The poster went up on a wall in the East Village, and a woman who lived on the same block kept walking past it. Her name was Jo Andres. She was nearly thirty, already an established choreographer and filmmaker with grants, European tours, and serious critical attention behind her. She developed a crush on the man in that image months before she ever met him.
Buscemi had spotted her from across the street first. He was completely taken by the way she looked, by what he gradually learned of her work. So he began timing his exits from the apartment and walking his dog at the hours he calculated she would be coming home from work. He contrived to bump into her on the sidewalk.
It was transparent, slightly ridiculous, and it worked. When she came to his apartment and saw the same poster hanging on his wall, she said, “That’s you. ”
He has never forgotten that sentence. “I still remember,” he told GQ, “when she went, ‘That’s you.
‘”
That moment sits underneath everything else he ever did. But the road to it started earlier, in Brooklyn, in a family with no pretensions about what a person like him should want. Steven Vincent Buscemi was born in 1957. His father, John, was a Korean War veteran who worked as a city sanitation man.
His mother, Dorothy, was a hostess at Howard Johnson’s. There were four sons and firm convictions about what constituted a respectable future. When Steve was ten, the family moved from East New York to Valley Stream on Long Island, a suburb quiet enough that it later became the setting for Trees Lounge, the film he wrote, directed, and starred in at thirty-eight. The place never quite left him.
In high school he wrestled varsity and performed in the drama troupe, two disciplines that said something about the person he was becoming. He was funny the way kids who aren’t obviously handsome or confident get funny, a survival mechanism that eventually became a genuine gift. But acting didn’t feel available to a kid from Valley Stream with no road map into the arts. So when he graduated in 1975, he did what his father told him.
John Buscemi had been unambiguous. Whatever civil service exam was being given when Steve turned eighteen, that was the test he was taking. It happened to be the firefighter’s exam. The FDNY process moved slowly.
In the meantime, Buscemi pumped gas, drove an ice cream truck, and worked as a theater usher, sitting in the dark watching other people experience the thing he wanted to experience himself. A family friend who had acted in Blackboard Jungle told John that if acting was what the boy wanted, he should get him into a real class. A small settlement from the time a city bus struck four-year-old Steve paid $6,000 toward tuition at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. He began studying acting the same year he passed the FDNY exam.
By 1980, two things were simultaneously true. He was a firefighter with Engine Company 55 in Little Italy, and he was performing comic sketches in the experimental venues of downtown Manhattan every night he wasn’t on shift. His firehouse colleagues thought he was the quietest man in the company. The audiences at the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge and Folk City saw someone with something precise and unsettling in his timing.
He was on the same stages as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, doing self-deprecating jokes about his looks and his day job. He partnered with Mark Boone Jr. in a two-man 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 on East 10th Street. She was a choreographer and filmmaker whose work had been performed 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. The dog-walking scheme worked.
They began seeing each other in late 1983, and from the start, Buscemi was the one starstruck. Not by fame, because Jo didn’t have that kind of fame. By the quality of her intelligence and the strangeness of her creative instincts. She trusted her intuition in a way he had never seen before.
She put images into the world without needing to explain or justify them or make them conventional. She was evoking moods, not making arguments. For a young actor trained to find the logic inside a character, being around 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 own instincts. In 1984, he left the FDNY. His colleagues said it simply wasn’t done. You didn’t leave a great, secure job like that.
But he had gotten a real break: a role in Parting Glances, one of the first American films to address the AIDS crisis directly, and his performance drew genuine praise. When he told his father that acting was going to be the career, John remained uncertain in the way of a man who believed in stable government employment. For years afterward, whenever Steve finished a project without another lined up, John would ask what was next. When Steve said he didn’t know, his father would say with the certainty of someone stating the obvious, “So, you’re unemployed.
