Steve Buscemi spent decades being the actor audiences remembered without quite being able to explain why. Behind the sharp intelligence in his eyes was a man who dug through ground zero in 12-hour shifts after 9/11 and told no one for 12 years. He held a 32-year marriage that most of America never saw. When his wife died, he grieved alone in his kitchen painting watercolors in yellow because the light was best there and the color surprised him.
Now he has said out loud what he spent a lifetime simply living: that Jo Andres was the only love of his life, and that the story of how he found her and lost her is the real story underneath every role he ever played. Steven Vincent Buscemi was born on December 13th, 1957 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, John, was a Korean War veteran who worked as a sanitation worker for the city. His mother, Dorothy, was a hostess at Howard Johnson’s.
They raised four sons with firm convictions about what constituted a respectable future. When Steve was 10, the family moved from East New York to Valley Stream on Long Island. The quiet suburb would later serve as the setting for “Trees Lounge,” the film he wrote, directed, and starred in at 38. The place had never quite left him.
In high school, Buscemi wrestled for the varsity squad and performed in the drama troupe. He was funny in the way kids who are not obviously handsome or confident get funny, a survival mechanism that eventually became a genuine gift. But acting did not feel available to a kid from Valley Stream with no road map toward the arts. When he graduated in 1975, he did what his father told him to do.
John Buscemi had been unambiguous: whatever civil service exam was being given when Steve turned 18, that was the test he was taking. It happened to be the firefighter’s exam. While the FDNY process moved slowly, Buscemi worked as a gas station attendant, an ice cream truck driver, and a theater usher who sat in the dark watching other people experience things he wanted to experience himself. Then a family friend, an actor who had appeared in “Blackboard Jungle,” told Buscemi’s father that if acting was what Steve wanted, he should get him into a real class.
A small settlement from the time a city bus struck 4-year-old Steve provided $6,000 for tuition at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. He began studying acting the same year he passed the FDNY exam. By 1980, two simultaneously true things defined Steve Buscemi. He was a firefighter with Engine Company 55 in Little Italy, and he was performing comic sketches in the experimental venues of downtown Manhattan on every night he wasn’t on shift.
His colleagues at the firehouse thought he was the quietest man in the company. Audiences at the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge and Folk City saw someone with something precise and unsettling in his timing. He worked the same downtown comedy rooms as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, telling self-deprecating jokes about his looks and his day job. He eventually partnered with actor Mark Boone Jr.
in a two-man sketch act they called Steve and Mark. They printed posters and put them up all over the East Village. One of those posters caught the eye of a woman who lived on the same block of East 10th Street. Her name was Jo Andres.
She was nearly 30, three years Buscemi’s senior, and already an established figure in the downtown experimental performance scene. A choreographer and filmmaker, she had earned grants, toured Europe, and gotten serious critical attention for her work at La Mama, PS 122, and The Performing Garage. By every external measure, she was doing considerably better than the firefighter comedian whose poster she kept walking past. She developed a crush on the man in that image months before she ever met him.
What happened next was one of those small, laughable moments that turns out to be the hinge point of everything. Buscemi had spotted her from across the street and was, in his own telling, completely fascinated by the way she looked and by what he gradually learned of her work. He began timing his exits from the apartment so he could walk his dog at the moments he calculated she would be coming home. He would contrive to bump into her on the sidewalk.
It was transparent and slightly ridiculous, and it worked. When she eventually came to his apartment and saw the same poster hanging on his wall that she had been walking past for months, she said, “That’s you. ” Buscemi has recalled that moment specifically. “I still remember,” he told GQ, “when she went, ‘That’s you.
‘”
They began seeing each other in late 1983. From the beginning, Buscemi was the one who was starstruck, not by fame, because Jo Andres didn’t have that kind of fame, but by the quality of her intelligence and the strangeness of her creative instincts. He would say years later that she simply trusted her intuition in a way he had never seen before, putting images into the world without needing to explain or justify them or have them make conventional sense. She was evoking moods, not making arguments.
