Playboy Interview: Denis Leary

When comedian Denis Leary first stormed the comedy-club scene in the late 1980s, he saluted audiences with a defiantly raised middle digit, swilled beer onstage, chain-smoked and loudly savaged political correctness, vegetarians and pretentious rock stars. Part of a generation of young comics that included Jon Stewart, Colin Quinn and Sam Kinison, Leary was slammed by old-timers and prudes for his machine-gun barrage of four-letter expletives. But younger crowds bought his CDs, books and videos and packed his stand-up performances and one-man shows, such as No Cure for Cancer and Denis Leary: Lock 'n Load, both of which aired frequently on cable. His widely seen high-speed promotional rants on MTV about R.E.M. and other topics, along with his satiric anthem "Asshole," about the joys of being an all-American asshole, brought him even more fame.

And then there are his movies. Since 1993 he has bounced between roles in mainstream flicks like True Crime and The Thomas Crown Affair and smaller movies like Wag the Dog and Jesus' Son. He has also done voices for the animated smashes A Bug's Life and the two Ice Age films, and he produced the highly charged Blow. In 2001 he co-created, co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the well-reviewed, prematurely axed ABC cop show The Job. Three years later he was back as the star and co-creator of Rescue Me, a seriocomic FX series about the gnarly personal lives of a group of post-9/11 New York firefighters; he also co-writes and co-produces it. The Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated show is classic Leary—brutally funny, edgy and obsessed with sex, Catholicism, hypocrisy, guilt and death.

The second of four kids, Leary was born on August 18, 1957 to a hardworking Irish immigrant couple who had settled in Worcester, Massachusetts. His mother, Nora, was a housewife, and his father, John, a jack-of-all-trades, worked as an auto mechanic and for the gas company. A so-so Catholic-school student whose dreams of a hockey career were smashed when poor grades got him bounced from the junior varsity team, Leary found a new outlet by performing in high school plays. After graduating he won a full scholarship to Emerson College in Boston, where he studied acting and theater production. While teaching at the Emerson Comedy Workshop in 1982, he met student Ann Lembeck, and they later married. Acting jobs were scarce, so he began to scrounge for work at East Coast comedy clubs, where his friends Steven Wright and Lenny Clarke were already gaining stand-up experience and cash. Leary's stand-up gigs weren't plentiful, and club owners advised him to tone down his language in the style of other up-and-comers such as Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno. He resisted. While in the U.K. for a weekend comedy gig in 1990, his wife gave birth prematurely to their firstborn, Jack, whose health complications forced the couple to remain abroad, for months. To stay sane and solvent, he wrote No Cure for Cancer, a show that would become a controversial prizewinning hit at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. Leary moved the show to New York at his own expense the following year.

While Leary was in New York shooting the third season of Rescue Me, Playboy sent Contributing Editor Stephen Rebello to interview him. The two began their conversation on location in Harlem and continued it on a downtown limo ride to Leary's apartment and then to a studio. "He's smart, serious and focused," reports Rebello, "and his rants—on subjects ranging from dropped cell-phone calls to arrogant Manhattan drivers—were wildly entertaining. A pissed-off Leary is the best Leary."

[Q] Playboy: On Rescue Me, your fireman character deals with post-9/11 stress syndrome, screws up his marriage, knocks up his cousin's widow and, when things get really bad, pours an entire bottle of vodka over himself, fires up a cigarette lighter and nearly goes up in flames. Where does his demented worldview come from?

[A] Leary: I wish I could take credit for all of it, but a lot of it is actually based on real guys and real events. It's funny that lots of people have picked out that scene with the cigarette lighter, including some of the firemen the characters are based on. Obviously the reactions to that scene and to the show are especially complicated for people who know these characters are based on real people.

[Q] Playboy: Who are they?

[A] Leary: My character is based on two good friends of mine. One is the technical advisor to the show, Terry Quinn, who I've known for 20 years and who's still a firefighter. I've never told the other guy that we based part of the character on him, and he's always telling me, "I don't know where you got that, but that's so fucking true." He doesn't see any of it. A lot of the shit you see on the show is literally what people went through with him, and we're afraid to tell him. The thing about television is that people project their own experiences onto the characters but don't necessarily come out and say they could be based on themselves or someone they know.

