Stanley Tucci

Stanley Tucci (birthname: Stanley Tucci Jr.) is perhaps one of American movies’ most versatile, durable, and busiest supporting actors, appearing in over 90 movies across five decades and including five movies as director/writer, starting with his appearance (three years after his 1982 Broadway debut) in Prizzi’s Honor (1985). Major filmmakers then cast Tucci over the ensuing seven years with Merchant-Ivory (Slaves of New York (1989)), Todd Solondz (Fear, Anxiety & Depression (1989)), Robert Benton (Billy Bathgate (1991)), Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss (1992)), Alexandre Rockwell (In the Soup (1992)), Alan Rudolph (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994)) and Barbet Schroeder Kiss of Death (1995)

Tucci was summoned by Hollywood for supporting roles in movies in a wide range of genres, including Beethoven (1992), with Charles Grodin, Bonnie Hunt, Oliver Platt; Undercover Blues (1993), starring Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid under Herbert Ross’s direction; The Pelican Brief (1993), starring Julia Roberts; It Could Happen to You (1994), with Nicolas Cage, Bridget Fonda, Rose Perez, Isaac Hayes, Seymour Cassel under Andrew Bergman’s direction. Tucci then co-starred with the colorful ensemble of Hope Davis, Pat McNamara, Anne Mera, Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber, and Campbell Scott in writer-director Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers (1996).

Stanley Tucci began being cast by major American filmmakers in the late 1990s, starting with Woody Allen in his dark comedy, Deconstructing Harry (1997), and followed by castings by Sam Mendes for the Tom Hanks-starring Depression Era crime drama, Road to Perdition (2002); by Wayne Wang for the rom-com Maid in Manhattan (2002); by Steven Spielberg for another movie starring Hanks, The Terminal (2004); by Peter Jackson for one of Tucci’s most acclaimed performances (including Best Supporting Actor Oscar, BAFTA, Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations) for The Lovely Bones (2009); by Nora Ephron for the Julie Childs biopic, Julie & Julia (2009), starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams; by J.C. Chandor for the Wall Street drama, Margin Call (2011), for which Tucci shared the Gotham Award for Best Ensemble Cast; by Robert Redford for the espionage drama, The Company You Keep (2012); twice by Bill Condon for the Julian Assange biopic drama, The Fifth Estate (2013), and in the Condon-directed version of Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017); twice by Michael Bay for the recurring role of Merlin in Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) and Transformers: The Last Knight (2017); by Tom McCarthy for his Best Picture Oscar-winning newspaper drama, Spotlight (2015), for which Tucci shared both a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Cast and the Robert Altman Award from the Independent Spirit Awards; by Richard Eyre for The Children Act (2017), based on Ian McEwan’s novel; by Robert Zemeckis for The Witches (2020); by Edward Berger for the role of a Vatican Cardinal in Conclave (2024); and by Anthony and Joe Russo for the sci-fi comedy, The Electric State (2025).

Tucci delivered one of his most colorful and widely seen performances as the recurring character of the evil Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games film series, starting with The Hunger Games (2012), and continuing with the Francis Lawrence-directed The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2 (2015). Tucci’s other recurring role is as fashion art director Nigel Kipling in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, and then two decades later in the sequel, The Devil Wears Prada 2 (date to be announced), reuniting director David Frankel with Streep, Hathaway and Emily Blunt.

Stanley Tucci has performed supporting roles in a range of lighter comedies, spanning from Puck in director/writer Michael Hoffman’s starry version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), co-starring Rupert Everett, Calista Flockhart, Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer; to the Joe Roth-directed rom-com America’s Sweethearts (2001), with Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal (also co-writer and co-producer), Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack, as well as the rom com remake of Masayuki Suo’s 1996 Japanese movie Shall We Dance? (2004) with Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez, and Susan Sarandon; the teen comedy Easy A (2010) starring Emma Stone.

Tucci appeared in several dramatic roles including MGM’s crime thriller Lucky Number Slevin (2006), with Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu, and Bruce Willis; his only Marvel Studios appearance in the Avengers sequel, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011); as Mr. D/Dionysus in 20^th Century Fox’s sequel, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013); as Philippe Duc d’Orleans in star/director/writer Alan Rickman’s Louis XIV drama for Lionsgate/BBC Films,  A Little Chaos (2014); in the Marie Colvin bio starring Rosamund Pike,

A Private War (2018); as a 9/11 widower in another biopic, Worth (2020), with Michael Keaton and Amy Ryan; and in a rare co-starring role as a longer lover and partner with Colin Firth in director/writer Harry Macqueen’s British drama, Supernova (2020). Tucci, by contrast, has also played supporting roles in musical movies including director/writer Steven Antin’s backstage musical for Sony/Screen Gems, Burlesque (2010), with Cher and Christina Aguilera; and as legendary music producer Clive Davis with Naomi Ackie’s Whitney Houston in Sony/TriStar Pictures’ musical biopic, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022), directed by Kasi Lemmons.

Stanley Tucci has been a favorite voice actor in animated features, starting with 20^th Century Fox/Blue Sky Studios’ sci-fi Robots (2005), followed by Fox’s Space Chimps (2008), Universal Pictures/Framestore Animation’s The Tale of Despereaux (2008), and as part of the distinguished English dub cast for Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, The Wind Rises (2014), co-starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Martin Short, Werner Herzog, Willam H. Macy, Mandy Patinkin, Jennifer Grey, Elijah Wood, and Ronan Farrow. Tucci voiced the animated character of Leonardo da Vinci in 20^th Century Fox’s and DreamWorks Animation’s Jay Ward adaptation, Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014), and then as the voice of a French Papillon dig in Show Dogs (2018), with the voices of Will Arnett, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Natasha Lyonne, Jordin Sparks, and Shaquille O’Neal.

Tucci, rare among actors, has had a productive and well-received career as a filmmaker across several decades, making a highly acclaimed debut as director/co-writer as well as star of Big Night (1996), for which Tucci won the Best First Screenplay Indie Spirit Award (as well as Best First Film and Best Actor nominations), the Sundance Film Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best New Director award.

Tucci was director/writer/co-star (with Oliver Platt) of The Imposters (1998), a farcical Laurel-and-Hardy style comedy that premiered in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard competition; Tucci then returned as director/producer/star with Ian Holm of Joe Gould’s Secret (2000), and then continued as director/writer/star of both Blind Date (2007), with Patricia Clarkson, and Final Portrait (2017), in which Tucci also co-starred as the great 20th-century Italian artist Alberto Giacometti.