehouse, Engine 55, where several members including some friends were missing.
He worked 12-hour shifts for days, sifting through the rubble looking for survivors, refusing interviews from the press so as not to distract from the rescue mission that would cause him, several years later, to suffer from PTSD. Perhaps that contributed to how he was feeling professionally some years later, when at the age of 52, he thought he was at something of an acting crossroads, believing that he had peaked and perhaps should concentrate on his second role as a director instead.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
He told GQ: “I felt like I was at an odd age where I was too old to play some characters, not old enough to play other characters”. But once more, Buscemi’s fellow New Yorker Scorsese proved to be the making of him. In 2010, HBO bankrolled a pilot episode of a show he was directing called Boardwalk Empire to the tune of $18million, the story of the gangsters of Atlantic City during the 1920s when prohibition was at its peak.
Buscemi was cast in the lead role as the gangster Nucky Thompson, and he would end up making five seasons, winning a Golden Globe award among three nominations in successive years. It wasn’t a development the self-effacing Buscemi could have predicted, and even the show’s creator Terence Winter would later recall: “When I called him to tell him he got the role, he was so ready to be rejected. I said, ‘Steve, we’d like to offer you this role’. And he said, ‘Well, it was really an honour to be considered’”.
In the decade since Boardwalk Empire concluded, Buscemi has not been prolific, picking his projects carefully, but one thing he has never done is forget his fellow firefighters. He was named an honorary Battalion Chief for his service in the ‘80s and following 9/11, and at one point was even arrested while protesting the closure of several firehouses, including his own, beloved Engine 55.
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