The large-scale commercial work that began arriving in the later 1990s — Con Air (1997), Armageddon (1998) — was significant not because it represented a different artistic direction but because it demonstrated a range that the character actor category could sometimes obscure. Buscemi in Con Air, playing serial killer Garland Greene with an affect of laconic detachment, was not doing what Buscemi in Fargo was doing; he was finding the specific truth of a character in a very different genre environment. His presence in both films is consistent with an artistic identity that is not defined by tone or genre but by the quality of attention brought to whatever the character requires.
The Sopranos directorial work, which preceded his acting work on the series, was another demonstration of range: he directed the episode “Pine Barrens” in 2001 — one of the most celebrated episodes of the series, a survival story set in the New Jersey woods — before appearing as Tony Blundetto in seasons four and five. “Pine Barrens” is remarkable partly because it takes two supporting characters, Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti, and builds an entire episode around their attempt to dispose of a body that refuses to stay dead in a winter wilderness. The episode is simultaneously funny, tense, and philosophically resonant, and Buscemi’s direction maintains all three qualities without sacrificing any of them to the others.
By the time September 11, 2001 arrived, he was forty-three years old, had been a professional actor for seventeen years, and had accumulated a body of work that was, by any standard, distinguished. He had done this without becoming a star in the conventional sense — without the mainstream leading-man roles that generate the kind of cultural ubiquity that makes certain actors’ names and faces synonymous with the word “movie star.” He was something more interesting and, in the long run, more durable: a performer whose work rewarded repeated attention, whose presence in a film was a sign of quality rather than a guarantee of commercial success, and whose range was demonstrated rather than asserted.