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A TUCCI OF CLASS
How did Stanley Tucci make the leap from mere movie star to foodie guru, ‘powerfully erotic’ cocktailmaker and ‘perfect husband’? Mick Brown finds out. Photography by Adam Whitehead. Styling by David Nolan
What a nice man Stanley Tucci is. Intelligent, courteous, amusing, a smart conversationalist. If you were having a dinner party, Tucci would be the first person you’d want at your table. But what the hell would you cook?
Tucci is a terrific actor, whose long career includes major film and television roles and a cluster of awards, but meeting him it’s easy to get the impression that the thing he loves talking about most in the world is food.
Tucci loves to eat. ‘I do!’ And he loves cooking. He co-wrote and co-directed one of the great films about food, Big Night , and starred in the film Julie & Julia as the husband of Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep), the chef who introduced French cooking to America. He is the author of two cookbooks himself, The Tucci Cookbook (2012) and The Tucci Table: Cooking with Family and Friends (2015) and is working on a food memoir. On the day we meet, he’s hosting a Zoom ‘cookalong’ for the literary agency Curtis Brown, where his wife Felicity Blunt works (Tucci is one of her clients). ‘I’m doing a fettuccine con funghi,’ he says. ‘Mushrooms. A little onion, shallot, vegetable stock, a little butter, parmigiana, a little parsley over the top… Delicious!’
In a career spanning some 35 years, Tucci, 60, has made more than 80 movies – from art-house chamber pieces to popcorn blockbusters, from The Devil Wears Prada and The Hunger Games to The Lovely Bones, as well as television series such as ER.
But now, for some reason, seems to be a Stanley Tucci moment. He has made the leap from being a character actor, who a lot of people like, even though they couldn’t always put a name to the face, to cult figure. The American TV show Saturday Night Live lionised him in a celebrity skit as ‘The Tooch’. In April, as lockdown hit home, an Instagram post of Tucci making a negroni in his kitchen (‘a good sweet vermouth, if you can find one’), described by one critic as ‘powerfully erotic’, attracted over one million views. There are even Stanley Tucci T-shirts. Though he had nothing to do with that. ‘I’m not that savvy. I wish I had better business acumen.’
How, I ask, has all this happened? He laughs. ‘Because I’ve been around so long. Honestly, I don’t know. But it makes me really happy. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t.’
We are meeting, before the introduction of Tier 4, at a members’ club in Barnes, south-west London, where Tucci – who was born and grew up in upstate New York – has lived with Blunt and their five children since 2013. A slight, trim man (he works out daily) with a shaved head, he’s a fastidious dresser; people, he laments, don’t dress the way they did when he was a child. His father, an art teacher, and ‘very suave-looking’, always wore a suit and tie to work. Tucci has written and directed five films and only recently realised that he always writes a scene where someone is dressing in front of a mirror. ‘I remember so distinctly as a child, watching my father get dressed. Even if it’s a simple suit, you’re transforming to make something new happen.’
This morning Tucci has dressed in a black pea jacket, a dark quilted gilet and well-cut Italian trousers over polished boots. His black thick-framed glasses were part of the costume for his character as the studio head Jack Warner in the 2017 TV mini-series Feud: Bette and Joan. ‘I liked them, so I nicked them – as they say.’
Tucci is here to talk about his new film, Supernova. He plays an author, Tusker, in a long-standing relationship with a pianist, Sam (Colin Firth). Tusker has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and the pair are on a journey in their antiquated camper van to the Lake District, to visit Sam’s sister. Tucci gives a deeply affecting performance – which is already being talked of as Oscar worthy – as a man all too aware of his faculties sliding away from him. ‘I want to be remembered for who I was and not for who I’m about to become,’ he tells Sam. ‘That’s the only thing I can control, and that’s all I have left.’
Supernova is the second film from Harry Macqueen, whose 2014 directorial debut. Hinterland, another love story, was made for just £10,000. When his agent sent him the script, Tucci says, ‘it was like nothing I’d ever read before’.
