“Sometimes you do just have to go do a job to make money, and sometimes — I think — who was it? Was it Edward G. Robinson who said — you did three movies a year. One for the location, one for the money, and one for the art.”
Stanley Tucci, in an interview with Dark Horizons last year.
Tucci is up for an Oscar on Sunday for The Lovely Bones. We’ve just finished a new profile of him, and I found myself really liking the guy. If nothing else, he’s a very warm interview. It’s hard to remember that for the first decade of his career, he was typecast as a heavy:
When Stanley Tucci — who grew up in a suburb north of New York City — began his career in the early 1980s, he was offered the same part over and over again.
“Yeah. Yeah. Italian mobsters. If you had dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair (when I had hair), that’s what you were cast as.”
He broke free of the mob by writing and directing his own film, Big Night, in 1996. Here’s twelve Tucci minutes, talking about Big Night that year with Charlie Rose.