[Q] Playboy: Your character gets regular visits from Jesus and from fire victims he couldn't save. When did Denis Leary last see God or dead people?

[A] Leary: I used to be incredibly cynical about people who talk about after-death experiences and how people came back in certain ways, but my experience has been that they do come back. It's actually an occupational hazard for firefighters because a lot of guys see people after they've failed to save them, especially co-workers. One time we were shooting a scene in which a little girl dies, and my character thinks she's still alive. We were rehearsing, and the little actress had to go to the bathroom. While we were waiting, a real-life fireman standing next to me said, "God, she reminds me of this little girl who died on me last year. I've been seeing her every morning before I go to work." I asked, "What do you mean?" and he goes, "I just see her, man." A lot of firefighters who were down at ground zero tell me that's what they hope for, a visit or some sign.

[Q] Playboy: Women love firemen, and you're playing one. How are you dealing?

[A] Leary: For years Terry Quinn and I have known Matt Dillon, who's a good-looking guy. But we have been places where women would walk right by Matt to get to Terry because he was wearing a firefighter T-shirt. We'll go to a premiere or something, and women go fucking crazy. It's fucking insane in a good way. We kind of laugh about it, but I'm not complaining at all.

[Q] Playboy: You've been married since 1989 to Ann Lembeck, who wrote episodes of your earlier TV show The Job, as well as the memoir An Innocent, A Broad. Does she complain?

[A] Leary: If it were the reverse, I'd fucking kill somebody. It sometimes bugs the shit out of her, but she's also a mom, so she's thinking that my getting attention is a good thing for our two kids. I think it's really fucking hard—almost impossible, in fact—for most straight men to live with most straight women. Then on top of that, to keep the initial spark going is also hard. Obviously when you have children, it's this never-ending fucking story. But it helps if you've built that kind of life with somebody with a good sense of humor who knew you before you had money and fame and all that stuff. My wife is really fucking funny and gorgeous, which helps too. You've got to feel like you have an intellectual equal, because otherwise you just get fucking bored. Our relationship has always been another storm or a fucking land mine or something, but it's never been fucking boring.

[Q] Playboy:Rescue Me is on FX, but it pushes the envelope like an HBO show in its language and situations. What do you make of the FCC slapping a $3.6 million indecency fine on CBS's Without a Trace?

[A] Leary: It's the sort of cyclone the religious right and conservatives have been pouring money into starting for ages. With the Bush administration in power, they feel they can take advantage of the atmosphere right now. Every time I see these people talking on C-SPAN, my reaction is always "Fuck you. I'm a parent taking care of my own fucking kids. You're in charge of yours." I think this is a battle they will ultimately lose. If the religious right and conservatives get everybody involved, either they're going to get a different conclusion from what they expect or we're going to live in two different worlds, one where there will be TV for fucking grown-ups and one with these incredibly inane networks that conservatives can watch.

[Q] Playboy: You mean networks with endless reruns of Little House on the Prairie?

[A] Leary: Yeah. Radio as we once knew it is already dead. I got satellite radio a year ago, not because of Howard Stern but for sports and music regular radio won't play anymore. The same thing can happen to regular network TV, which I don't watch either because it's so fucking bad. But I have friends whose shows I watch because I have to.

[Q] Playboy: What's must-see Leary TV?

[A] Leary: Kiefer Sutherland on 24. The King of Queens because Kevin James is so fucking funny, he makes me die laughing. I'm trying to catch up on Lost because I like it. The Sopranos is my favorite. When I saw this season's first few episodes, I went, "There go all the acting awards." Then I saw Thief, which is fucking unbelievable television, so now I think The Sopranos has some competition. FX has Thief, The Shield, Nip/Tuck and our show because the president of FX, John Landgraf, came from other big networks, where he said, "I don't like any of this stuff. Why are we making it?" Now he does only the shows he loves. I wish my writing partners and I could come up with bad TV-show ideas so just one could become one of these pieces of shit that make money on a network for fucking 15 years. We're incapable, so we'd have to hire retards to do it for us.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of clout have your show's Emmy and Golden Globe nominations brought?

