‘I was very uncomfortable’: How Stanley Tucci learnt to love himself on camera

When Stanley Tucci was 12 years old, his parents Stanley and Joan moved the family to Florence, Italy, for a year. For a kid who had grown up in Peekskill, a working-class neighbourhood north of New York City, the experience was transformational.

“I’d never lived in a city before, I had lived in quite rural suburbs, so Florence, the history of it, the architecture, the life of it, the accessibility you had to grocery shopping, to your local park, and to other cities via the train, I loved it,” says the 64-year-old actor.

“There weren’t as many, certainly as many cars as there are now, nor were there as many roads as there are now. I’d never really been in a restaurant before, a proper restaurant, and it was really exciting.”

Though his resume in cinema spans everything from The Devil Wears Prada in 2006 to the spy thriller series Citadel, and, most recently, the pope drama Conclave, the road through Hollywood has now brought him down an unexpected side laneway: the food and travel series Tucci in Italy, for the streaming platform Disney+.

It has also brought us both to a dinner of prosciutto and carciofi, and hand-made ricotta and spinach gnocchi at the Trattoria Cammillo in the Italian cultural and culinary centre Florence, a walk through the city’s 152-year-old bustling indoor Sant’Ambrogio market, and a visit to one of the region’s most prestigious wineries, Castello di Gabbiano.

Though Tucci would be described by most as an actor, he is also a great storyteller. He is a deeply cultured man, very funny and naturally charismatic. In conversation, over dinner, his knowledge of Italian culture is as comprehensive and meticulous as his understanding of cinema and art.

But this is not where, in 2025, you would have expected to find the man best known to audiences as Miranda Priestly’s loyal confidant Nigel Kipling in The Devil Wears Prada and the progressive reformer Cardinal Bellini in Conclave.

Tucci first turned his hand to the travel, food and culture genre in 2021, when he hosted Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which aired for two seasons on the news channel CNN. Food was clearly a passion for him, but the veteran actor had rarely played himself on camera, having spent most of his career cloaked in character and working from a script.

“Without question, when I first started doing it, I was very uncomfortable,” says Tucci. “I didn’t really know how to [play myself], and then eventually you learn how to do it by watching what you’ve done and going, oh, I see what I’m doing. Now, I’m much more comfortable doing it.

“I think actors become actors because they don’t want to be themselves all the time. Suddenly, I’ve ended up being myself a lot in front of the camera, which I like, but I don’t want to do that all the time. I still love acting, and I want to make sure that people continue to think of me as an actor, not just me.”

Food is also central to the Italian cultural identity. Not just because they turned pasta and pizza into culinary art, but because Italian food spins an interconnected web of regions, styles of agriculture, complex flavours and innovative techniques.

It is, Tucci says, a “fertile peninsula. And you have here a huge number of influences over the centuries. One of the reasons Italy is so familial is because they were invaded so many times, so the only people you could really trust was your family.

“The other thing that is interesting about Italian cuisine is that it’s very quick. There are some recipes where things are slowly cooked, but for the most part, when you’re making an Italian meal, the majority of it is going to be over an open fire or on a stove.”

It is clear Tucci has two great passions in his life: acting and food. The former has dominated much of his career, but despite the recent surge to prominence of his Italian food and culture adventures, Tucci’s relationship with food goes back much further. He wrote his first cookbook in 2012, and he now has four.

But the reality is that both disciplines are far more closely intertwined than they might seem. “There is a connection,” he says. “Food is like acting or writing in the sense that there’s a structure. You have this structure, but you can improvise within that structure, and it’s very much of you.

“All the elements go into the pan to tell the story, and then it goes onto a plate and that’s the final story, and it is, of course, sometimes performative, but ultimately, it’s just about taking bits and pieces of you, and things from outside of you, putting them together, and putting them on a plate as opposed to putting them on a stage, or the screen, or a canvas.”

The slightly more nuanced question of whether Tucci in Italy is a show about food, or a show about a country and its culture, is more difficult to resolve. The two notions share a kind of “Laverne & Shirley billing”, Tucci says, meaning that one is on the left, and the other on the right, one a little higher, the other a little lower.

“The right one is higher, the left one is lower, which equals them out, somehow. That’s the way I would put it,” Tucci says. But, I ask, which of the two is the slightly higher of the two? Tucci pauses to consider the question. “I have no idea,” he replies.

The same question, or one close to it, could be asked of Tucci. An American-born Italian man, raised in America, but still deeply connected to Italy. Like many offspring to the migrant experience, the result is sometimes a life lived in the wilderness between those facets.

So, I ask him, when the journey of Tucci in Italy ends, are the facets more clearly resolved to one another? And does he walk away with a more complete sense of his identity as the child of a culture that straddles two cultures?

“Yes, I do,” he says, genuinely relishing the question. “It has caused a reconciliation of selves, and it is really interesting because I always thought, I feel so Italian, and then I thought, no, I’m so American, and now I live in England, so I start to feel a little British, too.

“But the food, again, and exploring it, and the history of it, has made me more connected as a person, makes me more connected to my childhood, to understand things about my childhood, and to understand things about my family, to understand behavioral things, and to understand things about Italy that I’ve always wanted to know. Yes, very much so.”

A second season of Tucci is a certainty; it has already been filmed. But in the longer term, Tucci does not see a more substantial future in the genre in the same way that the actress Joanna Lumley, for example, turned one journey to the Northern Lights into a close-to-full-time career as a travel presenter.

“I don’t know that I want to do different countries because I don’t have a connection to those countries,” Tucci says. “It would be more interesting to have somebody like me explore those countries in the way that I’ve done it, [who has] a connection to it.

“You have to ask questions and asking questions is what is really interesting because those people are really passionate about what they do, and they really want to talk about what they do. But as far as another television series, me, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t have any plans for that. I’m kind of tired.”

Tucci in Italy streams on Disney+ from May 19.

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