Stanley Tucci returns to Italy with National Geographic series and vows to 'go more in depth'
By MARK KENNEDY
You can't keep Stanley Tucci from his beloved Italy just like you can't keep cheese from lasagna.
The Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning actor is once again elegantly roaming through the land of his heritage in National Geographic's new food-travel series 'Tucci in Italy,' less than three years after a similar show was axed.
'I think that visually it's more interesting this time around, and I think that we try to go more in depth into the stories as much as you can, given the format,' he says.
Tucci goes from a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Milan where the staff grow their own vegetables — 'Stop it!' he half-heartedly begs a chef adding salmon eggs to a pesto risotto — to cooking fish for anglers on the banks of the Sarca River.
'I'm exploring the complex connections between the land, the people and the food they eat in order to discover the essence of each region in the country I love – Italy,' the 'Conclave' and 'The Devil Wears Prada' star tells viewers in each installment.
Each episode of the first season of 'Tucci in Italy' explores a different region — from Tuscany to Trentino-Alto Adige, Lombardy, Abruzzo and Lazio. It was shot over six months, from January to July in 2024.
'It's a lot of planning, it is a lot logistics. But ultimately, once you get to where you're supposed to be, which isn't always easy in Italy, especially in the mountainous areas, it's great,' says Tucci. 'The people are great, extraordinary.'
In Tuscany, the cradle of the Renaissance, Tucci eats lampredotto, a sandwich made with the cow's fourth stomach, and a beef tongue stew. In the Alpine region of Trentino-Alto Adige, he skis and munches on beef goulash and polenta near the Austrian border.
National Geographic greenlit Tucci's new docuseries a year after CNN canceled his 'Searching for Italy' despite winning Emmys for Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special.
Much of the same production staff and crew transferred over with Tucci to his new TV home, and they embraced the use of the latest drones, giving the series a sweep and majesty.
Executive producer Lottie Birmingham, who worked on 'Searching for Italy' and jumped aboard 'Tucci in Italy,' says the new series pushes viewers into new parts of the European nation.
'I think before we did focus quite a lot on the major cities, whereas this time we've kind of gone out into the wider regions,' she says. 'In Lazio, for example, we haven't just focused on Rome or in Tuscany we haven't just focused on Florence.'
The series also stops to look at some of the social issues roiling Italy, like immigration and gay rights. Tucci and his team spotlight Punjabi migrants, particularly Sikhs, who have a significant presence in the nation's dairy industry, and the impact that Ethiopian immigrants have had despite facing racism and being treated as 'other.'
'Every country does it, and it's never a helpful thing,' says Tucci. 'And after people assimilate, then they often find others to become 'others.' So it's just this sort of weird, vicious circle.'
The new series — produced by Salt Productions and BBC Studios — in many ways is more true to Tucci's initial vision, which was to look carefully at trends below the surface of what appears to be a happy, sun-blasted land.
'The original idea of the show that I had almost 20 years ago, at this point, was to show the diversity of Italy. But also to, in a weird way, dispel the myth that it's sunny all the time and everybody's eating pizza and pasta and everybody is happy and smiling all the time. Yeah, that exists, but that's not everything.'
It was Tucci who suggested a stop in Lombardy after reading an article about a gay couple who haven't been able to legally adopt their baby boy since the government doesn't recognize adoptions by same-sex couples.
'There's a darker side, as there are with every country,' says Birmingham. 'Italians are so focused on food and family, but what does family mean? That was what we wanted to look at in that story.'
Tucci is part of a crowded field of celeb travel hosts, which includes Rainn Wilson, Eugene Levy, Zac Efron, José Andrés, Chris Hemsworth, Will Smith, Macaulay Culkin and Ewan McGregor. Birmingham believes her host has something special to offer.
'I think he's particularly good at putting people at ease,' she says. 'He is genuinely interested, and it is a real passion for him. He's not hosting this series just to host it. He loves Italy more than any of us, and I think that's really apparent.'
