Stanley Tucci, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is the ultimate character actor and the ultimate guide to Italy’s food and culture. The two professions may sound completely unrelated, but in actuality, they are not.
Tucci, who was raised on the Italian cooking of his parents — both children of immigrants from Italy, who took him to live in Forence for a year when he was 12 — has experienced some of his greatest successes as an actor in projects related to food. They include 1996’s Big Night, a low-budget indie about Italian immigrant brothers who open a restaurant in the 1950s, which he co-wrote and co-directed at a time when he was “despondent” and “insulted” about being repeatedly cast as Italian-American criminals, with the hope of creating greater opportunities for himself (mission: accomplished); and 2009’s Julie & Julia, in which he gave one of his most acclaimed performances as the husband of Julia Child opposite no less a scene partner than Meryl Streep.
Meanwhile, Tucci, who has played everything from a gay art director of a fashion magazine in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada and its 2026 sequel to a serial killer in 2009’s The Lovely Bones (for which he received his sole Oscar nom), has proven to be just as chameleonic as a TV host, managing to charm and ingratiate himself with Italian chefs, restaurateurs and locals of all backgrounds on both CNN’s Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which he hosted from 2021 through 2022, and Nat Geo’s Tucci in Italy, the first season of which dropped in 2025 and the second of which is rolling out right now.
