Steve Buscemi Is Hot. Grow Up.
"They hated Jesus because he told them the truth."
A decade ago, a meme was born, known simply as “Buscemi Eyes.” Google it now and you’ll still garner enough results to discern the premise without looking on Know Your Meme for a comprehensive definition. But the origin goes like this: in 2011, humor website and pop culture forum Something Awful posted a Photoshop Friday, a themed showcase where the Something Awful users put their image manipulation skills to the test to create an entirely new and hopefully amusing picture.
For this Photoshop Friday, users were tasked with a prompt called the "Celebrity Match Game,” where two celebrities’ faces had to be fused together to create some horrible, hilarious mutant likeness. Catherine Zeta-Jones is merged with her husband Michael Douglas; Sarah Silverman is blended hideously with Rodney Dangerfield; and one matchup featured Justin Bieber smushed together with actor Steve Buscemi, creating a malformed version of the Biebs with giant, wet eyes that are starting to slide off his prepubescent face.
From there, things took off and sort of skyrocketed over the next few years. It became a popular meme across the majority of mainstream internet corners, where attractive celebrities, winsome cartoon characters, and cuddly animals would have actor Steve Buscemi’s trademark peepers superimposed over their own eyes, contorting their faces into absurd, goblin-like visages. The joke was that Buscemi has ugly, creepy eyes, and that it would be funny to make images which are otherwise stereotypically appealing look ugly, too.
In 2014, the actor made an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, where the host confronted him about the popular meme. Buscemi — with no hint of fooling — began by telling Meyers that he didn’t find the meme funny at all. Meyers then proceeded to show Buscemi a series of images of classic Disney princesses with their eyes Buscemified. After he was finished, Buscemi responded to him plainly — “It makes those characters a little bit hotter, don’t you think?” — refusing to lean into what was so funny about the gag.
I used to follow a Tumblr account called the-pietriarchy (now, apparently just pietriarchy). I’m no longer on Tumblr, but it seems that she still very much is. It’s a popular account run by a young Swedish (I think?) woman named Elke who, at the time that I was using the site, posted casually and very humorously about mostly video games, movies, and television. She’d become somewhat infamous and equal parts admired by her many followers on the site for her open and relentless thirsting over Steve Buscemi. I don’t know anything about her beyond her presence on Tumblr, but we were mutuals for a brief window of time right before I stopped using the site entirely and then deleted the account. We had shared a few fleeting interactions where we bonded in DMs over our common Buscemi love, along with our strange, perverse attraction to David Thewlis and his disgusting fake teeth in season three of the FX series Fargo.
All this to say, it was because of pietrarchy that I first realized that Steve Buscemi is indeed hot, one of our most celebrated and versatile character actors who has, for as long as I’ve known about him, been something of a punchline due to his distinct appearance. Like I often am with the numerous offbeat things that I’m obsessed with, pietriarchy was embracing this attraction to Steve Buscemi as a running bit and also in total earnestness. She made it part of her brand to have a celebrity crush on Steve Buscemi because it was seen as funny, made her stand out from the crowd, and built her a unique persona — and she was also completely sincere about it.
Late in high school, all through college, and for a bit of time after finishing undergrad, it became my own brand among those who knew me to be in love with Steve Buscemi — following in pietrarichy’s footsteps like a learned disciple. For many of the people in my own life, I was their pietriarchy, posting incessantly about Steve Buscemi’s perceived hotness until my name and Steve Buscemi’s name were often interlinked among my friends, who would occasionally send me memes, posts, or images of him out of respect for my mania. Some of them probably thought it was a bit, and it was — but, as with pietriarchy, it was totally genuine.
It first came into focus with Reservoir Dogs, which is objectively one of the hottest Buscemi roles — young, slicked-back hair, suit and tie, chain-smoking — and probably followed with Fargo. But the height of this fixation occurred during my run-through of Boardwalk Empire in college, where Buscemi leads in his role of corrupt Atlantic City treasurer Nucky Thompson, and which was arguably my most annoying and obnoxious period as a Tumblr user. My Buscemi obsession has since waned but never truly burned out. It’s always there, peeking out from the corners of my endless conveyor belt of pop culture obsessions as one of a handful that will never truly die.
