Still Rolling: Stanley Tucci is The Rake's Issue 106 Cover Star
Stanley Tucci has faced down the terrifying unknowns of cancer and arrived at the most fully realised version of himself. The actor and gastronome talks to TOM CHAMBERLIN about regaining his senses of taste and smell — and his enduring appetite for life.
Two days before The Rake's team and Matt Holyoak congregated to photograph Stanley Tucci in the penthouse at Claridge’s, Tucci attended the Met Gala for the first time in 20 years, and by a distance he was the best-dressed at the event. He was in perfect black tie with a British-racing-green smoking jacket — perhaps a subconscious reminder of where his heart lies these days. The fact he was holding hands with a Brit (his wife, the literary agent Felicity Blunt) provided a more conscious reminder of why that might be. It was therefore with some guilt that, after such a sartorial triumph, we made him show up (with jet lag) to have his picture taken in multiple outfits before submitting to an interview with us. The thing is, in the 11 years since Stanley first appeared on The Rake's cover, there has been virtually no chance of catching him on a day off.
11 years is a long time, and Stanley has — sometimes purposefully, sometimes not — filled them with an awful lot. An extraordinary breadth of film and television work; a cancer diagnosis; a cookware range; social-media-sensation status; and two television series that amount to a complete philosophical inversion. Thanks to those series — Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy and Tucci in Italy — he has discovered that, somewhat to his surprise, the person he most wants to be on camera is himself.
This is not an issue of ego arising from nearly 45 years’ work as an actor. Certainly, Tucci no longer has anything to prove, but his most recent success on screen has run parallel to something more contemplative and rooted in reality, and something that will have changed perspectives. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, and he had to come to terms with the “terrifying” unknowns the illness — as well as the treatment — would bring. “I never anticipated it and it was very scary,” he says. “I lost all my sense of taste and smell, and you don’t really just lose it. At first, what happens is everything is just horrid. It just smells and tastes like shit. Everything. Somebody would open the refrigerator [and] I just wanted to throw up. I couldn’t eat for six months.” What was a hard mental hurdle to get over turned out to be an act of faith that things would improve. I ask if he knew it was just part of the process and would pass. He says, “They tell you it will, but you think it’s never going to happen, and it took a long time for it to come back.”
I never anticipated it and it was very scary... Somebody would open the refrigerator and I wanted to throw up.
Presenting is a different art form to acting; an audience will be carried by acting whereas presenting points the viewer in a direction. Stanley has had a good amount of practice with his unexpected social media success. His videos from home, either at the bar or in the kitchen, readying a meal for his family or friends or fixing himself and his wife a sundowner, captivated people in a way he didn’t anticipate, but they opened up this new skillset for a post-Covid world in which video content is king and our phones are just as popular as televisions to slake out thirst. And, boy, were people thirsty for Stanley.
What made this content so popular — other than the signature “We rolling?” opening, the forearms and the charm — was that it pushed against the tiring age of influencer content on Instagram. For years, people had been able to get away with projecting a lifestyle curated to suggest people wanted the audience to ‘be like me’. This style of vanity and narcissism, which offers little more than posing next to a glass of whisky or a fast car, has begun to be pushed aside by people offering practical advice in a voluntary way. With Stanley’s cocktails or cooking, you are never made to feel as though he is doing it correctly and you are doing it wrong should you opt for a different path.
On presenting, Stanley says: “I am not a chef, right? I’m a guy who likes to cook. And I love food. I know a fair amount about food. I’m hardly an expert. It’s my job to be the conduit, between the people who are doing our show, the contributors, and the audience. That’s all I am.”
I am not a chef. I’m a guy who likes to cook, and I love food. So it’s my job to be the conduit between the people who are doing our show and the audience. That’s all I am.
In Conclave we saw again how, even among greats like Ralph Fiennes and John Lithgow, Tucci, with that mellifluent voice of his, still captures your attention every time he is on screen. This special- sauce magnetism was what inspired us to put him on the cover of the magazine in 2015, and nothing has changed since except its volume. It is also what made his return to The Devil Wears Prada world, for this year’s sequel, a must.
Grooming: Isabel Concetta
Fashion Assistants: Elena Garcia and Poppy Wiseman
Lighting Technician: Andrew Edwards
Lighting Technician: Gabor Herczegfalvi
Digital Operator: Lubè Saveski
Camera Assistant: Karina Stevens