Colin Firth is one of his closest friends, and Tucci suggested to Macqueen that Firth should play Sam. ‘Harry said, “Amazing!” And of course, I’d already slipped Colin the script without telling Harry. Colin
read it and said, “My God, it’s so beautiful.” I said, “I know.”’
Without ever descending into lachrymosity, Supernova superbly depicts the toll exacted by dementia, and the terrible moral dilemma that arises in a relationship when one person decides that their life is no longer worth living, and the other must pay the price. ‘Exactly,’ Tucci says. ‘Whose loss is greater? And whose need is greater? That’s the thing both Colin and I loved about it. And in that situation you’re watching that loss as it happens. You’re grieving every minute.’
Much of Supernova’s effect derives from the obvious chemistry between Tucci and Firth.
They have been friends for 20 years, since working together on the film Conspiracy in 2001. ‘We just hit it off,’ Tucci remembers. They stayed in touch over the years, and ended up living not too far from each other when Tucci moved to Barnes following his marriage. The families have been close ever since – one of Firth’s sons went to the same school as one of Tucci’s daughters – sharing dinners at each other’s houses and holidays at Firth’s home in Italy. ‘We have the same sense of humour. We just talk about anything – our kids, politics, art, movies, whatever.’
‘First impressions were of a gentle, thoughtful person,’ Firth tells me via email. ‘Perhaps a little more sophisticated than the rest of us. We’ve been around each other for many of the most significant moments. Best and worst. The shallow banter has never abated, but we’ve seen each other at our most troubled and our happiest. One of the great marks of friendship is being comfortable with being utterly boring together. There are very few people in whose company I feel greater ease. For whom I care more. And who can also cook.’
Making Supernova, the cast were billeted in ‘what do you call it?’ Tucci says, ‘a holiday camp?’ Firth would come over to his chalet and Tucci would cook dinner. ‘That was one of the loveliest bits of making the movie because I got to hang out with one of my best friends, and cook and talk about the job, or whatever.’
This ‘ease in one another’s company’, Firth writes, was a critical factor in playing the relationship between Tusker and Sam. ‘In some ways, the lighter moments are harder to achieve than the intense stuff. This is where our friendship gave us our greatest advantage. Complete trust. And we make each other laugh – which was also helpful in decompressing from the heavier moments.’
Tucci grew up in the town of Peekskill, Westchester County, in upstate New York, the eldest of three children (his sister is the actor Christine Tucci). At the age of 11 he was cast in a school play, ‘and I knew it in a second. I felt more comfortable onstage than I did offstage. And I still feel that way. Who wants to spend their whole lives as themselves?’ He laughs. ‘I don’t.’
Tucci built a career on versatility. He played supporting roles in films and TV series, from light comedy to thrillers. His career had hit a lean spell when he was cast as Nigel, the art director of Runway magazine (a thinly disguised American Vogue), in 2006 ’s The Devil Wears Prada, alongside
Meryl Streep playing the termagant editor Miranda Priestly, and Emily Blunt as her snide assistant, Emily. It would be the biggest success of Tucci’s career so far. It would also forge a friendship with Blunt that would prove particularly felicitous.
By then Tucci’s wife Kate, a social worker, had developed breast cancer. The couple had married in 1995 and had three children, twins Isabella and Nicolo, who are now 20, and Camilla, who is 18, as well as raising Kate’s two children from a previous marriage. Tucci stopped working to be at home with his wife, but was then offered a part in the medical drama ER.
‘Having a wife who was in and out of treatment, and having to work on these medical shows… that was interesting. But it was the only way I could make money. We had three little kids, my stepdaughter, a mortgage. And Kate was going through severe treatments.’
In a desperate search for a cure, the couple went to Holland, where Kate was treated with a device called an Energetic Corrector, designed to reactivate weakened cells though electrical oscillation. The treatment, Tucci says, was ‘very beneficial’, but too late. Kate had been diagnosed at stage four, and the cancer had metastasised.
