Denis Leary to the Rescue

Craig Blankenhorn / FX The star of FX’s hit series Rescue Me talks to The Daily Beast about Michael J. Fox’s return to TV, penis size, his new comedy tour, turning down Scorsese, and firefighters doing musical numbers.

In the kitchenette of the trailer Denis Leary uses during Rescue Me location shoots, a number of newspaper and magazine clippings are taped to a cupboard over the sink. "This is our crazy wall," says Leary, pointing to each clipping and describing why the subject looks crazy. Mario Lopez? "Crazy hair." Hillary Clinton? "Crazy face." Amy Winehouse? "Crazy."

Considering the downtime inherent in shooting an hour-long TV drama—on this chilly early-spring evening, the trailer is parked in a Sunnyside, Queens, neighborhood, where a single car-crash scene is to be shot—putting up a "crazy wall" seems like a relatively benign way for Leary and Rescue Me co-creator Peter Tolan to pass the time. But when you hear the two of them banter, you tend to understand why they don't need a bunch of outside distractions to keep them entertained.

"We were on the set, and the two firefighters that work here, I overheard them talking about, 'Yeah, you know, if I’d known I could measure from the pubic bone…’”

"Our 10th anniversary as a writing couple is coming up," Leary says about his partnership with Tolan, shortly after flopping down on a leather couch and lighting up a Marlboro Light. "I’m gonna get him another TV show, and he’s gonna get me the same."

"But I do believe the 10th anniversary is the balsa-wood anniversary," retorts Tolan. "So I’m gonna get him a model plane. And then we’re going to Fire Island just to consummate it."

"To fly the plane…" says Leary, laughing.

Tolan laughs back. "Yeah, exactly. Get in the cockpit."

Leary, Tolan, and their third writing partner, Evan Reilly, are wrapping up production on a 22-episode fifth season of the firehouse dramedy, which premieres on April 7 on FX. This season, the after-effects of tbe 9/11 attacks on firefighter Tommy Gavin (Leary) and his colleagues at the Engine 62 company will come to the forefront in the form of a reporter looking for information. As she interviews the crew for a book about the historic day, the firefighters will dredge up feelings about the attack and its aftermath that will set them down different personal paths, all of which will be explored this season.

The specter of 9/11 has been hanging over the show since day one, but rarely examined this deeply. Why explore the tragic day's effects now, eight years after the event? "In real life, I think [with] the vast majority of firefighters, the reason that they can still get on their rig and run into the burning building is because, yeah, it’s there, but they can’t think about it on a daily basis," says Leary. "Otherwise, they wouldn’t run into a burning building. They wouldn’t be able to carry on."

As an example, Leary—whose interest in the lives of firefighters was piqued when his cousin died a decade ago trying to control a fire in his hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts—tells the story of a colleague of his New York Fire Department friend Terry Quinn, who returns to the station after toiling at Ground Zero. "He’s down there in his shift for like six hours, now he’s coming back to the firehouse to work. And Terry and some guys are putting their shit on to go down, and as he comes in the door, they said, ‘Um, how is it down there tonight?’ And he goes, ‘Eh, you know, sucky…good food though.’ He’s not being an asshole, he’s just stating the truth."

The finale of the fourth season aired more than 18 months ago, due to the 2007-08 writers' strike. FX ordered ten mini-episodes to fill the gap, and Leary feels like doing them energized the cast, because they could keep on top of their storylines. "That really helped us as writers. Because their work just kept getting better and better, and you’re going, 'These fucking actors are chewing this shit up.'"