One of the series' highlights is when Tucci visits Sienna, a city in central Italy's Tuscany region, and watches its medieval-era horse race run around the Piazza del Campo. Afterward, each city ward hosts a dinner party in the streets where thousands sing and toast their neighborhood.
'I didn't know about that and I just think it's incredible,' says Tucci, who first visited Sienna when he was about 12. 'Italy was a very different place and yet still is very much the same.'
It's that push and pull of modernity and tradition that the show highlights, like a restaurant in Florence that caused a stir when traditional regional delicacies were done with Japanese styles and ingredients.
Tucci found the food delicious and worried that Italians must embrace change. 'They maintain their traditions, they maintain the quality. But it also stops them from growing,' says Tucci. 'There's no reason why you can't have both.'
© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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Japan Today
4 days ago
- Japan Today
How true to life is Brendon Fraser's movie about Japanese rental families?
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Yes, you can rent a 'dad' in Japan, as Conan O'Brien famously did during his time in the country, but again, the service is targeted at adults wanting a fatherly figure for role play, not as a way to address the emotional trauma of a minor. Similarly, Japan's 'rental grandma' service is more about the sage wisdom, traditional skills, and calming presence that a woman of advanced age can provide, not necessarily acting as a substitute for an actual familial connection. So what about the two scenes where Fraser appears to have been hired to play the role of a groom at a wedding, one a Western-style ceremony and one a traditional Japanese one? Surely that's got to be crossing some sort of marriage-fraud line, right? Except, no, those are actually possible scenarios, though maybe not the most plausible. That's because in Japan, wedding ceremonies, whether performed at a church or temple, aren't legally binding. 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SoraNews24
6 days ago
- SoraNews24
How true to life is the trailer for Brendon Fraser's movie about Japanese rental families?
Rental families are thing in Japan, but is Rental Family going to show what life in Japan is really like? In the decade-plus that SoraNews24 has been around, we've never once mentioned Brendan Fraser. This isn't because of any long-standing beef between us, but simply a result of the Academy Award-winning actor not having any major connections to Japan-related happenings during that interval. So to all our loyal readers who also happen to be fans of Mr. Fraser, we apologize for the wait, which is now over thanks to the release of the trailer for Rental Family. An upcoming release from Los Angeles-based Searchlight Pictures, Rental Family stars Fraser as a foreigner living in Japan, eking out a living acting in commercials. When that line of income starts to dry up, he finds a job with a 'rental family' agency, where customers pay to have someone play the role of a family member or friend. This isn't such a far-fetched premise. There's an entire ecosystem within the Japanese show business industry of foreign resident actors who specialize in bit roles in commercials, movies, TV dramas, and historical reenactment programs that need non-Japanese on-screen cast members (the live-action adaptation of manga Thermae Romae , for example. has a scene set in an ancient Roman bathhouse with dozens of non-Japanese extras). The size of these parts, though, means that the actors aren't making A-lister money, so Fraser's character needing to take on an unorthodox job to make ends meet is pretty plausible. Likewise, Japan, really does have rental family agencies. They first started attracting significant attention in the early 2010s, and we've even tried their services out for ourselves, such as when our reporters rented a middle-aged man or sister (two sisters, actually). That said, judging from the trailer, it's debatable whether Rental Family , directed by professionally mononymous Hikari, who was born in Japan and moved to the U.S. after high school, is attempting to accurately depict the status of rental family agencies in contemporary Japanese society, or whether its main goal is to tell a dramatic and emotional story with Fraser's character's job as its framing device. For example. a major plotline seems to involve a Japanese woman hiring Fraser's character to pretend to be the father of her daughter, who appears to be of mixed Japanese/Caucasian ancestry. 'This girl needs a father,' Fraser's boss tells him, and when he introduces himself to the child as such, in a public place, she shouts 'I hate you!' and storms off. 