Boardwalk Empire Stopped Steve Buscemi From Giving Up On Acting For Good
With "Boardwalk Empire," it's hard to imagine anybody in the lead role except Steve Buscemi. As Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, Buscemi created a conflicted and engaging character who gamed both the political and criminal systems of Atlantic City in the 1920s for personal wealth and at great personal cost. The actor's demeanor, humor, and unconventional choices could easily have been at odds with the historical sweep of the HBO Prohibition Era crime drama. Moreover, Steve Buscemi had never really been much of a leading man, instead delivering scene-stealing character actor work in movies like "Reservoir Dogs" or "Armageddon."
But he made the role of Nucky his own, veering far from the real-life inspiration for the character to give the show one of its finest assets: an edgy and ruthless man driven by greed and loss to navigate the vast network of alliances presented by the early days of organized crime. The show could be brutal, killing its darlings at a moment's notice.
While Nucky isn't the show's most exciting character, like Chalky White (Michael K. Williams) or Al Capone (Stephen Graham), he is a perfect fit for the show's themes as someone who is always "half a gangster." He is a psychologically rich character, and Buscemi's famously expressive eyes carry the performance through even when the writing falters.
While Buscemi's casting was essential to the show, both in terms of its contemporaneous success and its lasting legacy, it almost didn't happen. The actor had hit a bit of a drought before the show's production and found himself questioning if other career options might be worth pursuing. According to GQ, he was effectively on the verge of quitting the trade before "Boardwalk Empire" came along. But the show changed everything for him.
Enoch Johnson
What kind of man would Nucky Thompson be? To look at Enoch L. Johnson, his namesake, there are a couple of choice similarities. From his stewardship of organized crime in Atlantic City (and throughout the country) to his signature carnation, both the real man and the fictional character dealt with navigating the power of political operation with the high tempers and violent threats of Mafiosi. However, Johnson was over 6 feet tall according to the Mob Museum, and he lived to be 85. The same couldn't be said for Nucky Thompson.
But the beauty of a show like "Boardwalk Empire" is less in how it goes over the facts and more in how it embraces Nucky's line in the pilot: "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." When the show was following mob lore strictly, it tended to be a lot weaker than when it followed its characters on their ahistorical digressions. Getting cast on the show came with homework for actors playing the historical figures, but many of its most vivid characters, like Rosetti (Bobby Cannavale) or Owen Sleator (Charlie Cox), were largely invented and fit perfectly within the show's milieu. Nucky, the character who walked the line between gangster behavior and respectability, also would walk the line between fact and fiction.
For showrunner Terence Winter, it was a matter of creative license. As he told Collider, the show tried to be as historically accurate as possible, but he "would say we're running in the high 90s," in terms of accuracy. Whether or not Nucky Thompson looked like Nucky Johnson or lived in the exact same way, it was more necessary that the actor could emphasize his fall from grace.
Buscemi's rise
Steve Buscemi could emphasize Nucky's fall from grace, playing both the conflicted politician and brutal gangster. Per Collider, according to executive producer Martin Scorsese, "It was interesting that Steve would play this part because it's a character that is basically a decent guy, but that world corrupts him so much."
Scorsese had worked with Buscemi some two decades before the filming of the "Boardwalk Empire" pilot, directing him in his segment of the 1988 anthology film "New York Stories," "Life Lessons." There, Buscemi was a nervy, extremely New York performance artist named Gregory Stark, doing standup in the subway and stealing away the protagonist's much-younger girlfriend. Surprising for anybody who learned of Buscemi through his more well-known work, "Life Lessons" shows him in a surprisingly warm light.
It was a far cry from the performances that would become Buscemi's calling cards throughout the '90s: "lunatics and weirdos" as a 2020 GQ profile puts it, criminals like Mr. Pink in "Reservoir Dogs" and Carl Showalter in "Fargo," and unforgettable supporting roles in movies like "Con Air," "Desperado," even "Billy Madison." Whether it was his unconventional looks or performance fearlessness, Buscemi's work had a wildly appealing and substantial soul. It may have made him an easy choice for a stock role as an edgy criminal. Every time he brought everything to the part.
Despite being such a definitive character actor in those movies, his fortunes began to change in the 2000s. Removed from the rise of director-driven crime movies on which he'd made his name, he slightly moved away from screen acting. The first part of the shift was voice work in animated films, but the most significant shift was in his directorial work.
Directorial temptation
While the 2000s saw Steve Buscemi creating one of Pixar's most indelible villains with Randall from "Monsters, Inc." and dominating "Spy Kids 2" as a mad scientist, the kinds of roles that he had become associated with were drifting away from him. Having aged into his 40s, he was given less of a chance to play eccentric outcasts and criminals. As he told GQ, "I felt like I was at an odd age where I was too old to play some characters, not old enough to play other characters."
Perhaps the most classically Buscemi role of the 2000s came from his year on "The Sopranos," as volatile con Tony Blundetto. It was a show he was well-acquainted with by that point, having directed one of the show's best episodes (and Paulie Walnuts showcase), "Pine Barrens," just a couple of years before.
Because of the paucity of roles he faced, there was temptation to switch entirely to directing in the late 2000s. He had made a number of well-received independent films like "Animal Factory" and the mini-DV tape beauty "Lonesome Jim," and his television direction, including the work on "The Sopranos," saw him leaving his mark on a wide variety of shows. Everything seemed to be adding up to a largely directorial career.
That is, until "Boardwalk Empire" came calling. Given that the show's creator Terence Winter had already worked with Buscemi on "Sopranos," he knew what to expect of the actor. And Buscemi, having already resigned himself to not getting the part, assumed Winter would be rejecting him.
Instead, he got to spend five years as Nucky, adding one of the great television antiheroes to his incredibly prolific CV.