Film star Stanley Tucci has spoken of his firm belief that actors should not be limited to roles that match their own sexuality in a frank interview about the highs and lows of his life and his career in showbusiness.
Tucci, known for screen hits such as The Hunger Games and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as for presenting the popular television food and travel show Searching for Italy, says the job of an actor is “to play different people”, adding: “that’s the whole point of it”.
The American actor, who lives in London with his wife, the literary agent Felicity Blunt, is the castaway today on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Asked by host Lauren Laverne how he responded when people criticised him for playing a gay character in the film Supernova, in which he starred opposite his friend Colin Firth, he says: “Obviously, I believe that’s fine, and I am always very flattered when gay men come up to me and talk about my role in The Devil Wears Prada or Supernova, and say I did it the right way. Because often it is not done the right way, and I really do believe as an actor that you are supposed to play different people. You just are.”
Tucci, 62, says he sees acting as an escape; a place where he is more comfortable. “I feel much safer on stage than I do in real life,” he says. “Sometimes, walking into a cocktail or dinner party, I get very nervous.”
He also talks about his pain when his first wife, Kate Tucci, was diagnosed with cancer in 2005. She died five years later. “I didn’t work for almost a year … It was awful. It still is awful in a way. You never really get over it,” he says, before describing his guilt about not being able to offer more help in the final days of her illness. “I was afraid it would affect me so greatly that it would overwhelm me, so that I wouldn’t be able to go on and take care of the kids, so I had to step away. Other people were there. But you still feel guilty and sad about it.”
His own more recent cancer diagnosis, for which he has been treated successfully, “humanised him”, he says. “I wasn’t fully aware of my mortality after Kate’s death. Now I get it.”
Choosing the Louis Armstrong song What a Wonderful World as one of his eight desert island tracks, the actor says it was a favourite of Kate’s, and was played at her funeral. “She was always upbeat and always saw things in a positive way. It made you want to be her,” he says.
He found happiness again when his friend, the actor Emily Blunt introduced her sister, whom he married 11 years ago. “I was kind of afraid of getting into a relationship and I kept trying to break it off because I am 21 years older than Felicity. I didn’t want to feel old for the rest of my life, but I knew this was an incredibly special person. If anybody made things better for all of us, it is her.”
