For dinner, Stanley Tucci’s youngest daughter, Emilia, six, only eats pasta and cheese, a bit of butter. Occasionally, she will accept pesto. As you can imagine, this pains him. Tucci is a man of deep-fried courgette, the giant timpano, barolo and squid-ink risotto. He is a man for whom food is love and the act of cooking a profound and indulgent pleasure. We are sitting on velvet sofas in a bar near his home in south London, drinking wine and beer, and talking about the pain, the shame, the frustration of feeding a child. “And the struggle. And the sadness,” he sighs. “But, that is what she wants. And she’ll grow out of it.”
His three adult children, with his late wife, Kate, have taught him this, as has his son, Matteo, with second wife, literary agent Felicity Blunt. “But still, after a while, you’re like, ‘Just fucking eat. Please.’” He drifts off for a second. “Tonight I’m thinking I’m gonna make pasta with guanciale and peas and cheese, and a little onion. I can’t tell her that I’m putting in the onion. But sometimes I do, just to get her upset.” He pouts.
Tucci graduated as an actor in 1982 from his local liberal arts college – an early role saw him modeling in a white vest in a Levi’s ad. He has been a fixture on our screens ever since: writing and directing (including the cult hit Big Night in 1996), acting (his best-loved role was opposite Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada), being tipped for awards, expanding his career to take in another great love – food. His show, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, took him from Milan to Venice, cooking, eating, basking in the grand pleasure of, for example, perfectly fried zeppole.
These were the foods he’d grown up on as a kid in New York state, cooked by his beloved parents, secretary Joan and art teacher Stanley senior, first-generation Italian immigrants who whisked Tucci and his two siblings to Florence for a year, seemingly just to eat. But it was only as he entered his 60s – we can date it accurately, in fact, because it happened in an Instagram video that Blunt filmed in their kitchen at the beginning of the pandemic – that Tucci became a bona fide sex symbol.
He was competently mixing a negroni and narrating his process archly in a low, firm growl. Light jazz played in the background. It was a window into a quite beautiful life, controlled and well-lit, one that only seemed richer for the grief and struggle that had been lived before. And then, as if everyone had drunk four of his cocktails, the internet melted. How does it feel to discover, at almost 64, that women have never wanted him more? “I’m thrilled. No, I’m thrilled.” He says it three more times, in gradations of earnestness. “I hope it lasts, you know? I do joke with Felicity, of course, where I say, ‘Do you know how many millions of people…’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ But beyond that I don’t really think about it. I’m glad of it, but it’s not on my mind all the time. Life’s too complicated already.”
It was only as he entered his 60s that Tucci became a bona fide sex symbol.
His complicated life, which includes but is not limited to, Hollywood movies (the latest is Conclave, a papal thriller), the Italian food programs and all the travel that involves, and supporting a close family spanning in age from 94 to six, is detailed with humor and vulnerability in his new book, a diary called What I Ate in One Year. “Once you start writing, it helps you make connections and you realize that writing about a piece of fucking sausage or whatever, suddenly this whole other memory unfurls.” He’s a skilled artist, too, and has painted two onions, one of which appears fresh and lovely at the beginning, “and then at the end, we just have one onion that’s sliced in half and decaying.” Can you explain the metaphor, I ask. “I don’t think I have to,” he purrs.
Through the diary we journey with Tucci between film sets and school plays, pausing for recipes and his intimate thoughts, both existential and tomato-based. “The slower one becomes, the faster time moves,’ he writes. “I think about death all the time,” he says lightly, “I always have.” In a comfortable way? “No! We used to go to the cemetery all the time and Italians always talk about death. Because there was so much of it. When I went to southern Italy in 1973 all the relatives were wearing black. My dad explained, somebody’s always dying, so they just wear black all the time, fuck it. You’re sort of defined by grief.”
In the book he remembers being overcome after a widower approached him in Somerset to ask if he’d consider writing a cookbook for the bereaved, with recipes for one. “It was hard. I knew exactly how he felt. He was feeling exactly what I felt for so long. I’m still feeling it, but in a different way.”
In 2009, Tucci’s wife of 14 years, Kate, died of breast cancer. She was 47. The grief, he says: “It’s always there. But if it were to stay as prominent in your life as it does at the beginning, you couldn’t function. You couldn’t take care of your kids. You couldn’t hold a job. You couldn’t do anything. So, whether we know it or not, we tell ourselves to let it go. And also the person who died would not want you to be that way.” He thinks for a second. “Although, I do want my wife to be that way when I die. I want her to be incredibly unhappy.”
Tucci is 21 years Blunt’s senior. I remind him about the house they’re building in the countryside, the one he writes is for her to live in after his death – with her lover(s). “Oh, that’s right, I forgot. It’s so terrible isn’t it? The things I say!” He’s thinking also, perhaps, of his multiple mentions of Blunt’s unfortunate diarrhea. “She said: ‘Why did you put that in there?’ I go, ‘It’s funny!’”
Tucci is a man of deep-fried courgette, the giant timpano, barolo and squid-ink risotto.
Tucci met Blunt through her sister, Emily, his co-star in The Devil Wears Prada. “We’re both sort of the same way, kind of romantic and then at the same time kind of cynical about it. Sometimes it’s like, ‘Why are you behaving that way? Why are you being so loving? What’s wrong with you?’” They married in 2012. Wedding guests included Colin Firth, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore; his best man was Steve Buscemi.