[A] Leary: The Emmy nominations definitely make a difference in the show's profile. An Emmy win might make a little more difference, but just being in that mix is good. Fuck it, this award stuff isn't a horse race where the fastest horse wins. It's partly political and partly handshaking and all that. I voted for Matt Dillon in Crash for last year's Oscar because I thought he was brilliant but also because he's an old friend. I voted for Philip Seymour Hoffman, but if somebody else in the best actor category were a good friend, sorry, my friend would get my vote.

[Q] Playboy: Your TV show keeps firefighters' problems—their job burnout, how little they're paid, how underequipped they can be—in the public consciousness. How much money have you raised through the Leary Firefighters Foundation, the organization you started in 2000?

[A] Leary: We're at about $7 million or $8 million. We ask the New York City department, "What do you guys need that isn't in the city's budget right now?" Last year it was a giant tank. It cost $1 million, and we turned it over directly to the department. It has satellite equipment that allows the chiefs outside to communicate with the guys instead of having to wait to go into the building. It felt great to watch CNN and see they had driven the tank down to New Orleans after Katrina.

[Q] Playboy: You became famous as a stand-up comic. Do you miss it now that you're doing the series?

[A] Leary: Once you've fallen in love with stand-up, you always want to go back to it. Doing a television series has made it impossible for me to tour, so I keep my comic muscles strong with charity gigs like the yearly one we do in Boston with my friend Cam Neely, who's a Hall of Fame hockey player. I host that, which means I have to do at least 30 minutes up front and another 30 along the way. I also do a yearly event in New York. Sometimes I do Michael J. Fox's private foundation event for Parkinson's, and this year, when I went overseas to push Rescue Me, I did a 10,000-seater in Dublin. I usually bring some young comedian the audience hasn't necessarily seen or who is about to become a star, like Dane Cook, who we had before anybody knew who he was. These gigs are high-pressure. It's not like you just go out there and fuck around. You have to make them laugh.

[Q] Playboy: Do you prepare much?

[A] Leary: I make bullet points and just talk those out when I get onstage. I might think about five things in the course of the week or day—stuff that's in my head, stuff that's in the newspapers—but once I get onstage and say something about Bush or whatever, 18 other thoughts about him that I'd forgotten just come right out. That adrenaline kicks in, you're making those connections, and if the audience is with you, you go, "Aw, fuck, what about this and that?"

[Q] Playboy: What compares with the thrill of doing stand-up?

[A] Leary: The closest thing to it is boxing. It doesn't matter what mood you're in, you've got to have your fucking wits about you or you'll get your head hit, which doesn't feel good. I don't know a more democratic process than stand-up. Somebody brings you onstage and you say whatever the fuck you want. You have total freedom of speech—no interference, no editing, no limitations. It's my favorite thing, just you and everything in your brain versus everything in the audience's brains.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get into stand-up?

[A] Leary: I went to St. Peter-Marian High School, and my grades were Ds. But this one nun, Sister Rosemary Sullivan, saved my life by forcing me to audition for Mame when I was 13. I got the part, and after that she talked me into doing other plays. My family didn't have any money and I didn't have much else in my back pocket, so by the time I was a senior, one of the nuns said I should go down and apply to Emerson, an arts college in Boston, where you audition and write an essay and SATs are secondary. I was like, "Yeah, whatever," but I fucking got a full scholarship. After graduation I wanted to act, but there aren't many theater jobs in Boston. Everybody was working shit jobs so they could get work onstage. Lenny Clarke's brother was running this talent show in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I fucking couldn't believe it when I heard that Steven Wright, who lived around the corner from me, was getting paid 25 bucks a set. Lenny was doing a kind of stream-of-consciousness comedy onstage too, but he was basically a street-fighting maniac. Steven was the most incredibly shy, quiet guy, though he was really funny, and the comedy he was doing was like haiku. I thought, Fuck, if he can do it, I'll go up and talk. I don't give a fuck what happens. I'll get 25 bucks. I figured I'd get $50 for both Saturday shows, and then I could always work the door for tickets.

