Stanley Tucci’s love of cooking has sent his acting career into a spiral of mediocrity

Some actors seem to operate on an almost sensory level. Watch George Clooney in basically anything he’s in, and you can practically smell the expensive aftershave wafting from the screen. With Johnny Depp, it’s a sort of musky, stale cigarette smoke. But Stanley Tucci? The man’s very pores seem to drip with the rich, dignified scent of Italian ragu.

Before he became known, predominantly, for his adjacency to the world of cosy Italian cooking – via a run of recipe books, online videos, and culinary documentary series – Tucci, who returns to screens this week in the heist comedy Fountain of Youth, was a fine and respected character actor. He was Oscar-nominated for The Lovely Bones (2009), in which he played a serial killer opposite Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz. He had strong roles in films by Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition), Woody Allen (Deconstructing Harry), Steven Spielberg (The Terminal) and Nora Ephron (Julie & Julia). He was a noteworthy writer and director, with his debut film, Big Night (1996), causing a minor stir on the independent circuit. (Roger Ebert likened the film, set in a restaurant, to “a perfect risotto… they include just what is needed and nothing else”.)

Perhaps, though, Tucci’s decade-long rebrand as Hollywood’s foremost pasta appreciator begins to make more sense if you look at his recent output. There have been small islands of quality, yes – 2015’s propulsive Best Picture winner Spotlight, in which Tucci played an eccentric lawyer, or last year’s entirely decent papal thriller Conclave, where he played a hopeful to be the next pope (a “popeful”, if you will). But Tucci’s oeuvre also includes a run of terrible misfires, franchise sequels and remakes, from Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast, to Robert Zemeckis’s dismal The Witches. There was the Quiet Place/Bird Box rip-off, The Silence; multiple regrettable Transformers films; the obnoxious spy prequel The King’s Man. The 2023 Prime Video series Citadel was one of the most expensive TV series ever made, but failed to woo critics; this year’s Netflix blockbuster The Electric State was a similarly lavish dud. Tucci’s filmography has become a veritable bolognese of bad decisions.

Fountain of Youth, released this week on Apple TV+, is a National Treasure-ish adventure film starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman. If Fountain of Youth’s ominously unspectacular trailer isn’t warning sign enough, then the fact that reviews are being embargoed until a few hours before release might well be. Forbidding too is the fact that it’s directed by Guy Ritchie, a polarising filmmaker at the best of times, but one whose oeuvre has only grown blunter and schlockier by the year.

This is not to say that Tucci is “too good” for populist fare such as this; many a terrific character actor has ventured into blockbuster pulp and emerged unblemished. But the problem, for him, is that it has become such a pattern, and that he typically seems unable to elevate the material he’s working with. This wasn’t always the case: the 2011 Marvel film Captain America: The First Avenger was genuinely girded by his presence, as a well-meaning German scientist. But too often now there’s a sort of unremarkable competence to his performances. I wouldn’t go so far as to say his name in the credits is the sign you’re in for a bad film, but it’s certainly a sign that you’re not in for a great one.

It’s also become impossible to discuss Tucci as an actor without encompassing Tucci’s second career as a celebrity foodie – a side-hustle that’s poised to spill over the sidelines. Fountain of Youth isn’t Tucci’s only release this week: there’s also Tucci in Italy, a National Geographic series indulging the actor’s love affair with Italian food and culture. It’s a follow-up to the Emmy-winning series Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy (2021-22) – this time, I guess he found it.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with churning out affable cooking content, and Tucci, a proud American of Italian descent, is a consummate discussor of all things Alfredo. But it’s hard not to question whether he could be doing something better with his time and talent. Spotlight, to pick an example, was a tremendously good film; he has gone from making art to making content. It’s the sort of infuriatingly tame career pivot that celebs do occasionally mount. (See, for instance, Richard E Grant’s Hotel Secrets, a show that had me practically yelling at the TV: “Good God, man, you were in Withnail!”) But Tucci has proven unusually adept at his new vocation; it’s as if people were always subconsciously waiting for him to become “that guy from the cooking videos”, and now his reality has finally caught up.

I suspect, no matter how far Tucci’s cooking ventures go, there will always be a place for him in Hollywood. He’s an intelligent actor, not without versatility, and his list of world-class collaborators speaks for itself. (As a fallback plan, he could always make a killing in football biopics – there are several bald, white Premier League managers for whom Tucci would be a dead ringer.) But for an artist with the profile and potential he has, the goal ought not to be simply remaining employed but finding work that is different and meaningful.

The Stanley Tucci Cookery Rebrand may be many things, but it is, by its very nature, unchallenging. It is an exercise in comfort content, as warming and palatable as a well-made risotto – and it disappears from the plate just as quickly. If he were appearing in reliably good films, it would be easier to overlook. But the harder he pulls on his chef’s hat, the more his acting career seems – for want of a better word – cooked.

‘Fountain of Youth’ is released on Apple TV+ on 23 May