There is a painful parallel in Supernova, when Tusker admits to Sam that he has stopped taking the medication that is supposed to arrest his slide into dementia. ‘Tusker knows that his medication doesn’t do anything,’ Tucci says. ‘That’s the part of this story that is so heart-wrenching. You try to do everything, but there is nothing you can do.’ Kate’s death in May 2009 at the age of 47 stopped everything. ‘It was a very difficult time. With three kids, how do
‘We’ve been around each other for many of the most significant moments. Best and worst’
you do it? You just do. I had an incredible support system. My family, my parents, were incredible.’
It was 12 months before he felt comfortable about travelling for work, filming Burlesque, a musical comedy with Cher and Christina Aguilera, in Los Angeles, where he was able to take his parents and children. Tucci says he had no thoughts then of what the future might hold, and whether he would ever marry again. ‘And then I met Felicity, and I knew.’
In July 2010 he was a guest at the wedding of Emily Blunt and the actor John Krasinski, held at George Clooney’s house on Lake Como. There Blunt introduced Tucci to her sister, Felicity. Tucci would later joke how he had never seen someone so slender enjoy their food so much. ‘It was astounding really. I thought she had some sort of disease.’
Shortly afterwards, he was in London filming, and they had dinner at the City restaurant L’anima. The meal lasted four hours. ‘At a certain point I couldn’t do it any more,’ Tucci would later remember. ‘At the end of the meal the waiter comes around, and she says, “Do you have a cheese cart?” I thought, that’s incredible. That’s really sexy and disgusting.’
When Blunt later visited Tucci at his home in New York, the relationship was consummated over a 26lb suckling pig, which they beheaded together in the kitchen and roasted over a spit. Tucci jokes that ‘75 per cent’ of their conversations are about food. ‘She loves to eat,’ he says. ‘I love to eat. And we’re both, thank God, blessed with fast metabolisms.’
Soon afterwards, Blunt moved to America from London to live with Tucci and his children. In 2012, the couple married in a private ceremony at home, followed a month later by a wedding at Middle Temple Hall (where Blunt was called to the bar after training as a barrister) in London, attended by Colin Firth and Meryl Streep, where Emily Blunt was a bridesmaid and Steve Buscemi the best man.
A year later, the family moved to England, settling close to Roehampton, where Blunt grew up. She wanted to be near her family, Tucci explains, and it was too hard for her to work from America. ‘And it didn’t matter where I lived. It was hard for the kids to leave, and hard for me to leave my family – still is hard.’ But the children have adjusted to English life like a dream. ‘They say things like, “I thought it was quite lovely” – but still with an American accent.’
Blunt is 21 years younger than Tucci. For her to become stepmother to his three children was, he says, ‘huge. I’m a stepfather myself. It’s the hardest job. But she’s incredible.’ She has embraced the part of Kate in Tucci’s life in a way that a more insecure person might have found difficult. ‘Felicity put together this beautiful book for the kids, of pictures of them with their mom. When we did a cookbook together, she said do you want to include any of Kate’s recipes in the book?
I said, well I guess so, so she found some and said, let’s get a picture of Kate in here…’
Their son Matteo was born in 2015, and a daughter Emilia three years later. Tucci is fond of quoting the maxim that you are only as happy as your unhappiest child, and fatherhood – particularly to five children with such a wide age-spread – is ‘the hardest thing in the world. You just want to get it right.
‘The only problem with being a father is you’re a human being, do you know what I mean?’ He laughs. ‘And everyone is always changing. From five to six, eight to nine. From 12 to 12-and-a-half – those are completely different people. They smell different. They look at you differently – with so much hatred! So you’re always trying to play catch-up. Should I do this, that? Should I yell? Should I be quiet? Then you’re like, just kill me.’
