Stanley Tucci on ‘Tucci on Italy’ & Possible Spinoffs — Awards Chatter

Stanley Tucci, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is the ultimate character actor and the ultimate guide to Italy’s food and culture. The two professions may sound completely unrelated, but in actuality, they are not.

Tucci, who was raised on the Italian cooking of his parents — both children of immigrants from Italy, who took him to live in Forence for a year when he was 12 — has experienced some of his greatest 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 in the 1950s, which he co-wrote and co-directed at a time when he was “despondent” and “insulted” about being repeatedly cast as Italian-American criminals, with the hope of creating greater opportunities for himself (mission: accomplished); and 2009’s Julie & Julia, in which he gave one of his most acclaimed performances as the husband of Julia Child opposite no less a scene partner than Meryl Streep.

Meanwhile, Tucci, who has played everything 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 both CNN’s Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which he hosted from 2021 through 2022, and Nat Geo’s Tucci in Italy, the first season of which dropped in 2025 and the second of which is rolling out right now.

After decades of playing other people, Tucci had no particular desire to start appearing on screen as himself — until, that is, one of the darkest times in his life. In 2017, after being misdiagnosed for two years, it was determined that he had oral cancer — specifically, a tumor at the base 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 able to swallow, and forced to consume food through a tube into his stomach. “It was a really scary time,” he acknowledges, adding, “I lost 30 pounds. I could barely walk. You’re on morphine for a while because the pain in your mouth is so excrutiating. It was horrible.”

Ironically, it was at this time that Tucci became infatuated with food-related TV programs, sucked in by the sight of things that he himself could not consume. It all reminded him of “an idea that I had almost 20 years ago, which was to break down each region in Italy and talk about that region through the food, because nobody 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 interested in 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 was 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: Searching for Italy went on the air, it quickly established its host as a sort 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 brief 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 impossible for him to continue the show elsewhere. “So CNN dumps us, and we’re like, ‘Oh no,’ and then there was one company that was interested in it, which I would have happily gone with. But the problem was, the people at CNN would not allow us to keep the name and they would not allow us to have the back catalog.”

In the meantime, Tucci remained involved with food and drink. 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. And then TV came calling again: “Finally, Nat Geo said, ‘OK, we’ll do it.’ We had to change the name, and we have no access to those other episodes.” But Tucci was back in Italy, talking about food, but with a different focus than the one of his prior show. On Tucci in Italy, he explains, “What I want to see is the connection between people. I want to see people eat together. It’s not food porn, that’s different. This is about interaction, and the food is a character, but the thing that makes the whole play is the three people, four people, or whatever it is, and that food.”

Last year, for the first season of Tucci in Italy, Tucci was again nominated for the best hosted nonfiction series or special Emmy. This year, for season two, he is poised to land another nom. Will there be a season three? And could it be Tucci in… say, somewhere other than Italy? “My interest in food is everywhere,” he emphasizes. “But I’ll only do it if I feel connected to the place. Otherwise, it’s just some guy wandering around who doesn’t speak the language and who really doesn’t know the food. That can be good, depending on who it is, but that’s not me.”