This is because Steve Buscemi is hot. Many people don’t want to say it, and if they do, it’s in the same breath as admitting a guilty pleasure, like they’re afraid to say it for fear of what people might think of them. Or they’re saying it ironically. Or they’re writing an article about it where it’s portrayed like a dirty secret, in which they need affirmation from others in order to admit it to be true — creating a “safe space” to confess an attraction to an unconventional-looking celebrity. This happens a lot when people talk about finding a non-conventional-looking famous person attractive. I’m guilty of doing it too, despite being unconventional-looking myself. We put on airs as if to act like feeling attraction to someone who doesn’t fit our unreasonable, Western standards of beauty needs to be danced around, tongue in cheek. Even writing this I feel some guilt that I’m making it into such a statement at all, that I’m defending something which is unfortunately considered a deviation from the norm. What would Steve Buscemi think if he read this essay? Would he feel embarrassed, insecure, offended — or celebrated, as is my goal?
The truth is, he’s almost certainly used to being puzzled at for his looks and being seen as a curiosity by general audiences, if his muted reaction during his Late Night appearance is any indication. But there’s nothing to be ashamed of in admitting that Steve Buscemi is hot because it’s a fact, not something that needs to be owned up to all. Part of the reason I used to like talking about it so much was because it felt like if I did it enough, people would finally shed their pompous reservations towards unusual beauty and realize it to be true as well.
Steve Buscemi’s unconventional face has also made him one of our best, most recognizable actors. He’s marked by his crooked-toothed grin, lanky frame, and trademark eyes, which are not only large but protruding and swaddled by bags underneath each one — something that was present even when he was younger. He has a skeletal, lizard-like look to him that matches the villainous reptilian creature Randall in Disney’s animated Monsters, Inc., of which the tones of his squeaky, adenoidal voice wed perfectly. He’s expressive, charismatic, menacing, and even funny and lovable, as he plays the most cowardly, amoral, and conniving slimeballs. This can be seen in the scheming Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, hapless crook Carl Showalter in Fargo, real-life Nikita Khrushchev in The Death of Stalin, and Tony Blundetto in season five of The Sopranos. His minute-long appearance as the fast-talking lover of a mobster in the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing is brief but scene-stealing. Checking the cast list of a movie before you watch it and discovering that Steve Buscemi is among the players is always a source of relief; if the movie is bad, at least Steve Buscemi will be in it.
Many of Buscemi’s most notable performances are linked by the taut thread of malfeasance, but this isn’t always the case. He’s portrayed a long line of sad underdogs, like the loveless Seymour in Ghost World; the object of Billy Madison’s childhood bullying, Danny McGrath; ill-fated Donny in The Big Lebowski; and mentally ill Pete Wittel in the series Horace and Pete. This is in addition to a parade of quirky characters, like his various roles on the sketch show Portlandia, poet Norther Winslow in Big Fish, and private detective Lenny Wozniak in 30 Rock. And, recently, he portrayed a humble firefighter in 2019’s The King of Staten Island.
This latter performance played off Buscemi’s real-life time as a volunteer firefighter during the 1980s, who returned for a week-long stint following 9/11 to help search for missing firefighters among the rubble. He also assisted in the clean-up efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and is documented as being incredibly, genuinely modest and also somewhat insecure, despite his prolific career appearing in countless cultural touchstones. Still, his documented acts of kindness, heroism, and occasional placement on lists of “nicest actors in Hollywood” run counter to his famously odd appearance and sinister-sounding voice, which make him perfectly typecast to portray thugs, villains, and other lowlifes.