[Q] Playboy: How tough were the audiences in your early days?

[A] Leary: I was onstage at Carolines at the Seaport, doing stuff about Elvis being way more popular than Jesus, and I hear this guy grumbling at a table with his wife and another couple, all shit-faced. When I went into this vehemently anti-Kennedy bit, he started in, "I didn't come here to hear you talk about this shit." I said, "These people came here to listen to me talk about this shit, asshole." When he fucking got up and came right at me, I realized he had a gun. So I said, "Come on up onstage, pal," which is the best thing to do. As he came toward me, he tried to grab me, and the bouncer leaped up and got him in a bear hug, but the drunken wife jumped on the bouncer's back, punching and kicking him. So these three were swinging around onstage yelling until two other bouncers got the couple offstage and out of the club. The crowd was so good, I did another 10 minutes on the couple. When we were done with the set, I went upstairs, and a waitress told me some people from the first show were at the front door, asking to be let back in so they could buy us drinks. Guess who. Classic drunken behavior.

[Q] Playboy: Which comics influenced you?

[A] Leary: Once I saw Richard Pryor's concert, I thought, I didn't know you could say whatever the fuck is in your head and use those words. I knew George Carlin had just started doing that too, so to me they were the first two guys in that generation. I didn't really know about Lenny Bruce, who came before them. Carlin has to be considered the Babe Ruth of comedy. Even in his most recent special, there may be things I don't like, but while I'm laughing a part of me is going, Goddamn, why didn't I think of that? He talks about his view of the world, but you don't know anything about his private life. On the other hand, you knew everything that was going on in Richard Pryor's life because he acted it out onstage. For me, Pryor was the fucking be-all and end-all.

[Q] Playboy: What are some of Hollywood's most inexplicable comedy careers?

[A] Leary: Some people get lucky. I mean, it's not a lack of talent; it's like they've found this one thing they know how to make work. I've known Adam Sandler for years and never really understood his career. I've seen some of his movies because my kids watch them, but he does the $20 million gorilla jobs where you kind of do the same thing over and over because that's how much money you get and that's what the audience expects. I would get so fucking bored, but some people seem to thrive on that shit, so who am I to say? It's like when my brother and I watched Jerry Lewis on TV, acting like a retard in the Martin and Lewis films and his first solo movies. He used to make us laugh our balls off, but we watched Hook, Line & Sinker and said, "He looks too old to do this." When some of these guys end up playing the retard-goofball crazy guy at 40, people all of a sudden say, "This is weird."

[Q] Playboy: How much drugging did you get into on the comedy circuit?

[A] Leary: Oh, I did shitloads and shitloads. I tried everything. You know, it was the time. But almost none of it worked for me. Weed was never a good thing, because it kept me up all night. Coke was the opposite. It kind of made me like, "I'm going to bed soon." The one time I tried quaaludes, I just literally fell asleep. I was never big on speed. I never did a lot of psychedelics. I had a couple of friends who were like, "We're going to trip. Do you want to come over and make sure nobody goes out the window?" and I was like, "What the hell are they doing this for?" It just wasn't my thing, though I tried mushrooms once and that was okay. A bunch of us went out to see a friend playing straight-ahead rock and roll, and it was really great, but we were over on the side, laughing our balls off during every song and getting dirty looks, which just made us laugh even more.

[Q] Playboy: Did you get static for using so much profanity?

[A] Leary: The fucking assholes who ran the clubs were like, "Why are you talking like that?" It was that way for me and the guys of my generation—Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Colin Quinn. All the owners wanted was someone like Seinfeld and Leno, the two clean comics working the clubs at the time. Everybody admired their ability to work a room—they did it much better than I could—but that wasn't our style. I wouldn't do it. Leno was a really good club comedian and wasn't as slick and homogenized as you have to be in the circumstances he's in now. Seinfeld was a fucking killer club comedian. A lot of guys wearing skinny ties were doing Seinfeld and Leno junior acts, doing what those guys did but nowhere near as well—like cover bands. They made shitloads of money in the comedy boom, but if a bunch of us are sitting around shooting the shit backstage at one of these charity gigs and somebody asks, "Whatever happened to blah blah blah?" it's "He went back to being a teacher."

