Stanley Tucci has a juicy role in Edward Berger’s Conclave, which might end up being a sleeper Best Picture Oscar contender. Tucci plays a cardinal who is considered “the next in line” after the pope dies under mysterious circumstances. The film also stars Ralph Fiennes, Isabella Rossellini and John Lithgow. I saw it recently and it was great! The buzz is that Tucci might even get an Oscar nomination, but I kind of doubt it (if anything, Fiennes and Rossellini might get nominated, but no one else). Tucci recently spoke to Vanity Fair about the film, acting in general, his food show and more. Some highlights:

Why ‘Conclave’ excited him: “The thing that’s interesting about it is the mistrust. Here’s this organization that is based on truth, purity, goodwill, and underneath all that is exactly the opposite. There’s all that subtle interplay between the characters, and Edward did this so beautifully—a lot of it is unspoken, and it’s with a glance or it’s with the way that somebody walks past somebody else. It’s in the movement of people as well as in their language. That was the stuff that really intrigued me, because that’s the most fun stuff to play—all that subtle subterfuge. The characters don’t know what they themselves are thinking and feeling, and suddenly they have these epiphanies. That was very much a part of what I loved about it and particularly loved about the character.

Whether he did a lot of research for the role: “Sometimes I find that if you start to research things too much, you can do yourself a disservice. In other words, you start to overthink things, and that overthinking will become evident in your performance. I hate to say it, but you f–k yourself up by thinking too much. In any art form, the important thing is that you’re not thinking. When you’re painting, you’re not thinking. You can’t think. You have to have done all your thinking before and now you’re just making a connection and you’re living really in the moment because that’s what we do in real life.

On playing a monster in ‘The Lovely Bones’: “Yeah, that was really hard. I couldn’t wait for that to be over. Peter [Jackson] was great, Saoirse [Ronan] was amazing, everybody was. But it was simply being that person and also having children. The research for it—I don’t like watching those shows. So many shows are about serial killers. We’re obsessed with f–king serial killers. How many are there? I didn’t know there were that many. And so you feel like, “Oh, is everyone a serial killer? Is half the world a serial killer?” They’re not. It’s just that we’re telling the same f–king story over and over again, and after a while it’s sickening. Doing this research for that was really awful. But again, you just want to make it real. And again, you want to make him human because he’s not a monster. He’s a human being. What he does is monstrous.

How he decided to be choosier about his acting jobs: “Well, it depends on how much money you spend. You could be really choosy and live in a hovel, but I want to live a nice life. So part of your decisions are based on that, and part of them are just artistic. My career has always gone through these fluctuations, and sometimes it’s just the business. Sometimes it was personal reasons why you can’t work. Having been sick six years ago, that threw a wrench into the works for a while, and then you slowly get back. But I had to start doing things. I needed to work because I needed money. I probably started working too soon. I didn’t really have the energy to do it after the treatments, but you had to do it, and eventually you climb back up again. After The Devil Wears Prada, I couldn’t get a job, and I didn’t quite understand that, but that’s just the way it was. So I went and did stuff that I didn’t necessarily want to do, but I did it.

[From Vanity Fair]

It’s weird because I always think “oh, Stanley Tucci works all the time, he’s in everything!” But I was looking through his filmography and I was surprised to see that’s not true. He pops up in interesting roles every few years and he’s a really consistent voice actor, but really… he has had a very up-and-down career. I’m glad he said that stuff about working for the money too, I never judge actors for that. Sometimes you need a job, sometimes it really is just saying yes to whatever because you need the money. Why didn’t he get work after The Devil Wears Prada?? He was excellent in that.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.