4 hours ago
1
Conclave, quite rightly, is nominated for a number of Oscars this year. This, I suspect, is down to how successfully it managed to construct a perfectly Oscar-friendly cladding – religion! costumes! meticulous reconstructions of the Vatican! – and wrap it around the silliest story imaginable. We’ll save discussions of the twist for another time, but even without that it’s a story about a bunch of ostensibly serious men acting like gossipy schoolgirls. It’s honestly hilarious.
Part of its appeal is in how well it has been cast. Ralph Fiennes gets to play his two best modes – furrowed doubt and Leonard Rossiter – at the same time. John Lithgow gets to be at once avuncular and menacing. Isabella Rossellini gets to tell lots of people that they’ve been very naughty boys. But arguably the best casting, and one weirdly shut out of nominations, is that of Stanley Tucci. And this is because, in Conclave, Stanley Tucci plays Stanley Tucci.
That’s basically it. He’s Stanley Tucci from books and TV and social media – urbane, sophisticated, conspiratorial – in a funny hat and a dressing gown. When you see Stanley Tucci on screen, you don’t think “Oh, there’s Cardinal Bellini, the clear favourite to become the next pope,” you instead think “Hey, it’s Stanley Tucci! Go on Stanley, make us a negroni.”
On the surface, this might seem like something of a problem. After all, the point of being an actor is to disappear into a role. The thrill of watching a great actor is getting to witness a transformation so comprehensive that you quickly forget that you’re watching an actor at all. This is not the case with Stanley Tucci. To watch Stanley Tucci in anything is to watch Stanley Tucci transform into a version of Stanley Tucci who wears slightly different clothes sometimes.
Indeed, look at Stanley Tucci’s filmography and you’ll notice that for the last half decade, Stanley Tucci hasn’t really made much of an effort to disappear inside a character. Citadel, What If …?, Inside Man, The Witches; all these performances saw Tucci knowingly adapt to a genre rather than disappearing inside a character. The last time he really did that was in 2020’s excellent Supernova. And even then he was still Stanley Tucci, just a version of Stanley Tucci who didn’t wink at the audience quite as much.
The reason for this, of course, is that Stanley Tucci has outgrown acting. He’s a personality now. Thanks to his books and travel shows and TikToks, Tucci has landed on the best-defined role of his life; a classy sophisticate who appreciates the finer things in life. He’s impeccably dressed and charming enough to make your grandmother giggle into her handkerchief. Forget any of the things he did before, this is now who Stanley Tucci is. And it’s probably impossible to escape.
This is fine. It happens sometimes. To watch culture in 2025 is to realise that acting is such a horrible job that all actors ever want to do is find a lucrative side-hustle that will get them out of it. George Clooney has his alcohol. Scarlett Johansson has her cosmetics line. And Stanley Tucci has his travelogues. These are the things that made him into a household name, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you had the chance to be handsomely paid to do the thing you love most in the world, you’d take it too. Of course you would.
Plus this isn’t exactly new. Even before he ate his way around Italy for a living, Stanley Tucci was always best when he played Stanley Tucci. His best film remains Big Night, which he co-wrote and co-directed as well as playing the lead. The film drew on Tucci’s love of food. His character demonstrated a lot of traits of the classic Tucci persona. The final scene, one of the all-time great movie endings, is just Stanley Tucci grumpily making an omelette. It’s basically a prototype of his Instagram posts. It’s a great film. If you can be Stanley Tucci as well as Stanley Tucci is Stanley Tucci, why would you ever want to be anything else?
However, when you’re primarily famous for sternly telling your wife how to make a cocktail on the internet, that does kind of cut into your ability to play a range of roles. He’s always excelled at camp, as he played in The Devil Wears Prada and Julie & Julia and The Hunger Games. But it’s hard to see him now playing, say, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans as he did in A Little Chaos in 2014. Or Stanley Kubrick, as he did in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers in 2004, or a serial killer paedophile as he did in The Lovely Bones. But hope springs eternal. Stanley Tucci is, as we have established, the world’s best Stanley Tucci. But perhaps Conclave’s return to drama shook something loose in him. Maybe in his next role, he’ll be a little less himself. And then a little less. And then it might be time to start getting excited again.