[Q] Playboy: Much has been written about you and comedian Bill Hicks, who died in 1994. People have accused you of appropriating his persona and material.

[A] Leary: That's a great story that people like to latch onto. When I came to New York from Boston, Bill was part of the Sam Kinison group, and I was part of the Lenny Clarke group. Kinison and Lenny exchanged the notion that Bill and I should see each other because we were going to love each other's act. Very quickly we got New York club owners saying, "You guys are too alike," while Bill and I were saying, "What are they fucking talking about?" It's the same approach to the subject maybe, but it's not the same act. Caroline Hirsch of Carolines comedy club in New York started booking us to co-headline, so one guy would open one show and the other guy would close, then vice versa for the next show. We had audiences laughing at both acts, as a lot of witnesses at those big New Year's Eve gigs we did can tell you. But as I've said many times, a fable is sometimes better than the truth.

[Q] Playboy: You were the second of four kids in working-class Worcester, Massachusetts. What were you ranting about at an early age?

[A] Leary: The Catholic Church, for one thing. By the time I was 12 or 13, I was like, "Fuck these guys and the organization." These fucking priests had maids and butlers, and after Sunday mass they would put their golf clubs in their Lincoln Continentals and go golfing. We're living in a three-decker apartment, my brother and I are sleeping in the attic, and the priests are walking around our school hallways wearing those rings and shit. I mean, Catholic Church bling is outrageous. Today, with the Italian Mafia disappearing, it's more evident than ever how much bigger the church is than the Mafia in terms of real estate. It has enough money to throw around to settle molestation suits. Don't get me started on those guys. Anyway, most of my anger as a kid was directed at my older brother because we shared a room the entire time we were growing up.

[Q] Playboy: What is he like?

[A] Leary: Three years older and much bigger, a football player. Nobody in the neighborhood would fight me, because they were afraid they would have to fight him. We almost drove my mother off planet Earth, we were so fucking out of our minds growing up, doing such crazy shit to each other that I was always in the hospital, getting stitches all over my body. Our apartment had a screened-in back porch with three wooden fire escapes down to the first floor, and one time my brother goes, "Get off the porch or I'm gonna throw you out the door and down the stairs." And then he did. He couldn't skate and never really played hockey like I did, so one way I could get back at him was to shoot right at his fucking head when he was playing goalie and wearing boots, because I knew he couldn't chase me. That was great public humiliation.

[Q] Playboy: Did he wise you up about sex?

[A] Leary: No, that was Eddie Correlli, who was on my street-hockey team. He was in my class, but he'd been kept back a couple of times. He had a girlfriend before we did and passed the word along. There were always lots of girls around, mostly Irish girls from the neighborhood—easy access. From two to four P.M., during Sunday mass, a gang of guys would go down to the railroad tracks nearest the church, with a six-pack, cigarettes and Playboy. When the priest came down the aisle to say good-bye to the people, all we had to do was check to see who it was. That way when we went home, if we were asked who said the mass, we could say, "Oh, Father McGraw." One time we were just about to go and see who the priest was, when my old man pulled up. That put a fucking end to that.

[Q] Playboy: What were your early sex experiences like?

[A] Leary: This girl and I would go into the first-floor vestibule of her parents' three-decker and pretty much do everything. Her parents were always in bed, supposedly. Years later I went back to take my nieces to a St. Patrick's Day event, and one of the ladies organizing it walked by and said, "Denis Leary." And I went into a complete panic. It was the girl's mother, and I still had that what-if-she-finds-out thing. She goes, "You remember me, right? I remember you because you used to feel my daughter up." And I was like, My God, she heard everything. Of course she was awake and waiting for her daughter to come home. I spent the rest of the night avoiding her.

[Q] Playboy: Who starred in your first erotic fantasies about celebrities?