”
In 1987, Steve and Jo married. They had been together four years, long enough to know what they had was not a downtown scene romance that would dissolve when circumstances changed. They settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, among brownstones and old trees, and stayed 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 everything. The late eighties and early nineties brought steady work in small, serious films and supporting roles other actors skipped because there was no money and no fame to extract. Miller’s Crossing in 1990 was his first work with the Coen brothers.
They cast him as a man shot in the head in the first reel, the kind of role where you do your best work and vanish before the audience registers your name. Then came Reservoir Dogs in 1992. 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 defined everything he did for the next decade: the sense of a sharp, accurate intelligence behind the eyes of a man everyone else felt safe dismissing. The gap between how a character was perceived and what was happening inside him became his instrument. He understood what it felt like to be underestimated by a room, and he used it every time. Tarantino put him in Pulp Fiction as a silent waiter dressed as Buddy Holly, because he understood that even a silent Buscemi carries a charge.
The Coens brought him back for Fargo in 1996, where he played Carl Showalter, a criminal so spectacularly bad at being a criminal that his incompetence had its own bravado. Con Air followed. Then The Big Lebowski in 1998, as Donny, the bowling teammate talked over in nearly every scene, until he suddenly, unexpectedly dies. It hurts in a way that surprises you because you never registered how much you cared until he was gone.
That was what Buscemi could do in eight lines of dialogue: make you care about people the story told you not to notice. Also in 1996, Jo’s film Black Kites premiered at Sundance. It was a documentary about the siege of Sarajevo, told through a Bosnian woman’s diary entries and paintings made while her city was destroyed around her. Buscemi and their son appeared in it.
He 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 North Carolina when a bar fight broke out. He intervened and 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, he drove to Little Italy and walked into Engine Company 55. He had not been a firefighter in seventeen years. His old company had lost four men the day before. He put on his gear and went to work, digging through the rubble in twelve-hour shifts.
He told no one in the press. He issued no statement. A photographer caught him on a fire truck. Twelve years later, a Facebook post by the Brotherhood of Fire made the image go viral, and people reacted as though they had discovered something that changed their understanding of 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 never associated with Steve Buscemi: the lead. Enoch Nucky Thompson, the political boss and bootlegger of Atlantic City, was a man of cultivated manners and genuine ruthlessness. Buscemi played him across five seasons and won 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 watched him receive those honors with the quiet amusement of a woman who had known all along. She had seen him do stand-up at Folk City when his biggest ambition was to land a sitcom.
She had helped him trust his instincts before anyone else had thought to tell him to. At a 2014 ceremony, accepting a Made in New York award, he stopped and named her specifically. “My wife, Jo. 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 was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She underwent chemotherapy. For a time, there was remission.
In 2017, the cancer returned. Buscemi has said very little about those final two years, and the restraint feels like the right kind, the kind that protects something belonging to two people and not to the public. What he has said is that watching her in pain was the hardest thing he has ever experienced. “It’s painful to die from cancer.
There’s just no way around it. ”
He has also said something that carries a different weight. He doesn’t believe Jo was afraid of dying. She faced it, surrounded by friends and family.
What dying 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 that if it came to it for him, he could be as present as she was. “She led the way. ”
Jo Andres died on January 6th, 2019, at their home in Brooklyn.
She was sixty-four. In the months afterward, Buscemi moved through grief the private way he had always moved through everything. He worked on archiving Jo’s art so 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.
Not loneliness exactly, but the specific anxiety of being far from the place where she had been. 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 that this was going to be a problem someday. There is a sentence he said about Jo 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 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 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 every film, every role, every firehouse shift.
A man from Brooklyn with his father’s work ethic walked his dog on a schedule nobody knew was a schedule and found the person he was looking for and never recovered from losing her. The poster caught her eye first. She 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. The question it leaves behind is not really about Steve Buscemi at all. It is about what it means to be seen that early, that clearly, by someone who had no reason yet to look.
And what a life looks like when you spend thirty-six years trying to be worthy of it.
