“I hated taking that role”: the 2009 movie Stanley Tucci loathed every moment of making
It says a lot about the feast-or-famine nature of acting that the same period where Stanley Tucci enjoyed some of his career’s greatest triumphs was also a time that pushed him toward his lowest ebb.
These days, everybody loves Tucci. He’s one of the most popular character actors in the business, although it took him a while to get there. He made his screen debut in John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor in 1985, but it wouldn’t be until the 21st century that he truly came into his own as a commodity.
While his feature-length directorial debut, Big Night, which he also starred in, scripted, and produced, became a slow-burning cult favourite, it wasn’t until a decade later, and the release of The Devil Wears Prada, that he reached the next level in terms of mainstream recognition and visibility.
However, it came at a cost. Despite stealing every scene in the smash hit flick as Nigel Kipling, a role he’d reprise 20 years later, it adversely affected his career, with Tucci admitting that the offers weren’t exactly rolling in, leaving him to wonder if the picture had actually done him more harm than good.
In 2011, he was “flattered and insulted at the same time” to be cast as a 70-year-old scientist in Marvel’s Captain America: The First Avenger, but he swallowed his pride and lent support in the superhero blockbuster anyway, which immediately became one of the greatest roles he ever played, according to him.
Sandwiched in between those two films was the high point of his professional life, at least from an awards season standpoint. Tucci might be a six-time Primetime Emmy and two-time Golden Globe winner, but his solitary Academy Award nomination came for playing against type in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones.
The literary adaptation wasn’t great, but his performance certainly was, with the actor chilling audiences to the bone as the twisted killer, George Harvey. It was a part that he was resistant to from the beginning, and even though he agreed to do it and knocked it out of the park, he wrestled with it from day one.
“I hated taking that role,” he admitted, with his late wife, Kathryn Spath, feeling much the same way. “I grappled with it, and Kate, she didn’t want me to do it. I couldn’t wait for it to be over.” The Lovely Bones wasn’t a big hit in the Tucci household, then, but he gritted his teeth and persevered with a character he loathed to his very bones, and at least he had an Oscar nod to show for it at the end of the day.
It was a strange few years: the biggest hit he’d ever been in at the time closed more doors than it opened, a role he was insulted to be offered became one of his favourites, and arguably the greatest dramatic turn he’s ever given was something he hated doing from the first second to the last, which sums up the life of an actor in a nutshell.
