The sensual Stanley Tucci – CBS News

The very funny and very charming Stanley Tucci was found in London just before Christmas.

“I smell English when I walk here,” he says.

“Do you really feel English?” asked correspondent Holly Williams.

“Yeah, and I speak English when I pass by! Yeah, just the language, not the accent!”

Tucci is that actor you’ve seen everywhere, often stealing scenes, sometimes entire movies. This has earned him a cult following, although Tucci claims he doesn’t understand it.

“People say that now. I don’t know what it is!” he’s laughing.

“I think that means you have people who watch a movie for you, even if you’re not in the lead role, ”Williams said.

“I guess people really like the variety of performances, and that’s what I kind of revel in. I love it.”

From an ideal husband to Meryl Streep’s Julia Child in “Julie & Julia,” to a deranged serial killer in “The Lovely Bones,” a role that won Tucci an Oscar nomination … and now “Supernova,” in which he and Colin Firth play a middle aged gay couple. Tucci’s character suffers from precocious dementia.

Williams said: “One of the interesting things is that the sexuality of the two main characters is not a theme of the film at all. It’s a universal love story.”

“Yeah, people are starting to come in and understand that love is just love,” he said.

Tucci helped direct the film, including sending the script to his friend, Colin Firth. “After you’ve played a number of gay characters, you want to do it so that, like you do with any character, you just want to be honest.”

“He has been silent, but there has been criticism from some quarters that gay roles should be played by gay actors,” Williams said. “What do you think about this?”

“I have a hard time with that,” Tucci replied. “I think acting is not being yourself. If we were to use that as a model, we would only play ourselves. I think what we need to do, we need to give more opportunities to the actors. Gay people. People who are. Gay people have only recently, in the last few years really been able to say, “I’m gay and I’m an actor and I can play straight roles. They’ve always had to hide their sexuality to be able to play the lead role or lead woman. “

Tucci was born in a suburb north of New York City to an Italian-American family. He started his career on stage, but was thirsty for roles in film and television. What he didn’t want, he told us, was the violent mafioso roles normally offered to Italian-American actors.

“I didn’t want to play this person all the time; it’s not interesting,” he said. “There are brilliant Mafia films out there, but you can’t – how often they come? Most of them are just cheap shiny movie scams. “

Frustrated, he says, he co-wrote, co-directed and starred in “Big Night,” a very different type of story about Italian-Americans – two immigrant brothers struggling to survive in the New Jersey restoration in the 1950s.

The film also featured some of Tucci’s family recipes (such as Timpano).

The film helped to get Tucci noticed and was just the beginning of his very public obsession with food.

“I grew up in a family that really valued food – that was it, seems to be about the only thing we talked about,” he said.

Tucci has written two cookbooks, has a cooking thesis on the go, and recently filmed a series on CNN on Italian cuisine in Italy.

Williams asked, “How good a cook are you, out of 10?”

“With some dishes, 11!” he’s laughing. “But with a lot of things I’m fine, I’m a good cook, maybe five.”

At 60, Tucci seems to be relishing his success. But he also suffered a horrific loss. His wife, Kate, the mother of their three children, died of cancer at the age of 47.

“You never stop crying. You never stop crying,” Tucci said. “And it’s still, it’s still hard after 11 years, it’s still hard, and it will always be hard. But you can’t let it – and she would never want any of us to sort of, wallow in this grief and let it take over our lives. She would never want that. She wasn’t like that. “

In recent years, he’s found love again, with Felicity Blunt, a British literary agent who is also the sister of Emily Blunt, Tucci’s co-star in “The Devil Wears Prada”.

And his very British wife and their two young children are also how this quintessential New Yorker ended up living in London, where he is enjoying another cult moment. He posted an Instagram video of himself mixing a Negroni for his wife during the lockdown, which quickly went viral … followed by more cocktails, garnering millions of views.

Williams asked, “Why do so many people want to watch you mix cocktails?”

“I have no idea!” he said.

“You really have no idea?

“No, honestly I don’t. I don’t. Why do it you thought? Tell me.”

“You know, I don’t mean to be inappropriate, but they’re pretty sultry, some of them,” Williams said.

“‘Sensual’? Really?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, there was always a lot of sexual comments in it, yeah …”

“How do you feel about this?”

“I was very flattered!” Tucci replied. “But it was great. I mean, you’re incredibly flattered when people are kind of going gaga for you.”

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Story produced by Mikaela Bufano, Jane Whitfield and Robbyn McFadden. Publisher: David Bhagat.