Stanley Tucci is topping off a good year with a cutting-edge drama about the credit crisis. He talks to Hermione Hoby about capitalism, the Occupy movement – and playing gay BFFs. The Guardian

At 3pm sharp, Stanley Tucci takes his seat in a cafe in New York's West Village with the words: "What are we drinking?" It's more a salutation than a question. He's tanned, twinkling and dressed in a sharp white shirt, emerald-green cardigan and black velvet jacket. That the air around him is delicately perfumed with vestigial lunchtime booze just seems like the finishing touch to the portrait of a Manhattan bon viveur.

It also means we start talking about Vine Talk, a faintly ridiculous public broadcast TV wine show in which Tucci presides over a table of cheese-nibbling, wine-supping celebrity friends. So he's something of a wine expert?

"Oh no, not really … I don't know … Oh God, it's terrible," he says, shaking his head as he scans the wine list. Is he admitting to fraudulence then? He makes a big, self-parodying Italian-American shrug and says, "Well, I'm an actor!"

Now 51, Tucci is the sort of actor known as both a good guy and a bad guy. There's something in the arch of his eyebrows that's wry and humane in one light, and in another, full of old-fashioned villainy. His latest role falls somewhere between those two. In Margin Call, he plays Eric Dale, an employee of a doomed investment bank who loses his job while working on a project whose ramifications are catastrophic.

"He's such a smart guy, such a smart film-maker, and this is his first. I think the guy's amazing, I have to say. You know he made it for nothing, in 17 days?"

"He" is JC Chandor, Margin Call's young director, and the man whom Tucci called straight after reading the script. "I said: this is one of the most amazing scripts I've ever read. Now you have to explain it to me, because the machinations are just anathema to me. But the humanity of the story was so accessible and so understandable, and that was all that mattered. The numbers don't mean anything to me, but they mean something to these people – and they're caught in a web and they've got nowhere to go. None of us have anywhere to go! What are you going to do: not put your money in the bank? The way that whole thing is structured, you don't have any recourse. I think we're all kind of trapped in this. Capitalism is suffocating us in a weird way, isn't it?"

He frowns at his glass. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."

Is he a fan of the Occupy movement? "I think it's great. I never went down there, but I think it's a good thing. If only to begin a conversation, to begin a dialogue. We're playing catch-up in every way – with the environment, with our social services, with our education, with our veterans."

And after a sip of Chablis: "What do you think about it as a Brit? I'm engaged to a British woman and have a lot of British friends who are just … gobsmacked, is that what you say?"



Tucci's fiancee is Felicity Blunt, a literary agent and sister of actor Emily. They met briefly at The Devil Wears Prada premiere while Tucci was still with his wife, Kate, a social worker with whom he has three children. She died from breast cancer in 2009, a year that was as personally hellish for Tucci as it was professionally triumphant.

"It was the year The Lovely Bones came out, and Julie & Julia. I had all these accolades, but I couldn't share them with Kate and she was a huge part of that. She wasn't there and that was just sort of awful."

He remembers meeting Felicity and thinking her "very funny, very caustic". "She ended up spending a lot of time talking to my wife that night. In fact, her mum just found a picture of Kate and Felicity together from that premiere. It was really, really nice." He jokes that as both a trained barrister and an agent, Blunt is "like a nightmare – two people you just don't trust at all! Why would you marry a person like that?" He smiles and adds: "But she certainly doesn't seem like that. My parents adore her, and my kids adore her. I'm very lucky."



In Prada he played a seen-it-all-before gay art director to Meryl Streep's fabulously glacial fashion editor. In 2010, he played gay BFF to Cher in the sequin-splattered turkey that was Burlesque. Would it be fair to say he played the same role in those two films? He sets his glass down with a good-natured chuckle – the silent, shoulder-shaking kind.

"Similar," he says. "A little too similar, frankly, for my taste. I said to the guy who produced the film: 'Look, I don't know if I wanna do this. I did this.' And he goes, 'What are you talking about? So what, you played a gay guy. How many straight guys have you played? Why is it that when somebody plays a gay guy, they feel like they can't play a gay guy again, but you can always play a straight man again and again?' And I said: 'That's a good point.' So that was that."



He was less easily won over when it came to The Lovely Bones, in which he was nauseatingly creepy as the paedophilic killer George Harvey. "I hated taking that role. I grappled with taking it, and Kate … she didn't want me to do it. I couldn't wait for it to be over."

Tucci was born in Peekskill, New York and says he knew he wanted to be an actor from the first moment he trod the boards at high school. "I was so comfortable on stage," he says. "Much more comfortable than I was in real life. It was just all easier, it just made sense." He studied acting at SUNY Purchase in New York and made his film debut in 1985 in the black comedy Prizzi's Honor. Since then, he's produced, directed and written films as well as acted in them. His next directorial project is Mommy and Me, a film starring Tina Fey and Streep, his old friend and frequent co-star. The script, he says, is "being constantly changed, but hopefully we'll end up with something that will work."

Nevertheless, "it's been a great year. My life is wonderful but I'll focus on the negative – we are in New York and I am Italian – so I'll say that I really, really am excited about projects and really, really frustrated that I can't bring them to fruition. Colin Firth is attached to some of them and, you know, nowadays you can have Jesus Christ attached to your script, and it's still not commercially viable. You're like: 'Oh stop it, really stop it: I'm not asking you for a hundred million dollars.'"

This mention of unreal sums of money reminds me of his character's speech towards the end of Margin Call: sitting on the steps of his enormous house, he reminisces about his former career as an engineer. The implication seems to be that it's these tangible, practical endeavours that are worth putting our strength into, not the made-up world of money. Has he ever had similarly existential thoughts about his own profession – ever wondered if he should be building bridges instead?

Now into his second glass of Chablis, he muses for a moment. "Sometimes I think it's pure fluff and yet, at the same time, I think that – not every movie I make – but the arts in general, are absolutely crucial to society. They're not a luxury; they're a necessity. It's civilising, it's holding the mirror up to life, it allows you to reflect on your own life and learn. It's freeing, it's freeing and it's … it's what? It's … opening. It's mind-opening and it's heart-opening. And it's also beautiful."

He nods. "Sometimes it's just beautiful, and that's enough."