THE THIN MAN.(Steve Buscemi)(Interview)

Steve Buscemi doesn't loom into view. He's not a looming kind of guy. On an overcast day in June, as I waited on the designated corner of Union Square to meet him for the first time, I called his assistant. "He's late," I said. "Where is he?" Buscemi, it turned out, was standing thirty feet away from me. Round-shouldered and wafer-thin, in a gray work shirt, black chinos, and a weathered denim jacket, with a baseball cap pulled tightly over his forehead, he was virtually invisible in the crowd.

Five feet nine and forty-seven years old, Buscemi could be almost anybody--or everybody. Give him some tattoos and a mane of shaggy hair, and he's the squirt-gun-toting heavy-metal doofus in "Airheads" (1994); put him in a blue sequinned dress, a red pageboy wig, and high heels, and he's the world-weary transvestite taxi-dancer in "Somebody to Love" (1994); slick back his hair and give him a pair of brown loafers, like the ones he wore as Tony Blundetto in "The Sopranos," and he has the gaunt, retro lounge-lizard look of the director John Waters. (In fact, the likeness is so uncanny that Waters used Buscemi's image on his Christmas card one year.)

Nothing about Buscemi's physical presence suggests the poetic lineaments of masculine film glamour. He is pale, almost pallid--as if he'd been reared in a mushroom cellar. In a certain light, he can look cadaverous. His eyes are large and bulgy, with a hint of melancholy. When he smiles, his mouth displays a shantytown of uneven, uncapped teeth. And yet that unprepossessing ordinariness is what makes Buscemi captivating as a performer. It gives him the unmistakable stamp of the authentic, and it helps to explain his emergence over the past two decades as an icon of independent films. (Buscemi himself understands the value of his rumpled looks. When his dentist suggested fixing his teeth, he told her, "You're going to kill my livelihood if you do that.") "Steve is the little guy," says the director Jim Jarmusch, who cast Buscemi in his 1989 film "Mystery Train." "In the characters he plays and in his own life, he's representing that part of us all that's not on top of the world."

When Buscemi and I finally found each other in Union Square, I raised the issue of lunch. There are more than twenty restaurants on Union Square, many of them excellent. Buscemi pondered for a moment, then chose the coffee shop in front of us ("bad food and worse service," one review says). "Appetite" is not a word that comes to mind in relation to Buscemi. His boniness carries with it a hint of negativity, a kind of rejection of the world. (In the course of our two-hour lunch, he didn't manage to finish a grilled cheese sandwich.) Likewise, although Buscemi has one of the most famous faces in modern cinema, he's not afflicted with a star's self-consciousness. He talks, but he also listens; he's not watching himself go by, and he doesn't carry himself with the expectation of being seen. As a result, he often isn't. He sat in a booth at the busy coffee shop for close to an hour before someone spotted him. ("You were great in 'Desperado'--one of my favorite movies of all time." "Thank you," Buscemi said. "Appreciate it.")

Onscreen or off, Buscemi is never ostentatious. Still, with his simplicity and restraint--an emotional as well as a physical minimalism--he manufactures a truthfulness that always surprises. At lunch, as he tentatively told the story of his working-class upbringing (his father was a sanitation worker, his mother a hostess at Howard Johnson's), he cast an unexpected light on his own edgy inhibition. We were talking about the terror he'd felt at nineteen, when he first thought of moving from Long Island to Manhattan to try to be an actor. What held him back, he said, was "this feeling that you don't deserve to be heard, that you don't really have anything to say or a point of view that's interesting, because you haven't been properly educated. I was very intimidated, basically feeling culturally inferior."

When Buscemi acts, his thinness and his slouch--which seem a product of that original shame--only heighten his odd presence, which is a topic of conversation in many of the seventy-eight movies he's made since his first major role, in "Parting Glances," in 1986. In Joel and Ethan Coen's "Fargo" (1996), the other characters repeatedly make fun of Buscemi's Carl Showalter, a dopey kidnapper turned killer. When Frances McDormand's beady-eyed, homespun policewoman presses a hooker for a detailed description of Showalter, whom she has recently bedded, all the girl can say is "The little guy was kinda funny-lookin' . . . He wasn't circumcised. . . . Funny-lookin' more than most people, even."

Buscemi's persona is understated, opaque, bewildered, ironical. "You seem a little stoned. What are you on?" someone says to his character in Terry Zwigoff's "Ghost World" (2000). He is in the hospital after having been betrayed, humiliated, and wrestled to the ground in a grocery store. "High on life," he replies. "Steve's a visitor in the world," the director Alexandre Rockwell, who has worked with Buscemi on five films, said. "His body, his face--everything around him is whirling, but you always feel in Steve a stillness, almost a calm." This stillness plays variously as anxiety, disconnection, and threat. Sometimes, a single character draws all three into a sort of trifecta of tension, like the silent hit man Mr. Shhh, in "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead" (1995). Buscemi's look is deadbeat; his sense of humor is downbeat. He can play loss for laughs--in "The Impostors" (1998) he was Happy Franks, a suicidal cabaret singer sobbing his way through "The Nearness of You"--or he can play it for real.