Steve Buscemi has cornered the market in creeps, weasels and tragic clowns. Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch love his shifty, nervous energy. Joel and Ethan Coen write roles especially for him, mostly to have him beaten up or killed on screen. Meanwhile, mainstream Hollywood directors hire him whenever they need a dash of indie credibility. For American cinema’s favourite loser, it’s a win-win situation.

Buscemi, who turns 50 in December, is much less sickly and rodent-like in person than he can appear on screen. Garrulous yet guarded, he resists analysing his work too deeply, but bristles at the limiting label of “cult” actor.

“I think of myself as an actor, it would be putting too much pressure on myself to think of myself as a cult actor,” he protests. “I try not to think about the state of independent film, I just try and work with the people who are doing good films. With directors like Tom DiCillo or the Coens or Jim Jarmusch, it makes my job as an actor easier because I don’t have to think about the character that much. It’s there in the writing.”

Besides his huge list of acting credits, Buscemi is also a director. He has made four well-regarded features and several episodes of The Sopranos, in which he also co-starred for a season as Tony Soprano’s cousin.

His latest feature project comes with a timely, tragic history. Interview is an English-language remake of a 2003 two-hander by the Dutch director Theo Van Gogh, who was murdered by an Islamic extremist in 2004. It stars Sienna Miller as an It Girl actress of Paris Hilton proportions, while Buscemi plays the haughty hard-news journalist sent to interview her. The mismatched pair engage in a bitter battle of wits, each simultaneously repelled and attracted by the other.

Interviewhas been widely interpreted as a sour attack on celebrity culture, but Buscemi disagrees. “I really didn’t see this film as a comment on celebrity,” he shrugs. “This is one journalist and one actress, and it’s their story. I was more interested in who they were as people than in what they did as their profession. It’s a great character piece.”

Miller’s tabloid profile as Jude Law’s former girlfriend lends her role an extra charge, although Buscemi insists her offstage reputation had no bearing on her casting.

“When her name was brought up I didn’t know who she was, I had to be reminded why I knew her,” he says.

“For me it was important just to get a really good actor, not do some sort of stunt casting and hire an actress who is known only for being a tabloid sensation.”

Born in Brooklyn and raised in suburban Long Island, Buscemi had a more blue-collar than Bohemian upbringing. His Italian-American father John was a sanitation engineer, his Irish-American mother Dorothy “pretty much a housewife”.

Former classmates recall him as something of a jock “with a greaser, auto-shop streak” who surprised them all by enrolling in the school drama programme.

Twenty years later, Buscemi returned to his old neighbourhood of Valley Stream to direct his debut feature, the semi-autobiographical Trees Lounge, dedicating it to his former drama teacher Lynne Lappin. In the intervening decades, however, his rise to fame was far from smooth.

His earliest showbusiness ambition was to become a comedian. But after an aborted college degree and drama lessons, Buscemi spent four years as a New York City fireman with Engine Company 55 in Little Italy.

He left in 1984, but remains loyal to his former colleagues. After the 9/11 attacks, he worked incognito as a volunteer, searching for bodies in the rubble of Ground Zero. He still campaigns against station closures.

In the late 1980s, Buscemi landed standout roles in low-budget films, including Bill Sherwood’s ground-breaking Aids drama Parting Glances and Jim Jarmusch’s playful rock’n’ roll fable Mystery Train.

But his belated mainstream breakthrough came in 1992, by fateful accident, with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. “I was actually auditioning for a Neil Simon film,” he says. “The same casting director was casting Reservoir Dogs, and Quentin saw that tape of me doing a totally different role for a film I didn’t even want to audition for.”

Films such as Reservoir Dogs and Fargo helped to make Buscemi a household name, but fame came with a price. He had a rare brush with tabloid notoriety in April 2001 after intervening in a bar brawl involving fellow actor Vince Vaughn in North Carolina, where both were shooting the forgettable thriller Domestic Disturbance.Buscemi required surgery for a serious knife wound to the face. Even now, six years later, he becomes uncomfortable discussing the incident. “It’s something I don’t really want to give that much attention to... so you can make something up if you want.”

It is a testament to Buscemi’s reputation for integrity that, even in trashy blockbusters, he usually maintains his dignity when all around are losing theirs. He makes no apologies, for example, about appearing in Michael Bay’s brainless action epics Armageddon and The Island.

“Michael Bay is really good at what he does,” Buscemi shrugs. “I go where the interesting work is, and for me that has been primarily in independent film. But I’m certainly not opposed to doing more commercial work. I’ve never done a role solely for the money, something I hated and thought was real garbage. But at the same time, I’m an actor and I want to make a living.”

Now on the cusp of 50, Buscemi has enjoyed a winning streak lasting almost two decades. All the same, he wears his success lightly.

He still lives in Brooklyn with his wife of 20 years, the sometime actor-director Jo Andres, and their teenage son Lucien. He insists he is just a “working actor”, does his own shopping and travels by subway.

“I like being in the public, I don’t like hiding from the public,” Buscemi shrugs. “For me, fame and celebrity are the least interesting thing about this business. If people know my work and I can help support a film like this, then to me the fame has a purpose. Otherwise, to be famous just for the sake of being famous holds no interest.”

Interview is being screened in The Times BFI London Film Festival, Odeon West End 2, Thur, 6.30pm, and Fri, 3.30pm (www.timesonline.co.uk/lff 020-7928 3232) before its release on Nov 2

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette