Steve Buscemi: A most unlikely hero

Steve Buscemi has spent his career playing the weirdo's weirdo. Sheila Johnston meets Hollywood's favourite oddball

Steve Buscemi is looking worried, an expression that sits rather comfortably on his baggy, hangdog features. "I don't think of myself as a celebrity, or focus too much on where my standing is," he insists, in response to the suggestion that he might have become, at the age of 49, an authentic cult icon. "My career has sort of been a steady progression over the years. I'm not an overnight success," he adds plaintively.

As it happens, Buscemi is about to be seen in two new satirical films about the fame game. In one, Tom DiCillo's Delirious, he is a manic, scuzzy paparazzo, a bottom-feeder on the fringes of Manhattan's media whirl. In the other, Interview, which he directed himself, he is a political journalist down on his luck and reduced to writing a puff-piece on a soap-opera star (Sienna Miller). However, in sharp contrast to the sad-sack characters he is so often cast as, Buscemi might just be the most successful failure in the business.

The coolest names in American independent cinema clamour for him, again and again: he has worked with Scorsese, Carpenter, Altman (twice), Tarantino (twice), Jarmusch and Rodriguez (both three times), Alexandre Rockwell (four times) and the Coen brothers on no fewer than five occasions. He has directed a clutch of television episodes, including several of the better Sopranos, as well as four features of his own. Interview has been selected for both the Sundance and the Berlin festivals. He was once pursued through the streets of London by the entire Peruvian national football team. "People know him from around the world, but he seems unaware of it," DiCillo says.

Buscemi has played in more than 80 movies, yet his ubiquity is, on inspection, a cunning sleight of hand. Sometimes his presence is limited to that kvetching East Coast drawl: he was the voice of nutty Mr Nebbercracker in last summer's likeable Monster House, and will be heard as Templeton, the self-centred, swaggering rat, in a new screen version of Charlotte's Web.

Blink and you will miss him in quite a few of his other films. Hollywood has never known what to make of Buscemi and, with his tombstone teeth, bug eyes, floppy hair and fleshy, sensuous lips, he has never been in the running for the heroes. He pops up in potboilers such as The Island, Armageddon, Rising Sun or Con Air, most often in what he calls "roles of the bad guy nature", certified weirdos with short life-spans.

But it is in the independent sector that he shines. Sinister, squalid or plain geeky, the quintessential Buscemi character is some subterranean type with a memorable kink and oddball name: Mr Pink (his watershed role, the querulous gangster in Tarantino's 1992 Reservoir Dogs), Buddy Holly, Map-to-the-Stars Eddie, Mink, Crazy Eyes, Bananas The Clown. In such parts, Buscemi's impact is often directly inverse proportion to his actual time on screen.

Parts are created for him, like the narrator - named Buscemi - in Rodriguez's Desperado. The Coens' segment for Paris Je T'Aime, a compendium of 20 short films set in the City of Light, begins with Buscemi's face looming into view in huge close-up, peering anxiously into the camera. He plays an American tourist on the Metro who has an unfortunate encounter with a French commuter. It's one of the funniest contributions to an otherwise patchy project.

"They told me that I had no lines and got beaten up in it, and so they had me in mind," the actor recalls wryly. "But it sounded funny and I hadn't worked with them in a few years. They never went out of the Metro even during lunch. It's so like them."

These days, Buscemi can be choosy. He turned down the bellhop in another collective film, the disappointing Four Rooms, even though Tarantino and Rodriguez were co-directors. It was a decision which, in retrospect, proved his excellent judgement (Tim Roth, who subsequently accepted this key part, netted a chorus of negative reviews). "You can't remain innocent forever. I'm an actor and I want to make a living," Buscemi says. "But I don't feel like I've been corrupted - I've never done a role that I hated or thought was real garbage, for the money."

DiCillo recently found himself on the sharp end of this philosophy. He had previously made three films with Buscemi when he offered him what he was convinced was a gem: the cynical, loud-mouthed photographer who takes a homeless actor under his wing in Interview. The character was, in the writer-director's words, "a twisted troll" and Buscemi was perfect for it. "He has to me the quality of a classic clown," DiCillo says. "The angrier he gets, the funnier he is. He brings a humanity to every moment."

Buscemi thought differently. "I didn't like it," he remembers. "The guy seemed too bitter, too angry, too destructive. I felt there wasn't enough to go on." DiCillo admits to being "devastated", but now concedes the point. "He made me realise I'd made the character extremely unlikeable. So I sent him another draft."

Months passed with no response. Eventually DiCillo decided to trek to the outlying district of Brooklyn where Buscemi lives with his wife and 15-year-old son. Fabricating a reason to be in the area, he called the actor with forced levity. "I said, 'Hey Steve, I'm gonna be a block away from you - why don't we get a cup of coffee?' It was a total lie on my part. We went to a coffee shop and talked about the script a little bit, and to my agonised delight he actually said four or five lines in character.

"Then we walked back to his apartment. It was a brutal, brutal winter day, the wind was blowing, it was freezing and I said, 'Well, Steve, what do you think?' He stood there for five minutes. Didn't say a word. So I looked at him and said, 'OK, see you later.' And I went home." DiCillo had one card left to play. He set up a reading of his script with 14 actors and an invited audience. "Steve read the role and people were cracking up. I have never fought harder for an actor," the director concludes.

On this occasion, his persistence seems vindicated: at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where Delirious had its world premiere last September, audiences loved the film and it bagged both the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards. "Steve made a toast to me. 'You know Tom, I have never seen anybody not give up like you did to make a movie'." Buscemi has shown equal determination in his own directing career. Trees Lounge, a gentle comedy inspired by memories of growing up in a sleepy Long Island commuter town, and Animal Factory, a prison drama, were well reviewed, but both had small releases and his third, Lonesome Jim, never opened in Britain.

Interview is a remake of a 2003 film by the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, who was murdered after releasing a film critical of aspects of Islam. Buscemi refutes widespread reports that he and Miller received a torrent of death-threats on the set.

Despite its modest scale, the finance for Interview collapsed several times. "My name alone doesn't mean anything to business people. I'm flattered that people see me that like that, and fame gets you a good table at a restaurant. But it doesn't always get the cheque in the mail. I'm just grateful to get the work."

'Charlotte's Web' opens on 9 February while 'Delirious' and 'Interview' open later this year