IT’S TUCCI TIME
Stanley Tucci greets 2021 with a new movie with Colin Firth and a mouthwatering docuseries that explores Italy.
I “just spilled a big cup of coffee on the floor, just as I was setting everything up,” says Stanley Tucci, who, like the rest of us, isn’t immune to the challenges of working from home.
The actor, 60, wearing his signature darkframed glasses with a scarf wrapped nattily around his neck, isn’t flustered: “Everything’s good,” he says. He’s chatting by video from his home in London, where he lives with his wife, literary agent Felicity Blunt (yes, actress Emily’s sister), and their two children, Matteo, 6 on Jan. 25, and Emilia, 2. (He also has three children from his first marriage, to Kate Tucci, who passed away from breast cancer in 2009.)
It’s been a busy year for Tucci—he’d just returned from a six-week television shoot in Spain when we were catching up. (Strict COVID-19 protocols on film and TV productions have enabled Tucci to keep working safely; earlier in the year, while at home, he’d had and recovered from the virus.) Even better, he’s kicking off the new year with the release of two big, close-tohis-heart projects: co-starring with Colin Firth in the film Supernova, premiering in theaters Jan. 29 (and video on demand
Feb. 16), followed by the delicious six-part CNN docuseries Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, premiering Feb. 14, which explores regional cuisine.
A MAN OF MANY ROLES
For almost 40 years,Tucci’s appeal has crossed genres and generations, thanks to a range of standout performances, from lighthearted (Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada) to iconic (Secondo in Big Night) to flamboyant (Caesar Flickerman in the Hunger Games franchise). He’s been nominated for just about every award imaginable (including a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing child killer George Harvey in The Lovely Bones) and taken home three Emmys, a couple of Golden Globes and a raft of other prizes. He has fun too, recently lending his voice to the old-biddy villain Bitsy Brandenham in the animated Apple TV+ series Central Park.
In Supernova, Tucci tackles one of his toughest roles yet, and there’s lots of buzz that it’ll snag his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He plays Tusker, a successful American novelist living in England with Sam
“As an actor, the more prepared you are beforehand, the more spontaneous you can be. I think that’s true of cooking too.”
(Firth), his partner of 20 years. At first, we see them in a camper driving across the country to visit family, gently bickering over directions like any longtime couple. But we quickly realize Tusker is grappling with early-onset dementia, which has robbed him of the ability to write and made Sam pause his own career as a pianist to care for him.
Director Harry Macqueen initially approached Tucci for the role of Sam, and Tucci was drawn to the tender relationship between the two characters and to the difficult subject. “It’s very hard to lose
somebody, especially when you’re
losing them and watching them,” he says. The pairing with Firth was Tucci’s idea— the two first appeared together in the 2001 TV drama Conspiracy and have been good friends since—so he slipped Firth the script. It was a sneaky move, he admits, “but I had a feeling Colin would like it.”
Firth did like it, and he had a casting idea too. “Colin said, ‘I wonder if we shouldn’t switch roles,’ ”Tucci recalls. He agreed, and it didn’t take much for them to convince Macqueen. “Harry chose a few scenes and we read them as originally cast, and then we flipped it. As soon as we did that, it was obvious we were supposed to play the roles we ended up playing.”
Tusker was both a perfect fit and big stretch for Tucci. On one hand, Tucci shares his character’s cultured charm and sharp wit. But the actor—luckily—hasn’t had any personal experience with someone in his life dealing with dementia, so he was starting from scratch to research the role. “I watched a lot of documentaries about it,” he says, and his performance is infused with the subtleties of dementia. A person’s condition “can change very quickly, and it can change very slowly,” he says. We see flashes of Tusker’s wry humor as his condition rapidly deteriorates, alongside Sam’s challenges caring for him.
The Oscar buzz is “very exciting,” says Tucci. But it’s also a little bittersweet, he says, because “I think it’s going to be harder and harder to make movies like this.” Smaller films were feeling the pinch before the pandemic, and now the enormous cost of ensuring sets are COVID-safe makes projects like Supernova even less likely to find a way onto the screen, he says.
MANGIA ITALIA! His other big project this winter, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, feeds his lifelong love affair with Italian food. He grew up in Katonah, N.Y., the oldest of three kids in a food-obsessed Italian-American family in which his mom, Joan, and dad, Stan, an art teacher, relished nothing more than planning, cooking and sharing great meals. That love first went public with Big Night 25 years ago, which Tucci co-wrote with his cousin, screenwriter Joseph Tropiano—and co-directed with Campbell Scott, his friend since high school—to showcase a side of Italian culture other than gangsters.
In the new series, Tucci is our guide to Italy’s rich regional cuisine. Although American diners in 2021 certainly know Italian cuisine better than, say, the 1950s-era patrons in Big Night, he thinks we still have a lot to learn.
“The more I went to Italy, the more I saw how completely diverse the food is in each region,” says Tucci, who has been visiting the country since his family spent a year in Florence when he was a teenager during his father’s sabbatical. “So many people around the world have the idea that Italian food is spaghetti and meatballs, which you never see in Italy. Or chicken parmigiana—which isn’t even a real Italian dish, though I make it!” The show explores regional nuances, from the rich Alpine fare in the north (where “you’ll barely ever see a tomato or eggplant”) to the vegetable- and seafoodcentric dishes in the south.
He also has authored two cookbooks— The Tucci Cookbook (a collaboration with his parents and with chef Gianni Scappin, who helped with his research for Big Night) and The Tucci Table, which reflects the fare he cooks with Blunt. Those will be joined this fall by his memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food.
Blunt shares his passion for food and cooking. The pair met at her sister Emily’s (Tucci’s co-star in The Devil Wears Prada) 2010 wedding to John Krasinski (in Italy at George Clooney’s Lake Como villa, no less) and later bonded over making a suckling pig. So it’s no surprise that during last year’s lockdown, with the family laying low in their London home,
Blunt turned a smartphone camera on Tucci and asked him to make her a drink. It was just a casual little thing, he says, meant to entertain her co-workers also stuck working at home.
But it was cute, so his assistant also posted it on his Instagram account, and more than a million people have happily watched Tucci calmly demonstrate how to make a negroni while Blunt occasionally comments off camera.
No one is more surprised by the reaction than Tucci. “I don’t even know how to use my phone,” he jokes. “It’s ridiculous. And then we just said, ‘Well, let’s keep making them.’” Now he turns up every so often, shaking or stirring a libation at their tidy, well-stocked home bar or occasionally demonstrating a recipe in their kitchen.
He’s making one concession to his newfound social media success: “We’re going to get some lights to make things look a little better. I’m getting older by the minute,” he says, chuckling, “so I’ve got to do something.”
He doesn’t really need to, though. The internet—and the world—likes him just the way he is.