For a young actor trained to find the logic inside a character, spending time with her was an education in a completely different approach to making things. He appeared in some of her dance pieces. She helped him trust his instincts. In 1984, Buscemi left the FDNY, something his colleagues said simply wasn’t done.
You didn’t leave a great, secure job like that. But he had gotten a real break: a role in the 1986 film “Parting Glances,” one of the first American films to address the AIDS crisis directly. His performance drew genuine praise. When he told his father that acting was going to be the career, John Buscemi remained uncertain in the specific way of a man who believed in stable government employment.
For years afterward, whenever Steve finished a project without another immediately lined up, his father would ask what was next. When Steve said he didn’t know, John Buscemi would say with the certainty of someone stating the obvious, “So, you’re unemployed. ” It took years before he relaxed. In 1987, Steve Buscemi and Jo Andres got married.
They had been together four years, long enough to know that what they had was not a downtown scene romance that would dissolve when circumstances changed. They moved from the East Village to Park Slope in Brooklyn, a neighborhood of brownstones and old trees, where they would remain for more than three decades. Their son, Lucian, was born in 1990. They bought a weekend house upstate and made a rule: they would not spend more than three weeks apart, no matter what Buscemi was filming or where.
They held that rule through all of it. The late ’80s and early ’90s were a period of consistent work in small, serious films and supporting roles that other actors skipped because there was no money in them and no fame to extract. “Miller’s Crossing” in 1990 was the first collaboration with Joel and Ethan Coen. They cast him as a man who gets shot in the head in the first reel, the kind of role where you do your best work and vanish before the audience has registered your name.
Then came “Reservoir Dogs” in 1992. Tarantino’s debut arrived at Sundance and something shifted immediately. Mr. Pink, the nervous, voluble, spectacularly aggravated thief who refuses to tip and spends the entire film arguing his own case, was the movie’s engine.
Buscemi played him with the specific quality that would define everything he did for the next decade: the sense of a sharp and accurate intelligence behind the eyes of a man who looked to everyone around him like someone you could safely dismiss. That gap between how the character was perceived and what was actually happening inside him was Buscemi’s particular instrument. He understood exactly what it felt like to be underestimated by a room, and he used it every time. In 1994, Tarantino put him in “Pulp Fiction” as a waiter dressed as Buddy Holly, wordless because Tarantino understood that even a silent Buscemi carries a charge.
The Coens returned to him for “Fargo” in 1996, where he played Carl Showalter, a criminal so spectacularly bad at being a criminal that his incompetence has its own kind of bravado. “The Big Lebowski” followed in 1998, where Buscemi played Donny, the bowling teammate talked over in nearly every scene, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, dies. When Donny dies, it hurts in a way that surprises you because you hadn’t registered how much you cared about him until he was gone. That was what Buscemi could do in eight lines of dialogue: make you care about people the story had told you not to notice.
Also in 1996, Jo Andres’s film “Black Kites” premiered at Sundance. A documentary about the siege of Sarajevo told through a Bosnian woman’s diary entries and paintings on kite paper made while her city was being destroyed around her, it screened at Berlin, Toronto, London, and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Buscemi appeared in it. Their son Lucian appeared in it.
Buscemi talked about it with the particular pride of a man who genuinely believed his wife’s work was more interesting than his own. In April 2001, Buscemi was filming in Wilmington, North Carolina when a bar fight broke out and he intervened. For his trouble, he was stabbed above the eye, in the jaw, in the throat, and in the arm. He recovered and went back to work.
Seven months later, on the morning of September 12th, 2001, he drove to Little Italy and walked into Engine Company 55. He had not been a firefighter in 17 years. His old company had lost four of its men the day before. He put on his gear and went to work.
