“They go crazy,” Stanley Tucci says in London, where he now lives with his wife, literary agent Felicity Blunt. “With The Devil Wears Prada, Hunger Games and now Transformers, oh my god, I can’t walk down the street. London is better, Italy is really tough and New York, forget about it. In Rome I couldn’t walk down the street. I’ve made so many movies at this point; I’ve just inundated and flooded the market with sheer volume.”
Stanley Tucci has come a long way in his storied thirty-five year career. In 1985 he debuted with a bit part in John Huston’s mob comedy Prizzi’s Honour (his one line removed from the final cut) and spent years afterwards typecast as a Mafioso. TV shows such as Miami Vice and Wise Guys embellished this pattern. Even when he scored a role in Beethoven, it was as one half of a criminal duo who robs a pet store.
Born in New York of Italian parents – a writer, and an art teacher – Tucci discovered inevitably that being an Italian American actor relegates you to automatic associations with Michael Corleone. At the least, he says, you get cast as urban, uneducated and unemployed.
When he took a role in TV’s Murder One, Tucci had only one stipulation for his character: “I said ‘the only thing, can I just ask, if he is the killer,’ which I never knew, ‘can he not be Italian and no connection to the Mafia.’”
It was a role and a decision which changed things substantially for Tucci, allowing, he says, people to see him in a different way.
“It’s different now, Italians are viewed differently now,” he says. “We still imagine a lot of them are Mafiosi, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Mark Ruffalo is the perfect example, really, if you think about it. Mark plays everything. He looks like what we would consider Italian and he has an Italian surname… You’ll see people have Italian surnames now in movies and they’re the teacher or they’re the doctor.”
Tucci’s citing of Ruffalo is not incidental. They both appear in Oscar contender, Spotlight, which documents the true story of how in 2001, the Boston Globe uncovered a horrific and massive cover-up of child abuse within the local Catholic archdiocese.
While Tucci himself was raised a Catholic, he considers himself officially lapsed. “Even when I was going to church – I stopped going to church in high school – you were listening to it, and this is just me, I just didn’t believe it, I didn’t get it. It was abstract, and it was dogmatic, and everything was black and white and the world just isn’t that way.”
While Spotlight restricts itself narratively to the Church abuse in Boston, what is “incredibly important” to Tucci is that its story is emblematic, representative of a greater widespread problem.
“You know it’s happening in Boston, ok, you know it’s happening all over the place. If it’s that systemic in one city, you know… the Catholic Church is all connected, it’s all connected… You couldn’t tell the whole story. All you have to do is tell just a little piece of it, and then you just see those tentacles. It’s a really ugly octopus.”
While Tucci is still promoting Spotlight, the ridiculously prolific star – who currently has 117 screen titles to his credit – already has another five projects in production, including a new film as director (he had previously co-director Big Night with Campbell Scott, and stepped out on his own with The Impostors, Joe Gould’s Secret and most recently, 2007’s Blind Date).
His next directorial effort will be a bio film about the life of Swiss sculptor and draughtsman Alberto Giacometti. The film, which is called Final Portrait went into pre-production in November and will star Geoffrey Rush and Armie Hammer.
“I love Giacometti. I’ve been interested in Giacometti for 20 some years. My dad was an art teacher and so I was brought up in a world of art, and learning about art. And Giacometti really just struck a chord with me. And this is based on a book called ‘The Giacometti Portrait’ by James Lord who was his friend and biographer. I got the rights to it about 13 years ago from James, wrote the script about 10 years ago…. It’s a short shoot. 5 weeks. We’re building Giacometti’s studio, and we’ll do some locations, cheat some locations in London for Paris, and probably go to Paris just for a few days.”
Spotlight is in cinemas January 28.