[A] Leary: They were always triple-headers with Karen Valentine from Room 222, Susan Dey from The Partridge Family and Peggy Lipton from The Mod Squad. To make matters worse, a couple of years ago Peggy Lipton, who still looks fantastic, did the play The Guys, about post-9/11 firefighters, here in New York. Terry Quinn calls me one night and says, "You have to come to this restaurant." I do and he's sitting there with Peggy Lipton, who he was dating. He was living the dream. Cindy Crawford is a beautiful, sexy chick, just naturally sexy. She doesn't have to do anything. I have a long list: Julie Christie in those movies from the 1970s—beautiful, very natural. That's what I always find sexy. I don't like anything fake.

[Q] Playboy: Including implants?

[A] Leary: Don't like them. Never did. It automatically opens a can of worms because the woman obviously didn't like herself to begin with or chose to be with somebody who didn't like her to begin with. To me that's just a red flag.

[Q] Playboy: What's your take on contemporary sexpots such as Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton?

[A] Leary: Maybe we're all just laughing at the idiocy of what Paris Hilton is doing. She did a homemade porn movie that actually increased interest in her—and, by the way, not very good homemade porn. And I'm not talking about the way it was filmed; I'm talking about the actual sex. Britney Spears is not my kind of music at all, but I went to a Jessica Simpson concert and she was really nice to my kids backstage, taking pictures and the whole nine yards. She does have a voice, so I give her credit for that at least. I don't think Madonna's ever had much of a voice or songwriting ability or anything, so she never even made my radar.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have erotic fantasies about nuns who taught you in school?

[A] Leary: Oh fuck, yeah. We had one nun who was hot-looking even in those old habits. She wasn't stern like the other nuns and talked to us about sex when she discovered us passing around a copy of The Godfather so we could read the scene of Sonny having sex with the bridesmaid. By Vatican II the nuns didn't have to wear habits anymore if they didn't want to, so this nun showed up wearing a skirt, a top and a crucifix but nothing on her head—fucking beautiful. After I graduated and went back to visit my mom, my brother and I were in the supermarket parking lot when I see this really hot-looking blonde get out of a pickup, wearing hot pants and sneakers. My brother goes, "That's the hot-looking nun. She had an affair with one of the other teachers, left the convent and now they're getting married." I was like, "Hell, she was obviously waiting for it. All we had to do was ask."

[Q] Playboy: Your mother is still living, but your father died young. How did he die?

[A] Leary: He had gone back to Ireland on vacation. His favorite brother had just walked in, they had just shared a laugh about something, and he went just like that. He was really young, only 60. He had a funeral in the village he was born and raised in, then he was brought home and had a massive funeral here. People came to his wake and nobody knew who the fuck they were—college girls coming up and saying, "My car broke down on the expressway, and nobody would stop and help but your father." A couple of old ladies told us that when they couldn't afford to pay their gas bill, he paid it for the month. He loved the Beatles and so did my mother, but she really loved Dean Martin. To this day he is the person she's most impressed that I've met.

[Q] Playboy: How did you meet him?

[A] Leary: He loved No Cure for Cancer and said, "Call up that kid. I want to meet him." I was in L.A. making a movie, and when I pulled up to the house, I was like, What kind of fucking practical joke is this? The door opened, and I recognized his ex-wife Jeannie, who he was back together with. Suddenly he comes sauntering in wearing a retro-cool Members Only jacket, and I'm thinking to myself, Holy shit, it's fucking Dean Martin. I almost collapsed because he looked just like my father—same size, thick hair, big hands, same glasses and personality. We had dinner and shot the shit all night. He was drinking 7 and 7s, but I wanted (continued on page 140)Denis Leary(continued from page 54) to be very cognizant, so I was nursing my beer. He kept asking, "You want another drink?" and I was like, "No, I'm good," and he goes, "What are you, a pussy?" I was like, My God, Dean Martin called me a pussy! Wait until the guys hear this. Besides Clint Eastwood, who I worked with on True Crime, it doesn't get much bigger than that. I also worked with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman on Wag the Dog, but Dean Martin? That's a whole other world.

[Q] Playboy: What did you learn from working with Eastwood, Hoffman and De Niro?

