In hindsight, Friday the 13th was a pretty good day to meet Steve Buscemi. Here was an actor, after all, who has played some of the most star-crossed schmucks ever committed to the screen.
Still, the timing also seemed fortuitous, I suggested, because of the series we were planning to talk about. It was a mild afternoon in June, and we had just met for lunch at a Midtown Manhattan hotel to talk about “Wednesday,” Netflix’s spooky, sardonic and spectacularly popular addition to the Addams Family canon.
Buscemi had been cast in Season 2 as Barry Dort, the new principal of Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for werewolves, vampires and the perpetually gloomy Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega). Dort models himself after Edgar Allan Poe and is “a big fan of Nevermore,” Buscemi said, though the principal has “nefarious reasons for being there” — an affable dork with a dark side, which is practically Buscemi’s brand.
For Buscemi, though, our meeting date was auspicious for an additional reason: “I always loved Friday the 13th,” he said, because he was born on one. (December 1957, for any astrologers keeping track.)
Buscemi’s personal connection to the unluckiest of days makes a poetic kind of sense given the roster of hard-luck characters he has brought to life over the decades. It also makes a perverse kind of sense for a guy from humble beginnings who has experienced his own share of tough luck. He has been stabbed, been punched by a stranger and suffered immense personal tragedy. He has been hit by a car and hit by a bus. He keeps coming back, keeps working.
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