'She hates me,' Fraser laments to his boss, who replies 'That's what being a parent is.' Now, it's definitely true that most countries don't have rental family services, and the obvious reason is that the concept would be seen as just too weird. But while the idea isn't too weird for Japanese society as a whole, renting a family member is still considered unusual by most Japanese people. There's no real pushback against it, since it's seen as quirky but harmless fun for those who're intrigued by the proposition, and you could argue Japan is already somewhat softened regarding paid quasi-social relationships, what with hostess/host bars having been a thing for so long. However, hiring a stranger to pretend to be your child's father, especially as an attempt to address clearly severe psychological issues stemming from the parent's absence, is something that most Japanese people would say is a cruel disservice to the child, and not the sort of benefit that rental family agencies promote themselves as providing. Yes, you can rent a 'dad' in Japan, as Conan O'Brien famously did during his time in the country, but again, the service is targeted at adults wanting a fatherly figure for roleplay, not as a way to address the emotional trauma of a minor. Similarly, Japan's 'rental grandma' service is more about the sage wisdom, traditional skills, and calming presence that a woman of advanced age can provide, not necessarily acting as a substitute for an actual familial connection. So what about the two scenes where Fraser appears to have been hired to play the role of a groom at a wedding, one a Western-style ceremony and one a traditional Japanese one? Surely that's got to be crossing some sort of marriage-fraud line, right? Except, no, those are actually possible scenarios, though maybe not the most plausible. That's because in Japan, wedding ceremonies, whether performed at a church or temple, aren't legally binding. The only way to make your marriage official in the eyes of the law is to submit your marriage registration paperwork to your local city hall or ward office. So as long as the chappal or temple is OK with it, you could, in theory, hold a wedding ceremony, and a reception too, as a purely for-fun thing, perhaps if circumstances mean you're unlikely to ever get legally married to an actual life partner. Sure, it'd involve considerable expense, and there's no guarantee that all of your friends and family members would be onboard and happy to attend, but there's no legal barrier to doing it if you want to have the wedding experience without actually getting married. Oh, and you also have to give Rental Family credit for making sure to pick a suitably niche console to be the system of choice of the lonely man who hires Fraser to pretend to be his buddy. ▼ Your true friends are the ones who'll still hang out and play Dreamcast games with you in 2025 (but they'd be even better friends if they helped keep any snacks off of the disc drive cover). The trailer also includes a few shots of the Shibuya Scramble intersection, but I'm pretty sure the U.N. recently passed a resolution mandating the landmark be shown at least once in any foreign-produced movie with scenes set in Tokyo. The more aggravating thing is when the preview has someone saying, ostensibly to Fraser, 'You could live in this country for a hundred years, and there will still be things you won't understand.' Yeah, Japanese culture has its initially confusing quirks, just like any country's culture does, but playing up the inscrutability of the Japanese psyche is a pretty tired cliche, especially considering how many of Japan's real-world foreign residents effectively adapt to the local social norms way before they hit the century mark of living here, and even more especially when the line is paired with visuals showing people waiting at a train crossing which doesn't exactly make one say 'Ah, Japan…so mysterious!' ▼ Granted, the barriers do tend to go down earlier in Japan than in some other countries, but 'Wait here so you don't get hit by a train' isn't so hard for non-Japanese people to wrap their heads around. So you could say that it's kind of a mixed bag in terms of how much of a window into modern Japanese life Rental Family is going to be, but that might not really be its intention anyway. Fraser's character himself even says 'You know sometimes it's OK to pretend' as the trailer wraps up, so 100-percent real-world accuracy probably isn't the goal, and if nothing else it looks like it's going to be a story that's both introspective and encouraging of empathy, neither of which are bad emotional spaces for a movie to take its audience. Rental Family opens in theaters in North America on November 21. Source, images: YouTube/SearchlightPictures ● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter! Following Casey on Twitter also does not count as a legal marriage.
Japan Today
7 days ago
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