Stanley Tucci, the visitor on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is the final word character actor and the final word information to Italy’s meals and tradition. The 2 professions might sound utterly unrelated, however genuinely, they don’t seem to be.
Tucci, who was raised on the Italian cooking of his mother and father — each kids of immigrants from Italy, who took him to reside in Forence for a 12 months when he was 12 — has skilled a few of his best successes as an actor in initiatives associated to meals. They embrace 1996’s Massive Night time, a low-budget indie about Italian immigrant brothers who open a restaurant within the Fifties, which he co-wrote and co-directed at a time when he was “despondent” and “insulted” about being repeatedly solid as Italian-American criminals, with the hope of making larger alternatives for himself (mission: completed); and 2009’s Julie & Julia, during which he gave considered one of his most acclaimed performances because the husband of Julia Youngster reverse no much less a scene accomplice than Meryl Streep.
In the meantime, Tucci, who has performed every thing from a homosexual artwork director of a style journal in 2006’s The Satan Wears Prada and its 2026 sequel to a serial killer in 2009’s The Beautiful Bones (for which he obtained his sole Oscar nom), has confirmed to be simply as chameleonic as a TV host, managing to allure and ingratiate himself with Italian cooks, restaurateurs and locals of all backgrounds on each CNN’s Stanley Tucci: Trying to find Italy, which he hosted from 2021 by way of 2022, and Nat Geo’s Tucci in Italy, the primary season of which dropped in 2025 and the second of which is rolling out proper now.
After a long time of taking part in different individuals, Tucci had no specific want to begin showing on display screen as himself — till, that’s, one of many darkest instances in his life. In 2017, after being misdiagnosed for 2 years, it was decided that he had oral most cancers — particularly, a tumor on the base of his tongue, which, fortuitously, had not metastasized. He instantly started therapy with a excessive dose of radiation that left him bedridden for six months, barely in a position to swallow, and compelled to eat meals by way of a tube into his abdomen. “It was a really scary time,” he acknowledges, including, “I lost 30 pounds. I could barely walk. You’re on morphine for a while because the pain in your mouth is so excrutiating. It was horrible.”
Paradoxically, it was at the moment that Tucci turned infatuated with food-related TV packages, sucked in by the sight of issues that he himself couldn’t eat. All of it reminded him of “an idea that I had almost 20 years ago, which was to break down each region in Italy and talk about that region through the food, because nobody had ever done that before,” he says. Coincidentally, as he was nonetheless recovering his energy — and style — CNN reached out to him and requested if he was serious about doing a present with them. He pitched them on the aforementioned concept, they bit, and he was quickly traversing Italy trailed by a digital camera crew. He acknowledges, “I was like a year-and-a-half out of treatment and I couldn’t even eat half the stuff. I could barely swallow it.”
When Stanley Tucci: Trying to find Italy went on the air, it rapidly established its host as a kind of a Julia Youngster-cum-Anthony Bourdain for the 2020s — and introduced him three consecutive Emmys for finest hosted nonfiction collection or particular. However then in late 2022, CNN, throughout Chris Licht’s temporary and rocky tenure as head of the community, canceled it “for some unknown reason,” as Tucci places it. To make issues worse, he says, CNN made it nearly unattainable for him to proceed the present elsewhere. “So CNN dumps us, and we’re like, ‘Oh no,’ and then there was one company that was interested in it, which I would have happily gone with. But the problem was, the people at CNN would not allow us to keep the name and they would not allow us to have the back catalog.”
Within the meantime, Tucci remained concerned with foods and drinks. He turned a viral sensation when his spouse posted movies of him making cocktails throughout lockdown. He wrote a well-received meals memoir, Style: My Life Via Meals. After which TV got here calling once more: “Finally, Nat Geo said, ‘OK, we’ll do it.’ We had to change the name, and we have no access to those other episodes.” However Tucci was again in Italy, speaking about meals, however with a special focus than the considered one of his prior present. On Tucci in Italy, he explains, “What I want to see is the connection between people. I want to see people eat together. It’s not food porn, that’s different. This is about interaction, and the food is a character, but the thing that makes the whole play is the three people, four people, or whatever it is, and that food.”
Final 12 months, for the primary season of Tucci in Italy, Tucci was once more nominated for the perfect hosted nonfiction collection or particular Emmy. This 12 months, for season two, he’s poised to land one other nom. Will there be a season three? And will it’s Tucci in… say, someplace apart from Italy? “My interest in food is everywhere,” he emphasizes. “But I’ll only do it if I feel connected to the place. Otherwise, it’s just some guy wandering around who doesn’t speak the language and who really doesn’t know the food. That can be good, depending on who it is, but that’s not me.”
