Wanna Know: Dennis Leary

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Dennis Leary

Denis Leary still smokes. He’s taking a drag off a cigarette while standing next to a fire truck on the “Rescue Me” set in industrial Long Island City, across the East River from Manhattan. At six feet, three inches, the actor-writer-producer-comedian-philanthropist has a blond moptop, ropy limbs, and weathered skin. His face in repose forms a mild grimace. He looks like a fireman.

And well he should. He plays troubled Tommy Gavin on the acclaimed FX drama, which throws you headlong into the professional and personal lives of New York City firefighters. While it chronicles the downtime antics and risky business of a fictional firehouse, it refuses to give some characters black hats and others white ones. As such, you find yourself getting angry with the guys when they make mistakes. You feel they know better. You care.

That the show is also very funny says something because it probes delicate areas - loss, divorce, addiction, bigotry, even 9/11 - and does so via techniques more at home in “Six Feet Under” than, say, “Emergency!” Sometimes it uses documentary realism, sometimes creative means. An awkward conversation between Tommy and his distant father (Charles Durning), for example, included subtitles that spelled out the emotions each man avoided expressing.

“A show like ours had never been done on television in this country, at least not correctly,” Leary says. “One of the things I was proudest of was when we did the first couple of episodes and showed it to a bunch of guys in the FDNY, and they all said, ‘Christ, this is the closest I can imagine to sounding what it sounds like in my firehouse.’”

He promises the first new episode - airing June 21 - contains a twist that will send shockwaves throughout the entire second season.

When I arrive on set, a production assistant leads me inside to craft services. Amid Warholian wall-hangings of TV moments past - Archie Bunker and Bobby Brady in stills silk-screened with the same dotted pastels - a broad-shouldered man says hello. He has graying black hair and wears the navy-blues of the FDNY.

So naturally I ask him if he’s one of the actors. “I’m a firefighter,” he says. “They’re doing some stunts, and we have to make sure everything goes off okay.” Past him are several off-white tables. Guys in similar attire are seated at two tables - one table a group of actors; the other, of firefighters.

Before long, I’m called outside. The aroma of the sushi being put out for lunch is replaced by an odor of propane and motor oil. A scene involving a fire has just been completed. The sunwashed lot makes everyone squint or don shades. Leary is talking to a woman with a clipboard when his publicist introduces me to him. Leary gives me a who-are-you glance, then nods when the publicist answers him, and shakes my hand. Leary and I amble away from the fire truck and move to a loading dock. We sit on folding chairs and converse over bottles of cold water.

“Didn’t you quit smoking?” I ask. “Or was that your character?”

“I quit.”

I figure he’s joking. But he doesn’t smile. In fact, his glacial blue eyes lock in on mine.

“You did?”

“Yeah. In ’98.”

“But before...”

“Oh, yeah, yeah. I started up again.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Probably around the time my cousin died.”

He stands and takes off the heavy, smocklike firefighter coat he’d worn in the previous scene. Hanging it over the blade of a prop ax shoved into a garbage can with umpteen hockey sticks, he fishes out a pack of Marlboro Lights and sits back down. Once he drains the bottle of Poland Spring, he uses it as an ashtray.

I know of his cousin.

Jeremiah H. Lucey, 38. A firefighter, eight years on the job. Killed along with five comrades in a warehouse fire in Leary’s hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. “48 Hours” reported on the 1999 blaze - on the shortage of exits, the depleting oxygen tanks, the temperatures inside that climbed above 3,000 degrees.

Left behind two boys and a widow, Michelle.

Jerry.

“What was he like?” I ask.

“In his obituary, it said he was ‘a firefighter’s firefighter,’ which is exactly true,” Leary replies. “Even the night when he died, he was supposed to be driving. If you drive the rig, you got to stay with the rig, and he hated doing that. So he switched up with another guy and said, ‘Come on, you drive. Let me go in. I hate sitting outside.’ He died doing what he loved to do. And it’s kind of like what Tommy Gavin is supposed to be. You have to have one of those guys who has to be tempered by other personalities, because firefighting is a team sport.”

Dennis Leary Coke