On the morning of September 12, 2001, Steve Buscemi put on his old firefighting gear and drove to the smoldering crater where the World Trade Center had stood the day before. He had not been a working firefighter for seventeen years. He was, by the fall of 2001, one of the most recognizable character actors in American cinema — the guy from Fargo, from Reservoir Dogs, from Con Air and Armageddon, the actor whose face launched a thousand casting directors’ “strange” and “menacing” calls. None of that was the point. The point was that he had worked at Engine Company 55 in Lower Manhattan from 1980 to 1984, that those men were his people, and that they were in there.
He found his old company working in the rubble. He joined a bucket brigade — not moving water in the conventional direction, but handing debris backward through the chain, piece by piece, away from the collapse. Occasionally, body bags came down the line. He described the dust as so thick it clogged the face masks that workers tried to wear, rendering them largely useless. He worked for what he later described as about five days, in shifts of roughly twelve hours. He did not give interviews at the site. He did not seek photographs. He was, as much as anyone in his position could be in the middle of one of the most documented disasters in human history, simply there to work.
The story of Steve Buscemi at Ground Zero has circulated online for years, often with the somewhat breathless framing that a famous actor secretly rescued survivors from the rubble while no one was looking. The actual account is both more modest and more meaningful than that. He did not rescue survivors. He moved rubble. He worked alongside other volunteers and first responders in an effort that was collective by nature and exhausting by necessity. He went because he knew these people, because he had made the same drives to fires that Engine 55 made for four years of his young adulthood, and because doing nothing, at a moment when his former colleagues were buried under two collapsed towers, was not an option he was capable of taking.