Denis Leary stars as television firefighter

By Frazier Moore
Associated Press

In the new FX drama "Rescue Me," Denis Leary stars as Tommy Gavin, a Manhattan firefighter saving lives and helping keep his city safe.

Denis Leary stars in "Rescue Me" as a firefighter whose life has charred edges. The FX network's series debuts tonight. Associated Press

Viewers see Tommy step into his bathroom to answer nature's call. Suddenly there's smoke everywhere. He's trapped. He yells for help. But it turns out he's just having another one of his panicky delusions. A guy like Tommy wouldn't really know how to ask for help.

"He's a firefighter whose life is falling apart," Leary was saying a few weeks ago, practically licking his chops at the dramatic possibilities.

Leary, also a creator, writer and executive producer of "Rescue Me," was huddled with his partner, Peter Tolan, in their motorhome office at a Harlem curb.

Around the block, the "Rescue Me" production team was prepping a scene for Episode 2 in a rundown brownstone, where Tommy will burst in on a soot-smeared old gent nailing shut the door into the next room.

When asked his wife's whereabouts, the man gestures past the bolted door. "She's right where I left her, on the couch soaked in kerosene," he announces. "Forty-two years I put up with her yapping. No more yapping!"

"Part of the fun of the show," explains Leary, "is that, like the actual fire department, when you get the call you don't know exactly what's going to happen. You might find a horrible fire and people needing to be saved, or (as in a scene from the premiere) you might find a crazy naked junkie who doesn't even know these are firemen, he thinks they've come to steal his money and attacks them with a baseball bat."

But derring-do and zany misadventures play only a backup role in "Rescue Me."

"Our focus is on the guys," says Tolan, meaning the crew of 62 Truck (played by Michael Lombardi, Jack McGee, Steven Pasquale, John Scurti and Daniel Sunjata). "Yeah, we want to show them on the job, but we want to see them after the fire — that's the most interesting thing to us."

Smoldering throughout "Rescue Me" is 9/11, whose impact on New York's firefighters makes their tough job tougher.

Leary has infused "Rescue Me" with his intimate knowledge of the world it inhabits. The deaths of a cousin and a childhood friend while battling a 1999 Worcester, Mass., blaze inspired him to create the Leary Firefighters Foundation charity.

And he has long been pals with a crew of New York firemen who "I've seen go through a zillion different things, 9/11 being just one of them.

"The show," he says, "is about all the stuff that separates a group of guys from other men. But it's also what separates them from their wives and girlfriends, who complain, 'You don't talk to me about this, you don't open up.' Especially for my character: It's just not something he wants to go home and talk about, and it's basically destroyed his marriage."

In fact, Tommy lives across the street from the home he used to share with his three kids and soon-to-be-ex-wife, Janet (Andrea Roth), whose loss he mourns bitterly while killing time with the booze he meant to swear off.

"I couldn't open up, I wasn't emotionally available, blah blah blah," he grumbles to his cousin and best friend, Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey), a fellow firefighter who died at the twin towers yet keeps visiting Tommy.

Says Leary, "A lot of this show is seeing what the guys are trying to ignore, and trying to drink away, and trying to run away from."

But cutting through their self-imposed smoke screens is their close-knit male camaraderie. There's lots of trash talk, pranks and blowing off steam, with more mentions of "balls" than in a Spalding catalog.

Towel-snappingly rambunctious, "Rescue Me" invokes a comedy-drama from a couple of years ago in which Leary starred as a reckless NYPD detective. Rowdy, raw and apparently out of sync with ABC's other fare, "The Job" was a ratings flop.

"A lot of people said to me, 'You should have done that show on cable,' " recalls Tolan, a veteran of "The Larry Sanders Show" for whom "The Job" was his first collaboration with Leary. "It really feels like now we're doing the show we should have done back then."

Maybe rescued just in time.