But he is, perhaps, most marked in his staggering career by playing outcasts. Desperate men struggling to fit in. People who exist on the margins, who are bullied, unloved, weird, or otherwise not quite aligned with the status quo — and who will occasionally go to great lengths in order to be accepted. Adam Sandler has had a longstanding professional relationship with Buscemi (Sandler affectionately refers to him as “The Boosh”), casting him in bit roles in his Happy Madison productions, playing all sorts of oddballs and eccentrics like “Crazy Eyes” in Mr. Deeds, “Homeless Guy” in Big Daddy, and escaped mental patient Walter Lambert in the recent Hubie Halloween.
When Buscemi’s characters are placed into more of a position of power, they frequently display an uneasiness existing in it, or the joke is that they’re totally incompetent. Mr. Pink is promptly ridiculed for being given said name as his heist alias; Carl Showalter lacks authority over his accomplice, Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare); Lenny Wozniak is hilariously inept at his job in 30 Rock; and bassist of the wannabe rock band The Lone Rangers, Rex (in 1994’s Airheads), is deluded into thinking he and his bandmates are worthy of airplay, to the extent that they hijack a radio station until their single is played. Despite the fact that he plays the wholly towering figure of Nucky Thompson leading Boardwalk Empire, this profile sees Buscemi recounting two instances of preferring to shift from a more powerful role to simply being “one of the guys.” It fits with his odd appearance to play men who are pitiable and stuck on the fringes because that’s where people who deviate from the norm are usually placed. Insecurity is built into your persona if you’ve grown up feeling different from others — it’s something that you can’t help but carry with you.
Thankfully, the good word on Steve Buscemi’s factual hotness is increasing. Simply searching “steve buscemi is hot” on Twitter reveals — heartwarmingly — just how exponentially the sentiment has spread. There’s a lovely TikTok fancam someone made of him in one of his earliest roles, Parting Glances, in his late-twenties, where he looks angelic with his loosely coiffed hair and leather jacket and a cigarette between his lips. There’s a Tumblr account dedicated to him being “actually extremely sexy” called “Fuck Yeah Steve Buscemi.”
And clearly there are those who have held this sentiment long before now, as Buscemi apparently modeled for clothing company H&M back in 1999. People have also noticed the uncanny similarities between his younger self and hot, young contemporary actor Bill Skarsgård, who, while more widely thirsted after than Buscemi ever was, has received similar puzzlement over his perceived “creepy” appearance, which did help to land him the role as the terrifying clown Pennywise in the recent It movies.
And a few years ago, another meme made the rounds, in which young Buscemi was compared to a young Angelina Jolie. It’s fair to say that their faces look a little similar, and the sentiment is offered as to the “unfortunate” concept that one of them is considered a standard beauty while the other is not. The caption underneath the images reads: “One of these people is regarded as one of the most attractive in the world, and the other as one of the least, but for one brief, shining moment, they looked exactly alike.”
It’s an embarrassing, shallow observation that rings false (both of them are still attractive), but it does hold a nugget of truth: why is it that one of these people is considered beautiful by the general population and the other isn’t? Of course, the answer to that is elementary-school-level simple: because of our society’s arbitrarily imposed beauty standards, there are certain features that are seen as more desirable on women than on men, and vice versa.
But the thing about unconventionally attractive people is that they’re hot because they’re unconventional, not in spite of it. Angelina Jolie is certainly attractive in one way, but Steve Buscemi is attractive in another. Steve Buscemi is hot because he looks weird, which is why this piece is not about why “Steve Buscemi is hot in a weird way,” or “Am I the only one who thinks Steve Buscemi is kinda hot?” There’s no need to other myself in this line of thinking (I am obviously less alone these days, anyway), or to act as if feeling this way is something to be half-ashamed of, akin to ironically loving a bad movie; nor to act like Buscemi’s hotness manages to shine through his otherwise strange looks. Saying someone is weird-looking is not a negative thing. Our culture currently has enough doe eyes, Kewpie doll lips, and turned-up button noses filling TikTok videos and Instagram Explore feeds and the mainstream media at large. What we could always use more of are hot people who look like Steve Buscemi.*
Well I'm glad I look like him..lmfao I'm finally in..