For several days, he dug through the rubble in 12-hour shifts without notifying the press or issuing a statement. A photographer caught him on a fire truck, and 12 years later a Facebook post by the Brotherhood of Fire made the image go viral. People reacted as though they were discovering something about Buscemi that changed the way they understood everything he had ever done. What they were actually discovering was that he had been this person all along.
“Boardwalk Empire” arrived in 2010, and with it something most people had not previously associated with Steve Buscemi: the lead. Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, the political boss and bootlegger of Atlantic City during Prohibition, was a man of cultivated manners and genuine ruthlessness. Buscemi played him across five seasons in a performance that won him the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama series. His father had spent years asking what was next and being told his son was technically unemployed.
By 2010, that son was the lead of the most expensive drama on American television. Jo Andres watched him receive those honors with the quiet amusement of a woman who had known all along. By 2014, when Buscemi accepted a Made in New York award, he stopped and named her specifically. “My wife, Jo,” he said.
“You know this business can be a challenge to relationships, but you stick it out and there are rewards, and I am so grateful to her. She was my biggest supporter and also audience and my biggest inspiration. ”
In 2015, Jo Andres was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She underwent chemotherapy.
For a time, there was remission. Then in 2017, the cancer returned. Buscemi has said very little about those final two years. What he has said is that watching her in pain was the hardest thing he has ever experienced.
“It’s painful. It’s painful to die from cancer. There’s just no way around it,” he told GQ. He has also said something that carries a different weight: that he really doesn’t believe Jo was afraid of dying, that she faced it.
She was surrounded by friends and family. She truly encountered it, and what it consisted of for her was a long, specific series of recognitions, a whole series of “Oh, I don’t get to do this anymore. ” He said he hoped if it came to it for him, he could be as present as she was. “She led the way,” he said.
Jo Andres died on January 6th, 2019, at their home in Brooklyn. She was 64 years old. In the months afterward, Buscemi moved through grief in the private way that had always defined him. He worked on archiving Jo’s art so that it would survive her correctly.
When he had to fly abroad for a project not long after she died, he found the distance from home unbearable in a new way. He started painting watercolors in his kitchen because the light was best there. He told GQ that he had expected to reach for dark colors and was surprised to find himself using yellow. “I do like the brightness of it,” he said.
The house in Park Slope felt too large. He thought about Lucian, that Lucian would be the one left eventually to go through everything, and acknowledged without self-pity that he was a hoarder and this was going to be a problem someday. There is a sentence Buscemi said about Jo in that GQ interview that contains more than it appears to. Describing what made her creative instincts what they were, he said, “She just had to feel a certain way, like she was trying to evoke a feeling or a mood.
” He was talking about her art. But it is also a description of what had drawn him to her in the first place. Not someone who could explain the work, but someone who could make you feel it without the explanation. Jo Andres was the person who first showed him what that looked like from the outside, before the credentials existed, before any of it was confirmed by anyone else’s attention.
He had been a firefighter who secretly wanted to act. He had put up a poster in the East Village and a woman across the street developed a crush on the man in the image before she ever met him. He had timed his dog walks to bump into her on the sidewalk, which was neither casual nor accidental. And she had come into his apartment and seen the poster on his wall and said, “That’s you.
”
He had married her in 1987 and made a rule about three weeks and held it through “Reservoir Dogs” and “Boardwalk Empire” and 9/11 and the stabbing and all of it. She had been his audience, his inspiration, the person who showed him what trusting your instincts actually looked like. He watched her die in pain and called it the hardest thing he had ever experienced. Then he went to his kitchen and painted in yellow because the light was best there, and the color surprised him.
That is the story underneath all the films and all the roles and all the firehouse shifts and the award nominations. A man from Brooklyn with his father’s work ethic who walked his dog on a schedule nobody knew was a schedule, found the person he was looking for, and never recovered from losing her. The poster caught her eye first. She was the one who noticed him before he was anyone, before there was any reason to notice.
That detail runs through the whole story like a load-bearing wall. Everything else was built around it.