The book is peppered with stories of celebrities like Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan popping round for dinner. I wonder how his children feel about fame. “Last year Matteo was like, ‘You’re famous.’ So I tried to tell him, there are so many different ways of being famous, like you can kill someone and be famous. I said, ‘If you end up being famous because you’ve worked hard and you’re good at what you do, that’s a good thing.’ I think that’s what I’ve done. People see you on a screen, larger than life, and that heightens everything. But it’s sort of silly. I mean, we don’t do anything. We just pretend to do things.” How seriously does he take the pretending? “I take it seriously, but I don’t beat myself up about it like I used to.” These days, “I find it easier to access emotion now. Part of it is technique, you know, but I’m just freer. I’m much freer now. I’m not trying to do anything. I’m just doing it.”
As he talks, five jade bracelets jangle on his wrists. Four were gifts from Blunt – his children’s names are engraved on tiny silver plates – but the first was from the director Paul Feig. “It’s meant to bring health – they gave it to me soon after I got out of treatment.” Tucci filmed the first season of Searching for Italy while in recovery from oral cancer – he still has trouble swallowing, a side-effect from the radiation. A lot of his illness, he says, “is kind of vague. There are big parts I don’t remember. Felicity will talk about that time I collapsed on the floor and I have no recollection. All I remember is being so fucking miserable and so nauseous I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. Sometimes I’d think I was hungry. But the taste in your mouth was so horrible. I was so weak. Walking up the stairs was a supreme effort. It was awful. Then, eventually, slowly, slowly, slowly you get better.”
It started one day in 2017 with a pain in his jaw. “Pain wasn’t the word. And then it started in my throat.” It took two years before they found a tumor at the base of his tongue – even with treatment there was the possibility he’d never be able to eat again.
Later, on a feeding tube, he’d watch cookery shows, a very specific kind of torture. “I didn’t want to do the treatment, because I knew a lot about cancer treatments. I’d seen it. I wanted to do alternative treatments. But Felicity was adamantly against it.”
He takes a long swig of beer. “Look, I’d also seen that alternative treatments don’t work. But, unfortunately, a lot of people try alternative treatments at the 11th hour. And so the alternative doctor gets this fucking corpse, basically. You get cancer, you do standard of care treatments. And then a lot of people die anyway. And what people will say is cancer is just too strong. Right? If you do alternative treatments and you die, they say, ‘See, those alternative treatments don’t work’. They never say that about the chemotherapy. Some alternative treatments do work for people. We don’t know enough about them. A lot of it’s bullshit. But we have to really look at the system and what’s really right for each individual patient. Each cancer is different, each person is different.”
“The slower one becomes, the faster time moves.”
How did the experience change him? “It made me tired. Like fundamentally tired. It aged me significantly.” Before we met he’d spent the morning doing stunt training for his spy action series Citadel. “But you catch yourself in the mirror and you’re like, ‘Oh God. What is that old man doing with a weapon?’ But they’ve got a great name for it now.” I’m ready. “Geri-action!”
If he could linger at one age (“A perfectly reasonable request”, he believes), Tucci says he’d take a decade of 40 – mature, experienced in love, loss, success and failure. “I hope I’ll live a long time. But when I’m 80, Felicity will be younger than I am now. Millie will only be 21. The little kids, they go, ‘You’re really old, aren’t you?’ I’m like hey, alright. But yeah, we talk about it. And it’s something I really worry about.” I remind him, of course, that he’s going to live forever. “Yes, because I made movies, that’s why.” After all his film roles, including Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, and The Lovely Bones (which earned him an Oscar nomination), as well as The Hunger Games series, it was a leap for him to play himself in Searching for Italy. What did the show do to him? “Well,” he says drily, “I only eat Chinese food now. People are like ‘Hey, you’re drinking, you’re eating, you’re having fun,’ but it’s hard!”
He details the grueling schedules, the driving, the planning, the flying. After one particularly exhausting crawl through customs, the security officer who had been grinding him over water bottles in his luggage finally turned to him and asked which film she knew him from. He almost cracked a tooth, he says, he was clenching his jaw so hard. After the guard continued to question him, which show, which movie, he muttered, shaking with anger, “Probably The Devil Wears Prada!”, walking away as she squealed her delight.
“But the logistics of the show are kind of killing. We’re shooting in 40C heat and Italians are so generous. And the poorer they are, the more generous they are. They’re like, ‘We made all this food for you. Why don’t you come and sit? Why don’t you come and see my grandfather in the thing?’” He’s started laying out specific rules – one pasta, one salad, one goodbye. It sounds like a happy sort of hell. What was the best thing he ate? “In the north of Italy I think it was a dumpling called a knödel.” Can he spell that for me? “No.” He smiles serenely.
Last night he made a meal he’d seen on Instagram. “I get a big kick out of it. Some of the food stuff on there is awful; some is stupid and makes you laugh. But this was fantastic: little aubergine parcels. Bake them for a minute, cut them into long strips, then make a cross and inside you put a little tomato sauce, really simple, mozzarella, basil. Wrap it up. Lovely!” What’s he thinking about when he’s eating? “You’re tasting this thing and you’re like, what is that? Why is that spice in there? Then you find out it’s because this was on the route for the blah blah blah and these people traded in that spice 600 years ago… I’m fascinated by it, I mean, it’s all I think about!”
And among the work, the cooking, the history of a taste, what place does pleasure play? “At five o’clock, I don’t want to be working, I want to have a cocktail, I want to sit down at the table with people, I want to cook, I want to have a great time, then I want to go to bed, go to work the next morning…” He leans forward, twinkling. “And then I want to do it all over again.”
Eve Wiseman is a commissioning editor and columnist for The Observer
