Rescue Me star Dennis Leary is opening up about how 9/11 inspired the hit TV drama. The show followed firefighters dealing with the trauma of the tragedy.
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"The sound of the buildings ... it's almost like it goes into your bones," he told New York Post.
The actor lost his friend Garnet "Ace" Bailey of the NHL's Bruins in 9/11. Bailey had been on United Flight 175. It proved to be a shock to the actor.
"I knew I was going to hear about firefighter friends of mine from the FDNY that didn't make it," Leary said. "But the next day, to hear that "Ace" Bailey had died in the thing as well, we were just like, 'That is crazy.' I mean, it's insanity."
Actor Remembers 9/11
Leary had a lot of ties to the 9/11 tragedy. Several of his FDNY friends helped search the wreckage in the aftermath.
"A lot of members of the FDNY who I was friends with had come up to help look for the bodies," Leary recalled. "A lot of the guys I knew that had survived, I was spending time with them and in their firehouses as they were digging through The Pile in the fall right after 9/11. We were witnessing the grief that they were going through."
"It was literally in the blink of an eye. We went from watching a guy come up from downtown from The Pile — they had found a friend - a piece of a friend - and so he was just overwhelmed with grief. I mean, he could barely talk," the actor said.
All of these things led to Leary developing Rescue Me as a way to process his emotions about 9/11. It followed the lives of firefighters.
"We had so much information on a daily basis, not just comedically, I'm talking about dramatically," Leary said. "All the ideas for our fires came basically from experiences those guys had."
It proved to be a hit and also accurate for firefighters still dealing with their own grief.
"They said, 'You got it. You totally nailed it,' " Leary recalled.
