Steve Buscemi is one of the most recognizable and versatile character actors in the business, and over the course of a distinguished career, he’s won a Golden Globe, an Emmy and a Screen Actors Guild award from a combined total of 23 nominations. Not only that, but he’s also one of the most prolific talents in the industry, racking up well over 150 credits.
Despite frequently working with the Coen brothers in Miller’s Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy, Barton Fink, Fargo and The Big Lebowski, as well as appearing in Reservoir Dogs, Desperado, Con Air, Armageddon and many more, a lot of people will know Buscemi best from his collaborations with Adam Sandler. The duo first starred together in 1994’s Airheads, and this week’s release of Netflix exclusive Hubie Halloween marks their sixteenth movie as part of the same cast.
Buscemi is well established as a vital part of the Happy Madison Productions inner circle by this point, and in a recent interview, Sandler admitted that it didn’t take much convincing to get him to sign on as Hubie Dubois’ mild-mannered neighbor Walter Lambert, who may or may not be a werewolf.
“It’s very easy. You just say, ‘Would you like to get some fur on your forearms and all over’. And he’s like, ‘Yeah!’. No, the Boosh, I think I told the Boosh about it maybe a year before we shot it. I said, ‘I’ve got a kind of funny character. We’re thinking of doing a Halloween movie, and we got a funny character for you, being my neighbor’. And he’s like, ‘You just tell me when’. And then we did it, and he is the best.”
Overlooking the fact that he’s given him the nickname the Boosh, Buscemi isn’t one for turning down many offers, having appeared in fourteen movies and nine TV shows in the last five years alone, so he was hardly going to say no to one of his friends. Unsurprisingly, the former Boardwalk Empire star steals every scene that he’s in and is the undoubted highlight of Hubie Halloween, which is the latest in a long line of Sandler vehicles to draw in a huge audience on Netflix without generating a great deal of enthusiasm amongst critics.
