The role brought a different kind of public attention than the character work that had preceded it. Lead roles in prestige television drama carry a particular cultural weight in the contemporary moment, and Buscemi’s work in the series received the formal recognition — the nominations, the awards attention — that his earlier film work had not generated in equivalent quantity, partly because his earlier work was distributed across dozens of projects in smaller roles, and partly because character actors don’t consistently generate the sustained awards attention that leads in long-form television do.
He spoke, in interviews during the Boardwalk Empire years, about acting as work — not in the demystifying way that some performers adopt to appear grounded, but in the specific sense that the craft was something he approached professionally, with preparation and technical attention. His background at Lee Strasberg’s school emphasized the psychological dimension of character building; his years as a working actor in independent film and theater had added the practical knowledge of what actually worked in front of a camera or on a stage, as opposed to what sounded good in an acting class.
The documentary about the FDNY came out in 2014, the same year Boardwalk Empire ended. The timing was probably coincidental, but it illustrated something about how he allocated his professional attention: the prestigious television work and the advocacy documentary were not sequential but simultaneous, part of the same sustained engagement with multiple aspects of a public life that he did not treat as a single unified brand.