Covid has wrought the same confusions and anxieties in Tucci’s life as in everybody else’s. He was able to travel to Spain and Italy for work during the summer. But he has been unable to see his parents in America for more than a year. A trip to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary and his father’s 90th birthday was cancelled. His mother is 84. ‘They’re both in incredible
‘Felicity loves to eat. I love to eat. And we’re both, thank God, blessed with fast metabolisms’
shape, but when you’re 90, you’re 90,’ Tucci told me in a second conversation by telephone, on the day after the most recent lockdown was announced. ‘It’s angering because you know there hasn’t been great leadership on either side of the pond, and that’s really frustrating to my dad. He said to me, “I can’t see my grandchildren because so many people in government have made so many mistakes.”
‘And it’s only getting worse. The virus is rising again and it’s terrifying, devastating for families. I’ve been very lucky that no one in my family has been harmed by it. But how long can that be avoided? I really can’t wait for my parents to be able to get the vaccine.’
Three of his children who should be at university are now at home. There is homeschooling to be taken care of. Blunt has a full-time job; Tucci has a book to finish – a memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food. ‘It’s all so complicated. We’re prepared for it now, and that’s some sort of solace. But you’re afraid for the people that you love who are vulnerable – and just on a superficial level you want to have a social life.’
In May, at the height of the first lockdown, he wrote a piece for Atlantic magazine describing holding the domestic fort for the family, while Blunt continued to work from her office upstairs. What the piece made clear was just how attuned Tucci is to the demands of housework. He is, he says, ‘a very tidy person’. First thing in the morning, before he’s even made coffee he is reaching for a damp cloth to wipe the kitchen surfaces. ‘Then we can move forward. And then I’ll make a terrible mess of it. But that’s part of the process.’ His studio at the bottom of the garden where he writes and pursues his other passion of painting, is ‘a disaster’. But the house is ‘incredibly clean’.
Ironing? ‘No. My father loves ironing. But I’m not a very good ironer, and I’m also not a very good folder.’ Between the cleaning, the cooking and the cocktails, he seems to be a paragon of domesticity. Every woman I know, I tell him, seems to regard him as the perfect husband. He laughs. ‘They need to just call up Felicity and get the truth of it. But let’s continue that myth.’
In writing his memoir, he says, he has come to realise how ‘profoundly significant’ the family meals of his childhood were. It carries memories, he says, of ‘intense happiness, obsessiveness and strange dichotomies’ – there was a period when his mother would serve Swanson frozen TV dinners – ‘this woman who was completely obsessed with if you ate this pasta with this sauce, and never any butter on the table.’
The Tuccis are originally from Calabria, where only bread is put on the table, to be used as a scarpetta (‘ little shoe’) and dipped into the sauce. ‘Taint it with the butter,’ he says, ‘then you won’t taste the sauce. And still when I see people eat Italian food certain ways, I can’t… It doesn’t only offend me. It offends the entire Italian civilisation.’
I ask, when is he at his happiest – apart from being with his family, of course, and at the stove, and making negronis. There are times when he is painting, he says when he feels incredibly happy. And skiing. ‘I’m probably happiest when it’s winter. I like snow. And I like when you finish skiing and you go and have a cocktail, raclette, fondue. I love all that.’
So, food again. ‘I love rabbit. Usually I’ll just make it with tomato, onion, maybe some olives. Or you can stuff it with fennel, and salami, or prosciutto, maybe pancetta, because they have no fat, so you need to add the fat. And some herbs and white wine, and you kind of tie it up and cook it. So I took this rabbit, put it into the pressure cooker and just added, a little garlic, shallot, fennel, a bay leaf, loose herbs, white wine, a little bit of cognac, mustard and salt, and chicken stock – cooked it for 25 minutes in this thing. And oh, my God…’
I’ve lost him.
Supernova will be released in cinemas on 5 March
‘The only problem with being a father is you’re human. And everyone is always changing’