As anyone who’s seen Steve Buscemi casually riding the F train knows, this guy’s one of us. He was born in this city, has fought fires in this city and, despite his success, has resisted the urge go all Hollywood on us. He still lives in a brownstone off Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and says he never wanted to relocate to LA.
“Show business is not in your face all the time here,” he says. “I like being in this business, but not living in the middle of it. If you live in LA, unless you live on the outskirts, it’s hard to avoid.”
Buscemi also looks like one of us. He doesn’t have movie-star good looks or give off the patented supernatural glow that the famous do, which we suspect can only be gained through years of ludicrously expensive spa treatments, perhaps involving whale sperm. Buscemi is not ugly, but he’s not exactly handsome, either. He has the kind of face that your mother might say “has character.”
His eyes are buggy. His teeth are a bit prominent. His hairline is losing ground to his forehead. But instead of being a detriment, his looks actually add to his viability as an actor. Were George Clooney to play a twitchy loner who couldn’t get the girl, audiences would roll their eyes and head for the lobby. When Buscemi does it, we all nod in unison and go, “Yep, that’s about right.”
Buscemi has also, against long odds, refused to be pigeonholed. Indie snobs revere him as a guy who’s only in it for the art, but they conveniently forget he’s done not one but two Michael Bay blockbusters. (Same number as Megan Fox, FYI.) Not that Buscemi is particularly interested in becoming either the mainstream’s go-to guy or retaining his cred as king of independent cinema.
“I don’t see myself as king of anything,” he says. “I’ve done lots of different things. Animated films, children’s films. The stories in films that I’m most attracted to have been independent, but to me, it doesn’t matter where the money is coming from or who’s making the movie. It just matters about the content of the script. That’s what’s important.”
His latest, “Saint John of Las Vegas,” happens to be an independent. It’s so independent, in fact, that Buscemi produced it himself through his newish Olive Productions — a company he formed with Stanley Tucci and Robert Altman producer Wren Arthur.
“Stanley and I are friends, we’ve worked together a few times and we’ve both directed four films. We help each other do that, whether it’s just talking about the script or talking about casting or watching each other’s cuts,” he says. “After a while it just made sense to form a company and have a common producer that we share.”
Best known, and often beloved, for supporting roles in hit TV shows and films, such as “The Sopranos” and “The Big Lebowski,” in “Saint John,” Buscemi takes the lead role.
The movie centers on John, a compulsive gambler who works for an Albuquerque insurance company. When his abusive boss (Peter Dinklage) asks him to help investigate an episode of possible fraud near Las Vegas, John heads out on the road with his grumpy partner (Romany Malco). What follows involves Sarah Silverman as a clingy girlfriend, a wheelchair-bound stripper and John Cho as a human torch at a carnival whose flame can’t be extinguished.
“The lead character was charming and funny and smart, and I understood his need to gamble and being in denial about it,” Buscemi says. “To me, that’s the fun of acting: to play characters that have problems and are complicated.”
First-time writer-director Hue Rhodes developed the script with the help of Spike Lee, who taught one of his classes at NYU. Buscemi had no qualms about working with a rookie.
“I’ve always liked working with new writers and directors, so it wasn’t a big decision,” he says.
For his next major project, the actor has teamed up with anything but a newbie. “Boardwalk Empire” in a new HBO series, based on actual events, to debut in the fall. It’s produced by Martin Scorsese, who also directed the pilot (which reportedly cost $50 million).
HBO has released little information about the show, except to say it’s set in New Jersey in the 1920s and centers around Nucky Thompson, “the undisputed ruler of Atlantic City, who was equal parts politician and gangster.” Buscemi, who’s halfway done filming the first season, fills in a few more details.
“Thompson is not a mobster. He’s the county treasurer. He gets things done by whatever means necessary,” he says. “When Prohibition hits, he’s not above going above the law to get his constituents what they want.”
Many of the scenes were filmed on a gigantic Atlantic City boardwalk set — complete with trucked-in sand — built in a Greenpoint parking lot. “We’ve also shot at a lot of old churches in Brooklyn that haven’t changed through the years,” Buscemi says. “We’ve been all over. Bronx, Staten Island. Everywhere but Atlantic City.”
Even without the Scorsese project on his résumé, Buscemi’s place in cinematic history is secure — if for nothing else as the guy who got fed into the wood chipper in “Fargo.”
It’s a long way from his time as a struggling actor and a community-college dropout, working day jobs, including as an FDNY firefighter for about four years in the ’80s, and living in the East Village.
“I was living there because the rent was cheap, and it took me a couple years to figure out that there was a scene happening around me,” says the actor, who moved to the area in 1978. “Music, art, performance art, dance, theater. There was sort of a community of people that were working on each other’s shows or going to each other’s shows. It was a really fun time.”
Then again, now’s not so bad, either.
reed.tucker@nypost.com