In 2018, the “Tucci Gang” of New York made a big splash in the national media. Was this yet another Italian criminal group, a modern incarnation of New York’s infamous “Five Families,” who dominated organized crime in that city for nearly 50 years ? Actually, no. “The Tucci Gang” was a satirical, affectionate rap music video featured on Saturday Night Live, a tribute to one of the America’s most underrated character actors: Stanley Tucci.
In the video, cast member Pete Davidson “spits” (sings) about Tucci’s talent while actor Sam Rockwell (himself a respected character actor in independent movies) dances around dressed as Tucci in many of his different roles, from The Hunger Games and Transformers to The Devil Wears Prada and Spotlight. After 32 years in show business, Tucci, a native of Peekskill, New York, had officially become the epitome of class and cool.
All respect to the SNL crew, but Stanley Tucci was always such to the Italian American community. It was his thespian skills, to be sure, but also because he was a rara avis: an Italian surnamed actor who routinely calls out Hollywood bigotry via its caricaturing of our community. Mark Ruffalo and Lady Gaga aren’t shy about identifying themselves as Italian American, but much of their pride is lip service, at best. Tucci literally talks the talk and walks the walk.
As for talk, here is Tucci in an October 1st, 1998 interview in The Washington Post: “Before I made Big Night (1996), I had been in 25 films, and it was always the same stuff, gangsters and mafiosi. It was very frustrating. It was perpetuating the stereotype of the Italian as the guinea gangster. I felt it was an insult to a wonderful culture, to wonderful traditions – and a personal insult, too, the idea of dumb, working-class people always on the edge of illegal activity. Food and the mafia, that’s all Hollywood sees as. People still say to me, ‘Hey, you’re Italian, you must know someone who can break his legs’.”
As for walk, Tucci released that frustration two years earlier with the aforementioned Big Night, an independently produced film in which he starred, directed, and co-wrote the script (with his cousin, Joseph Tropiano). Although studio heads admired the screenplay, they were reluctant to finance the film unless, in Tucci’s words, “I put a mob guy it.” It was an offer Tucci easily refused. He held out, eventually got the financial backing he needed, and made a film about two immigrant restauranteur brothers in New Jersey that became a critical classic.
As Tucci said in a March, 2002 interview in The Independent, a British newspaper: “It was a chance to portray Italians in a different light to the way they’re usually portrayed in films,” adding, “It’s not what you see in movies, it’s what you don’t see. We have to show Italian Americans in different capacities. They can be schoolteachers – like my father – or anything else.”
Both of Tucci’s parents were Italian, of proud Calabresi stock, and he received his talents from both – cooking skills from his mother, and an appreciation of art from his father. Indeed, when he was a teenager, Tucci accompanied his parents and siblings to Florence, where his father took a one-year teaching sabbatical. Clearly, the experience was life-changing, giving him a sense of genuine pride which he still carries with him today.
Within his mainstream Hollywood work, Tucci does try to insert some italianita‘. He played Maestro Cadenza in the 2017 live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. He provided the voices for two historical Italian characters in the animated films Peabody and Sherman (2014, artist Leonardo Da Vinci) and The Wind Rises (2012, aviator Gianni Battista Caproni). He narrated the four-part 2015 PBS series, The Italian Americans. In fact, Tucci’s voice has become a second instrument over the past decade, selling everything from cell phones to luxury cars. Keep your ears tuned! His latest project is an upcoming CNN six-part series, Searching for Italy, scheduled to begin on February 14th. Completed just before the pandemic lockdowns in February, 2020, the series follows Tucci as he visits different regions of Italy, sharing their culinary treasures. And when the pandemic did hit full stride, though quarantined in the London home he shares with his British-born second wife, Felicity Blunt (his first wife, Kathryn, tragically died of breast cancer in 2009, age 47), Tucci still managed to make a splash, so to speak: Last April, his wife filmed him making a Negroni (an Italian cocktail) and then uploaded it on YouTube, where it promptly went viral. It was poetically perfect: a dry drink made by a man with a dry wit.
Example: Tucci’s roommate in college was the African American actor Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction). When Rhames told Tucci that his first name was Irving, Tucci did a typically understated Tucci double-take: “You ain’t no Irving. I’m calling you Ving.” The name stuck, and the two remain friends to this day.
I will close with a quote from Rhames: “Basically, Italians are white Black people.” In short, the essence of cool. And their “gang” leader is Stanley Tucci. -BDC
A new superhero movie is being made: The Batman. John Turturro will play the role of mob boss Carmine Falcone. John Turturro is an Italian citizen as well.
The movie will be watched by millions of children around the world. I wish they had the decency to change the name of the mob character. Falcone was a beloved judge killed by Cosa Nostra in Italia in the early 90s.
The name Falcone has far more admirable connotations than a fictional mob boss.
BTW: This is the second time Carmine Falcone will be the major villain in a DC comic movie: British actor Tom Wilkinson played him in the 2005 film, Batman Begins. And Eric Roberts also played the fictional mob boss Moroni in 2008’s The Dark Knight, a film which, though it featured a “multi-cultural” assortment of bad guys, found it necessary to include the following line from the Joker: “Where’s the Italian?” In short, a specific insult.
Needless to say, but I’ll say it: Our own people are, of course, behind it. The fictitious character of Falcone was created in 1987 by Frank Miller and David Muzzecchelli, and was based on the also fictional Don Vito Corleone of The Godfather.
And for an actor of John Turturro’s stature to breathe life into this ugly stereotype is especially hurtful. In 1993, he made the indie film Mac, a tribute to his honest and hard-working father (a carpenter). He also made documentaries tied to his heritage, be it Passione (2009) and Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy (2012). He has likewise tried to portray a few positive Italian characters (such as in 1998’s Illuminata) to counter-balance the negative ones (such as the racist son in 1989’s Do The Right Thing).
Et tu, Giovanni?
Although Tucci is definitely a petunia in an onion patch of defamation, he is not the only Italic character actor in history who graced our American stages and theatres with class and dignity. I would draw the attention of our readers to the careers of Leonard Cimino and Joseph Campanella for starters. James Coco and Dom DeLuise (often mistaken for each other) were non criminal comedic and serious character actors. Naturally, Ann Bancroft (ne Italiano) was a shining star. The wonderful actors from Italy itself are too numerous to mention, but Mastroianni, Pupella Maggio, and Romolo Valli were a few of my shining stars..
TOUCHE’ TUCCI!!
A breath of Fresh Air. He and the rest of us need to keep at it. Enough of the buffoonery and gangsterism constantly attributed to us. Hurray for Tucci!!