His experience also illustrates an important distinction.
He was not among the firefighters who spent weeks or months working at Ground Zero.
He was there for a relatively short period.
Many other first responders remained at the site for far longer, repeatedly returning to the rubble while dealing with funerals, missing colleagues, exhaustion, and uncertainty.
Buscemi has emphasized that difference himself.
He has spoken about the survivor's guilt experienced by people who survived when so many of their colleagues did not. He also discussed the difficulty many firefighters have in admitting that they need emotional or psychological support.
For a profession built around helping others, asking for help can be surprisingly difficult.
“I Went There to Help”
Perhaps the most revealing part of Buscemi's story is something he said years later: he went to Ground Zero intending to help, but he also felt that being there helped him.
In a CBS interview, he described the experience as strangely comforting despite the devastation. He had returned to a community he knew. He was surrounded by people who understood the work, the danger, the grief, and the culture of the firehouse.
That paradox is central to understanding why he returned.
On one level, Buscemi was trying to contribute his physical labor.
On another, he was reconnecting with an identity he had left behind.
For years, he had been known primarily as an actor. But before the movies, before television fame, before awards and celebrity, he had been a firefighter.
At Ground Zero, he could once again participate in the work he had once done.
There was no special Hollywood role waiting for him there.
He was simply another person wearing firefighting gear and moving debris.
That is why the story has endured.
It is not really about a famous actor doing something heroic.
It is about a former firefighter returning to his old company when his former colleagues were facing the greatest catastrophe of their professional lives.
Celebrity Had No Meaning at Ground Zero
One of the most striking elements of the story is the contrast between Buscemi's public identity and his role at Ground Zero.
By 2001, he was already a recognizable actor. But the work at Ground Zero was not glamorous.
There were no movie cameras, no red carpets, and no special treatment.
There was rubble.
There were long hours.
There were exhausted firefighters.
There were missing friends.
There were human remains.
There was grief.
And there was work that needed to be done.
Buscemi did not go there to tell people that he was a famous actor.
He went because he had once been a firefighter.
That distinction matters.
The culture of the firehouse is built heavily around the idea that people are judged by what they do for one another. The 9/11 Memorial Museum's accounts of firefighters working after the attacks repeatedly describe a similar culture of cooperation, mutual respect, exhaustion, and sacrifice.
Buscemi was returning to that environment.
His celebrity existed outside the firehouse.
Inside it, his most relevant qualification was the one he had earned years earlier.
He knew how to be a firefighter.
The Loss of Engine 55
The human cost for Engine 55 was particularly painful.
Five members of the company were lost on September 11.
For Buscemi, the names were not abstract statistics. They were connected to people he had known during his own years at the company.
When he arrived back at Engine 55 on September 12, he discovered the devastating reality facing the company.
The firehouse was no longer simply a place from his past.
It had become a place of mourning.
Yet the surviving firefighters still had a job to do.
That was one of the defining characteristics of the days after September 11. People who had lost friends and colleagues continued working.
They attended funerals and returned to the site.
They searched for missing people.
They helped identify remains.
They supported one another.
They kept working.
Buscemi's presence placed him inside that same cycle, even if only temporarily.
What Happened After Those Five Days?
Eventually, Buscemi stopped going to Ground Zero.
Returning to ordinary life proved difficult.
The contrast between the world of Ground Zero and everyday life was enormous. At the site, the situation was immediate and concrete: there was always another piece of debris to move, another search area, another firefighter who needed help.
Away from the site, life continued.
People went to work.
Restaurants reopened.
Movies continued to be made.
Television programs continued.
But for Buscemi and many other responders, the psychological reality of September 11 did not simply disappear.
In later interviews, Buscemi spoke openly about the emotional impact.
He said that he found it difficult to look at images of the attacks after he stopped working at Ground Zero. He did not return to the site for months, by which point the physical landscape had changed considerably.
He has also spoken about post-traumatic stress and the mental-health needs of first responders.