Stanley Tucci Has No Idea Why He's the Internet's Boyfriend. He Thinks He Wore Us Down
Promoting Prime Video's Masterplan, the 65-year-old told People his heartthrob status is all his wife's doing, and that she may be trying to get rid of him.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
Stanley Tucci, who is 65 and stars in Prime Video's new heist movie Masterplan, told People this week that he has no idea why the internet has made him its favorite boyfriend. He's glad, he said, and he offered a theory: maybe he simply wore everybody down. It's the most honest description of romance I've read in years, and it's how most of history's great love affairs started, including nearly all of the ones in Ohio.
He traces it to 2020, when his wife, Felicity Blunt, posted an Instagram video of him making her a cocktail during lockdown, after which, as he put it, everything changed. It's all her doing, he said, and he joked she might be trying to get rid of him. Then came the cooking videos, puttanesca and pasta e ceci, with Blunt deciding what they film because, he says, she's younger and better at it. So the sex symbol of the pandemic was cast, produced and marketed by his wife from their kitchen. That's not a heartthrob. That's a family business, like a hardware store with more garlic.
Meryl Streep, his co-star in The Devil Wears Prada 2, said at his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in April that he has an elegance to his heterosexuality. It's the finest compliment ever paid to a man, and also the sort of thing you'd carve on a headstone if you wanted the cemetery to have a conversation piece.
In Masterplan he plays Roger, a master thief who recruits two strangers for a job on the Mona Lisa and then reveals they're his children, which also makes them siblings, which is a lot to learn before a Louvre heist. Tucci says he liked its ridiculousness. Of course he did. He's spent his whole career being the most reasonable man in unreasonable movies, like a butler at a house fire.
Here's the part that should frighten the studios. Hollywood spends a fortune every year manufacturing sex symbols out of trainers, surgeons and publicists, and it just watched a bald character actor become one by stirring a drink at home. No industry survives learning that. They'll pretend it never happened, the way a casino treats a man who walks out ahead.
The secret to being loved, it turns out, is to stay put and keep cooking until people get hungry, which is also how most good restaurants and all grandmothers stay in business.