Stanley Tucci Is Savoring It All

Stanley Tucci has been in front of the camera, in one form or another, for some four decades now. He’s always had that certain movie-star élan, always been a master of the charismatic smolder. But it was not until April of last year, at the age of fifty-nine, that he became a proper sex symbol of the digital age. It was a few weeks into the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, and Tucci’s wife, the literary agent Felicity Blunt, filmed a short phone clip in their London home of her husband mixing her a Negroni, the classic Italian cocktail, as he narrated his process step by step. The video is three minutes and seventeen seconds of obscene domestic fantasy: a man stands at a built-in bar stocked with top-shelf liquor and elegant glassware; he banters flirtatiously with his wife; his hands move with the fluidity of a confidence man dealing an ace from the bottom of the deck. Tucci is trim, gently muscled, bespectacled, a little arch, a little icy. In the background, a tidy children’s playroom is just visible, evidence of life beyond the cocktail. The video, posted to Instagram, became a viral sensation.

As Tucci explains in his new memoir, “Taste: My Life Through Food,” his career has orbited the world of food and drink nearly from the start. The book is a decidedly un-Hollywood memoir that traces Tucci’s path from son (and grandson) of magnificently talented Italian American home cooks up through his most recent project, the CNN series “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” in which he takes on the role of culinary tour guide. He writes that the realization that food, and not acting, is the central passion of his life came in 2017, after he was diagnosed with a form of oral cancer, the treatment for which destroyed his taste buds and left him temporarily reliant on a feeding tube. “Food not only feeds me, it enriches me,” he writes. “All of me. Mind, body, and soul.” Tucci and I spoke recently via video chat, as part of The New Yorker Festival. Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, touches on the process of writing a memoir, the importance of truth in art, and why terrible meals aren’t always bad.

You’ve written two cookbooks. Both, as many cookbooks do, include somewhat memoiristic aspects. But your new book is a true memoir. What was it like for you to take on a project like this?

I’ve made notes about food over the years, and I thought that maybe I would compile them into a book of observations and musings. It was suggested to me, by the publishers, that I write a memoir, and I thought, Well, is that right? Is that interesting? But they said to give it a try, so I did, and, as I started writing it, it started to make sense.

We’re always taking in information in different ways—visually, orally, kinesthetically, and so on—but I realized that so much of the way I took in everything I experienced was through my mouth. So it made sense that the memoir would take that shape. I think maybe people expected it to be more about movies, or more about celebrities or gossip, and I’m afraid I’m not really interested in that. What’s interesting to me is the relationship between what you do in your job and then what you do outside of your job, whether it’s taking care of your kids or cooking or playing sport or music. And then how do those two things, or however many things, go together? Those are all the things that make up you.

Did you know who that “you” would be—the person that all of these elements would make up—before you started working on the project, or did it come together as you were working on it?

The answer is both. I’ve known for many years that food was something that I was gravitating toward. Certainly, after we made “Big Night,” which was twenty-five years ago, and then, after I did “Julie & Julia,” I just became more and more interested in food. Whenever I went to restaurants, if it was a good restaurant, I would figure out a way to insinuate myself into the kitchen shamelessly, so that I could just sort of see the way they work, and what the setup was, and maybe ask how they made a certain dish. It was fascinating to me. It became all I could think about, even when I was acting. So I knew that that was who I was. But, as I started writing, I realized that it was even more of who I was, if that makes sense.

How did you go about composing these stories? Did you check in with other people to make sure their memories lined up with yours?

I wrote a lot about my parents in the book—my parents are my heroes—and I would check in with them and say, “Do you remember this story? Is that what happened?” Then they would say, “No, it was this year,” and so on and so forth. I’m sure I’ve gotten a number of things incorrect regardless. I talked to chef friends whom I’ve known over the years, to just really get it all as exact as possible. But then, of course, it’s always one’s experience of somebody’s cooking—it’s your impression of it, your feeling of it, your experience of it.

You write about these extraordinary memories of your mother’s cooking, and the food that came out of your grandparents’ kitchens. When did you begin to cook for yourself?

When I was married to Kate, my first wife, who passed away eleven years ago. She loved food. We loved to cook together, and she taught me things that I didn’t know, and I taught her things she didn’t know. As we travelled more and more, we became more interested in food and experimenting with recipes. Then, when I met Felicity, after Kate had passed away, she was the same: food was a huge part of her life. I was introduced to the way she cooked, to the things she cooked, to the restaurants in England. I live here in London now, and luckily it’s a food mecca. A lot of people don’t think that. If you say, “Oh, I live in London,” they go [making a skeptical face], “Oh, how’s the food?” Well, it’s actually great.

Saying that food is a sensory experience might be a little bit tautological, but it seems to me from this book, from your films, from your CNN show, that the sensuousness and physicality of food is very important to you.

When you really watch somebody eat—say, when you watch somebody eat an oyster—there’s something really satisfying about it. You watch somebody take a mussel and then eat the mussel, and then they use that mussel to scoop out the next mussel and then keep using that mussel to scoop out—there’s something really beautiful about that. It becomes like some sort of strange little dance. Just watching people in a kitchen move around is really quite beautiful. It’s balletic. I love that.

That makes me think of my favorite scene from “Big Night.” The timpano, I think, gets all the attention and all the glory. But, for me, it’s always been the final scene of the movie—that five-minute wordless, unbroken take of you making a frittata from start to finish. “Balletic,” I think, in fact, is a word that I’ve used in The New Yorker to describe that scene.

Really?

Unless my editor cut it, but the word definitely came to mind. There’s something very choreographed about the ritual of cooking.

I mean, that scene is obviously choreographed, because it’s blocked within that frame, which is the proscenium, really. What I’m looking at right now here [gestures at video-chat screen] is a rectangle, and that is your blocking within that. Any successful blocking is balletic, in a way.

I was surprised how many details from your memoir I recognized from “Big Night,” which is not an autobiographical film. Do you collect these moments as they come, or do they only coalesce when the story starts to come together?

I don’t think you can consciously say, “I’m going to remember this.” If you do, you’ll never remember. They sort of rise up as you’re writing something—suddenly, it just comes from some weird part of your brain, and you go, Oh, yes! Yes! That’s it! You’re making all these connections. There are—what’s the word I want?—anchors for things. It’s a word that my acting teacher used to use. It could be a smell, a touch, a sound, a taste. There are things, really little things, as we go through life, that we remember, and, suddenly, if we want to put pen to paper or we want to re-create something as an actor or as a painter, these images come to you. They’re embedded in your subconscious because they are significant. Why are they significant? That’s purely an individual thing. They’re not necessarily traumatic or dramatic. It could be something very simple, like a pencil that you held once, the color of the pencil, and where you were. You can then take that pencil and turn it into a whole play, or a painting, or a movie, or whatever the genesis is. I think that these little things have real significance. There are, of course, huge, traumatic experiences that have real repercussions for us. But it’s the little things, in a way, that individuate us as artists.