Stanley Tucci, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is the final word character actor and the final word guide to Italy’s food and culture. The 2 professions may sound completely unrelated, but in fact, they will not be.
Tucci, who was raised on the Italian cooking of his parents — each children of immigrants from Italy, who took him to live in Forence for a yr when he was 12 — has experienced a few of his best successes as an actor in projects related to food. They include 1996’s Big Night, a low-budget indie about Italian immigrant brothers who open a restaurant within the Nineteen 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 greater opportunities for himself (mission: completed); and 2009’s Julie & Julia, wherein he gave one among his most acclaimed performances because the husband of Julia Child opposite no less a scene partner than Meryl Streep.
Meanwhile, Tucci, who has played all the pieces from a gay art director of a fashion magazine in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada and its 2026 sequel to a serial killer in 2009’s The Lovely Bones (for which he received his sole Oscar nom), has proven to be just as chameleonic as a TV host, managing to charm and ingratiate himself with Italian chefs, restaurateurs and locals of all backgrounds on each CNN’s Stanley Tucci: Looking for Italy, which he hosted from 2021 through 2022, and Nat Geo’s Tucci in Italy, the primary season of which dropped in 2025 and the second of which is rolling out immediately.
After a long time of playing other people, Tucci had no particular desire to start out appearing on screen as himself — until, that’s, one among the darkest times in his life. In 2017, after being misdiagnosed for 2 years, it was determined that he had oral cancer — specifically, a tumor at the bottom of his tongue, which, fortunately, had not metastasized. He immediately began treatment with a high dose of radiation that left him bedridden for six months, barely in a position to swallow, and compelled to devour food through a tube into his stomach. “It was a extremely scary time,” he acknowledges, adding, “I lost 30 kilos. I could barely walk. You’re on morphine for some time since the pain in your mouth is so excrutiating. It was horrible.”
Sarcastically, it was presently that Tucci became infatuated with food-related TV programs, sucked in by the sight of things that he himself couldn’t devour. All of it reminded him of “an concept that I had almost 20 years ago, which was to interrupt down each region in Italy and speak about that region through the food, because no one had ever done that before,” he says. Coincidentally, as he was still recovering his strength — and taste — CNN reached out to him and asked if he was eager about doing a show with them. He pitched them on the aforementioned idea, they bit, and he was soon traversing Italy trailed by a camera crew. He acknowledges, “I used to be 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: Looking for Italy went on the air, it quickly established its host as a kind of a Julia Child-cum-Anthony Bourdain for the 2020s — and brought him three consecutive Emmys for best hosted nonfiction series or special. But then in late 2022, CNN, during Chris Licht’s temporary and rocky tenure as head of the network, canceled it “for some unknown reason,” as Tucci puts it. To make matters worse, he says, CNN made it virtually inconceivable for him to proceed the show elsewhere. “So CNN dumps us, and we’re like, ‘Oh no,’ after which there was one company that was eager about it, which I might have happily gone with. But the issue was, the people at CNN wouldn’t allow us to maintain the name and they’d not allow us to have the back catalog.”
Within the meantime, Tucci remained involved with food and drinks. He became a viral sensation when his wife posted videos of him making cocktails during lockdown. He wrote a well-received food memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food. After which TV got here calling again: “Finally, Nat Geo said, ‘OK, we’ll do it.’ We had to vary the name, and we have now no access to those other episodes.” But Tucci was back in Italy, talking about food, but with a special focus than the one among his prior show. On Tucci in Italy, he explains, “What I would like to see is the connection between people. I would like to see people eat together. It’s not food porn, that’s different. That is about interaction, and the food is a personality, however the thing that makes the entire play is the three people, 4 people, or whatever it’s, and that food.”
Last yr, for the primary season of Tucci in Italy, Tucci was again nominated for the most effective hosted nonfiction series or special Emmy. This yr, for season two, he’s poised to land one other nom. Will there be a season three? And will it’s Tucci in… say, somewhere apart from Italy? “My interest in food is all over the place,” he emphasizes. “But I’ll only do it if I feel connected to the place. Otherwise, it’s just a few guy wandering around who doesn’t speak the language and who really doesn’t know the food. That may be good, depending on who it’s, but that’s not me.”