Bellini tries to maintain his morality amid so much chaos and so many power plays. I would think it’s an interesting acting challenge, to hold on to that sense of moral authority and feel it slipping away.
That was the joy of doing it, and that is what we all struggle with every day. But this is on a greater level because we have put them on this pedestal, on this very high moral level. They’re not, in a way, supposed to be human, but they are very human—only their God isn’t human. And they try to be as much like him as they can, but it just doesn’t work sometimes.
When you approach a role like this, a fictional character in a real setting, what kind of research do you do?
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 fuck 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.
Since the pandemic, you’ve seemed to take on fewer credits. Has that been a deliberate choice?
No. People just don’t want to hire me. [Laughs]
I don’t believe that, Stanley.
I think that the television show has taken up a lot of my time and energy. It’s now called Tucci in Italy. It’s the prepping of it, it’s the filming of it, and then the editing of it. We just did 10 more episodes—so we did that from January to the end of July, and that was after about nine, 10 months of preparation. Now we’re in the editing process. Five [episodes] will come out next year, and five will come out the year after that.
The previous iteration of this show, which was at CNN, was canceled. So theoretically you could have stopped, but you chose to go right back into it.