[A] Leary: Working as an actor with people of that level, you think, It's definitely not a level playing field. De Niro made me want to be an actor in the first place. I was a huge Eastwood fan, had read all the books about him and told him I wanted to pick his brain. He let me sit and watch between shots and ask questions, which is how I learned how fucking easy it is to act if you do your homework and preparation before you get to the set. You don't have to waste the studio's money or your own time. Eastwood is like fucking John Wayne. He's been famous since I was born, but he's a gentleman's gentleman, an extremely cool guy with a fucking great sense of humor. Everybody stayed in the same hotel, and at the end of the night we'd all go back and have drinks. He's a huge jazzman, and we had been talking about a couple of albums he hadn't heard. So on an afternoon off I went to a local jazz music store, got the two albums and just left them for him. That night on my hotel voice mail, it's "Hey, Denis. Clint. Hey, thanks for the albums, man. I've been dying to get these things. I owe you." I was like, Fuck, how do I get this off the phone and onto a tape recorder? I completely fucked it up by erasing it.

[Q] Playboy: You often mention real people in your act. How would you handle a topic like, say, Barry Bonds and steroids?

[A] Leary: As a baseball fan, I don't give a shit about him. My problem with Barry Bonds began when he made comments that turned the idea of breaking an incredible record into a racial thing. Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs. Had he taken steroids and not been out of shape for half of his career, how many fucking home runs would he have hit? Guys like Ruth and Hank Aaron were amazing—especially because Aaron's not a big fucking guy—and they set the records Barry's ultimately going to break. So if I were Hank Aaron, I'd be fucking ripshit. In 1999 my son and I were at the All-Star Game at Fenway Park, and when Mark McGwire knocked 12 out of 13 balls over the Green Monster, my son asked, "Dad, is he on drugs?" What am I supposed to say? I don't know if he is. I don't know Bonds, but from what I've read and seen, he seems so egotistical and arrogant—always has been, even before the steroids—that I don't think he has it in him to come clean and tell the truth. He's going to find himself in a real fucking hell storm. Do you really want the record, knowing how you got it, knowing Hank Aaron is still alive and working in baseball? I wouldn't. Fuck that.

[Q] Playboy: Should Americans accept the probability that every future politician will have used drugs and had extracurricular sex?

[A] Leary: If I were suddenly the top man on the planet, had the plane and the world's biggest army and all, pretty much what I'd ask the outgoing president first is "Where's the pussy? What time is the blow job?" This is how democracy should work. We should expect free blow jobs for the president right from the beginning. If you work as a White House intern, you're blowing the president; that's just the deal. Balance the budget like Clinton—extra blow jobs. Hollywood starlets should be made available to the president. If he's doing a good job, Keira Knightley gets told, "Part of your job is to fuck the president or at least blow him; then we'll put you in a big movie." With a female president, it's "Mel Gibson is coming over at four to fuck you and take a picture with you, then he's off to make his next movie." Bush is supposedly the closest we've had to the perfect family man who goes to church and all that, yet he's one of the biggest fuckups who has ever been in office—a true moron when it comes to leading the country. If that's a perfect guy, I'll take the flawed guys.

[Q] Playboy: Your 1994 movie The Ref had you playing a thief who holds an insufferably dysfunctional family hostage. It should have ignited your movie career but wasn't a hit.

[A] Leary: That movie not doing well is still a sore spot. I kept saying it had a fucking shitty title and we should start making lists of other titles. But Teddy Demme, the director, kept saying, "I like the title," and Disney ended up going with it, which is one way they killed the movie. The other way was with a bad release date. I will always love Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio president, because he called me and Teddy after the release and said, "I take full responsibility. I should have demanded you guys change the fucking title."

[Q] Playboy: Has your TV success brought you more movie offers?

