The 2015 movie Stanley Tucci called the “antidote” to the role he couldn’t stand playing
Once upon a time, Stanley Tucci did some other stuff rather than stand in the kitchen of an incredibly expensive house, over-pronouncing the names of posh pasta and pretending to be surprised someone was filming him even though they’d pre-arranged it.
He was simply an actor, and a pretty good one to be fair to him, with an Oscar nomination, two Golden Globes and six Emmys under his no doubt exquisitely fashioned leather belt and a CV listing some critical and commercial hits, including Prizzi’s Honor, with Jack Nicholson, Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition and the Peter Jackson-directed The Lovely Bones in 2009.
That was the adaptation of a book which, at the start of the 2000s, was rather like The Da Vinci Code in that it was almost impossible to have a conversation with anyone, anywhere, without them asking you if you’d read it yet. It was a supernatural novel about a young girl who is brutally attacked and murdered, and then watches over the life she left behind and her own murder investigation.
Jackson snapped up the rights and cast Saoirse Ronan in an early lead role, with Tucci playing the man who murders her character. Although reviews were somewhat mixed and it didn’t make a huge amount of money, it was the New Yorker who came out of it with the most praise, scooping an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
Despite that, the role took something of a heavy toll on him, and it wasn’t until a few years later, and once he’d made a few Hunger Games movies and fittingly written his first cookbook, that he had the opportunity to go full circle to some degree.
2015’s Spotlight was the crime thriller with a stellar cast including Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo that would go on to win the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’ the following year, and in taking his spot among the characters, Tucci found some redemption for the horrors of his past six years.
He played Mitch Garabedian, an Armenian lawyer who dedicates his life to getting justice for the victims of abuse in a mass cover-up by the Catholic Church in Boston, working together with the investigative department of the Globe newspaper to shine a light on the decades-long wrongdoings.
Tucci was asked by the Evening Standard if The Lovely Bones had informed what he did on the later film, and replied, “In some way I think so, maybe it was an antidote. Your biggest fear as a parent is for anything to happen to your kid. Also, the extent of the abuse and the cover-up was so profound – it’s important to tell the story again and again.”
Spotlight would eventually be nominated for six Oscars and grossed five times its budget at the box office, but it is by far Tucci’s only sizeable hit; in fact thanks to the Hunger Games franchise, a Disney film with Beauty and the Beast, two Transformers movies and two instalments of The Devil Wears Prada with Meryl Streep, Tucci has accumulated almost $3billion gross over his career, putting him right up there with the most successful actors.
This year, aside from looking disapprovingly over the top of his black glasses while making TikToks, Tucci will be appearing in a heist thriller called Masterplan for Prime Video about a thief enlisting his own kids in a plot to try to steal the Mona Lisa. It hits the streaming site in October.
