It’s the show that’s hotter than a three-alarm fire: the FX firefighter dramedy Rescue Me returned for a third season May 30–and Hollywood.com fans the flames with series star-creator Denis Leary.
Hollywood.com: Let’s go back to the beginning: talk about how you got the idea for the show.
Denis Leary: There’s a crew in New York, a firehouse where I’ve hung out for the last 20 years, a great crew of guys. A lot of this is based on the family at the firehouse—which is what it is to those firemen. It’s like they have two families, and quite frankly, they’re a different animal than the rest of us. They walk around and when they look at a fat person they go, “What if I had to pull her out of the fire?” Everything they look at deals with life and death. I think the firehouse family is easier for them to navigate than real life. The grocery list is something they’re just not good at. They’re really good at running into a building and doing sh*t that the rest of us can’t imagine doing.
HW: There’s been a lot of talk about the films United 93 and World Trade Center, and concern that it’s too soon to explore the 9/11 issues in popular entertainment—yet Rescue Me started in on them two years ago. Did you have the same concerns?
DL: We were concerned about it, but we were gonna make the thing that we set out to make. The firehouse is full of a black sense of humor. It’s how they get over things on a daily basis, the incredibly horrible things that happen over and over again. Everybody knew what these guys had gone through and how much they lost, so we were worried maybe a little bit, but we went about the work in an organic way. You can’t put a timetable on that stuff.
HW: Did you have any hesitation about doing another series after your experience with The Job?
DL: Well, I come from the theater, I’d never done television, and I really loved it, loved the process, and The Job was getting unbelievable reviews, but they’re like, “Can’t you turn it into a three-camera show?” It’s like working with the big studios. They give you $120 million to make something and they want $120 million back, and if they don’t get it back they’re not gonna give you any more money for something else. The $20 million man has to do the gorilla dance that he’s done before. They don’t give you $20 million to do something different. Do the same f*cking thing over and over again until we’re sick of you!
HW: How does the network experience compare to working for FX?
DL: They not only believe in the show, they love the show, they watch the show, they can’t wait to market the show. On ABC we couldn’t show anything or say anything, and here the only thing we can’t say is “f**k.” I don’t mind being released from the power of that word at all. I’m more interested in behavior. We have the freedom to say whatever we want, and more importantly, behavior-wise there’s almost nothing that we’re not allowed to show and I like that, to really push the envelope.
HW: What kind of feedback to you get from real life firefighters?
DL: They help us. Sometimes I just write “Exterior, Manhattan, Burning building, Trucks pull up. Talk to Terry Quinn,” and they’ll give us the dialogue and the stunt action. One of the best examples is this year we came up with a bus fire in one of the early episodes and I called Terry. “We got a bus fire coming up next week.” And he goes, “I’m at a bus fire right now!” “So take notes!”
HW: Does the FDNY cooperate?
DL: Because of what happened on 9/11, a lot of the senior guys disappeared,so the senior guys are mostly my age, and those guys have given us the freedom to have the trucks and the access and all that. But the older guys, it becomes problematic. Some of them don’t like what we’re doing. They don’t like their secrets coming out. But if we didn’t piss somebody off we wouldn’t be doing our job right.
HW: Were there any problems getting to shoot at Ground Zero?
DL: No, none. A lot of people in the FDNY in power love the show. But it’s a very difficult place to go to. I’m not a cemetery guy and this is the place they were buried.
HW: It was important for you to shoot in New York.
DL: Before we went [to FX] somebody offered us a sh*tload of money guaranteed for 13 episodes to shoot it in Toronto, but there was no way. The city of New York is such a character in this show. You can’t fake it.
HW: Are you surprised that so many women are addicted to the show?
DL: No. Early on, my wife said to me, ‘You know, this is the first time in a long time that real men have been shown on TV, the way they talk, the way they act, what they think about, the petty things that they argue about, what they care about, what they’re made up of.’ A lot of women are going to think they have their ears to the ground in a secret room that they’re not supposed to be in, and I think that might be true. They can be as courageous as they are, and still argue about f*cking ridiculous things like the size of their penis.
HW: Your character Tommy Gavin is clearly flawed, but did you worry about making him too unsympathetic?
DL: No, I never worried about that even though some people brought it up. My favorite drama on television is The Sopranos, and this is a guy who kills people for a living. From the beginning I knew our overriding factor was what [Tommy] does for a living—he saves people. The character is based on two friends of mine and almost everything that happens has come somewhere from real life.
HW: Any exciting surprises in store for the new season?
DL: There’s a big surprise in [Episode] One, there’s a huge surprise in [Episode] Two and then there’s a shocker at the end of [Episode] Four. It’s pretty insane. I’m not gonna tell you what’s gonna happen in terms of the crew staying together or not staying together and how many replacements we’re gonna need, but that is a big issue. And as the season starts the foundation is ripped through: who’s gonna leave, who’s gonna stay, who’s gonna get killed. The danger that Tommy and the guys always feel is looming over their heads is if somebody dies again or goes away, that they’re gonna get another woman. They’re deathly afraid of that, especially if she’s gonna be attractive.
HW: You have some big guest stars this season with Susan Sarandon and Marisa Tomei.
DL: Yes. Susan I’ve known for a while. I play hockey with Tim Robbins and Susan was actually the coach of the celebrity hockey team that we had, and I know she’s a fan of the show. And she wants to spend a lot of time in New York, because they have an agreement between them that one of them is always home for the kids. So I said, “Come on, do the show, you’re here, it’s like two days a week.” We got her to play Danny’s new older, sexier, wealthy girlfriend. Marisa I started going after last year, because I knew she was interested in doing something like this.
HW: How hot is it wearing the firefighter gear?
DL: It’s very hot in the summertime. It’s 65 extra pounds. If you’re a firefighter, you go in and fight a fire for three or four hours and take a break. And we have to run up and down the stairs and carry this stuff around over the course of a 12-hour day.
HW: How do you find time to write and also act?
DL: It gets hairy, but we have built-in hiatuses. We write as we go. I always feel that the hiatuses are my writing catch up time. I know it sounds insane and it is insane but we’re so used to doing it, it seems normal. I have to rewrite something tomorrow on the plane and then get ready to get out notes for [Episodes] Nine and Ten. We do two episodes at a time. I love the craziness of it. You never know what’s gonna happen.