[A] Leary: Most movies suck, even the independent ones. Hollywood is like baseball: Hit three good movies out of 10 and you're a Hall of Famer. I don't think like those guys who say, "I'm hot again, so I've got to get back into a big movie." It's a lot of work and pressure for Kiefer on 24 and a couple of my friends on The Sopranos to do movies, but they're not writing their shows, like I am. Rescue Me is the equivalent of doing six movies from February to the end of August. I met with director Adrian Lyne about playing the other guy in Unfaithful, and when I asked him how many takes he does, he said, "That depends on how we're feeling." I walked away thinking, No fucking way. I turned down Martin Scorsese, who I love and respect as a filmmaker, for this movie he just made with Nicholson, The Departed. He wanted me to shoot on weekends while I was doing Rescue Me, but I didn't want to be in the position of fucking myself over trying to make him happy or vice versa. I have plenty of work, and I don't really need the money.

[Q] Playboy: So what's next after Rescue Me?

[A] Leary: I have a couple of movies I want to write and one I'm in the middle of. I have another idea for a television series. I won't star in it, but I'll produce and write the pilot. I also have to finish writing a book that pretty much sums up my take on the world: Kiss My Irish Ass.

[Q] Playboy: One of your punch lines is "Life sucks. Get a fucking helmet." Do you follow that advice?

[A] Leary: I have friends who jump out of planes, but I'm not jumping out of a fucking plane even if it's on fire. I'm addicted to adrenaline, juice and competition, but I get that through playing hockey. Most of the time I don't even wear a helmet when I play, which seems ridiculous because if you don't pay attention, you'll get your fucking head chopped off. If I had the choice, I'd want to die either laughing or fucking. Both at the same time would be excellent.

Funny because it's True

But seriously, folks, no one can rant like Denis Leary

I would never do crack. I would never do a drug named after a part of my own ass.

I got two words for you, okay? Jim Fixx. Remember Jim Fixx? The big famous jogging guy? Jogged 15 miles a day. Did a jogging book. Did a jogging video. Dropped dead of a heart attack when? When he was fucking jogging, that's when.

I love to eat red meat. I'll only eat red meat that comes from cows who smoke, okay? Special cows they grow in Virginia with voice boxes in their necks. This is America. I want a bowl of raw red meat right now. Forget about that. Bring me a live cow over to the table. I'll carve off what I want and ride the rest home.

Racism isn't born, folks; it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps. End of list.

When I was teenager I wouldn't have gotten a steel bar put through my tongue. That is just one more thing for your dad to grab ahold of when he is pissed off at you.

I want coffee-flavored coffee. Coffee doesn't need a menu; it just needs a cup. I actually gave the coffee up once. I said, "I'm not going to have a heart attack in front of some 18-year-old haiku-writing motherfucker in a Starbucks."

I'm sick of my generation getting called the TV generation. "Well, all you guys do is watch TV." What did you expect? We watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot live on TV one Sunday morning. We were afraid to change the fucking channel for the next 30 years.

I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country. Call it Irate. All the pissed-off people can live in one place and just get it over with.

I don't have to spank my kids. I found that waving my gun around gets the point across.

We only want to save the cute animals, don't we? Yeah. Why don't we just have animal auditions? Line 'em up one by one and interview them individually. "What are you?" "I'm an otter." "And what do you do?" "I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands." "You're free to go." "And what are you?" "I'm a cow." "Get in the fucking truck, okay, pal?" "But I'm an animal." "You're a baseball glove. Get on that truck."

I love these little facts. "Well, you know, smoking takes 10 years off your life." Well, it's the 10 worst years, isn't it, folks? It's the ones at the end. It's the wheelchair, kidney-dialysis fucking years. You can have those years. We don't want 'em, all right?

My biggest regret in life is that I didn't hit John Denver in the mouth while I had the chance.

"I'm just not happy, because my life didn't turn out the way I thought it would." Hey, join the fucking club, okay? I thought I was going to be the starting center fielder for the Boston Red Sox. Life sucks. Get a fucking helmet, all right? Happiness comes in small doses, folks. It's a cigarette or a chocolate cookie or a five-second orgasm. That's it.

You knew everything that was going on in Richard Pryor's life because he acted it out onstage. For me, Pryor was the fucking be-all and end-all.

Paris Hilton did a homemade porn movie—and not very good homemade porn. And I'm not talking about the way it was filmed. I'm talking about the actual sex.