He also kept auditioning.
The combination — firefighter by assignment, actor by aspiration — was not as unusual in the New York arts world of the early 1980s as it might sound. Many performers held day jobs that were institutional, unionized, and schedule-defined, because those jobs left clear blocks of time for auditions and rehearsals. Firefighting offered exactly this: long on-duty periods followed by extended time off, a schedule that could, with some management, accommodate the irregular demands of auditioning for theater and small film roles.
The fellow firefighters at Engine 55 were aware of his ambitions. By some accounts they were skeptical; leaving the FDNY to become an actor was, in the culture of the department, an eccentric choice. “Nobody leaves this job” was reportedly one response when he took his leave of absence. The pension, the union protection, the community — these were not things people walked away from. But Buscemi’s passion for acting was, by his own account, greater than his passion for firefighting, even though he genuinely loved the job. The leave of absence he eventually took was structured as a temporary arrangement; he expected, he later said, to return to the department if the acting did not work out. He left Engine 55 in 1984. The leave became permanent.
## The Theater, the Small Roles, and the Slow Build
New York theater in the early 1980s was a world of small companies, alternative spaces, and performers working at the margins of commercial entertainment. The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, where Buscemi studied, was one of the most prominent method acting schools in the country — the Actors Studio had produced Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman — and studying there connected him to a tradition of American performance rooted in psychological realism and character work.