It’s 5 o’clock in London and Stanley Tucci is talking about how he almost threw his back out trying to lift a 40-kilo wheel of Parmesan cheese so he could cut it into two moons, hollow out one of them and make carbonara in it. Looking distinguished in a black polo neck, the 60-year-old actor is video-chatting from the backyard studio of the London home where he and his family have been riding out most of the last year. Like most people, he has grown used to these sorts of virtual conversations – except his extra screen time has earned him a spot in the club of unexpected quarantine social media stars, alongside Patti LuPone, Leslie Jordan, and husband-and-wife duo Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody. In late April 2020, Tucci posted a three-minute video of himself shaking a negroni on his Instagram account. The internet drank it up. His life has lately been consumed by Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy , a six-part travelogue series on CNN in which the culinary enthusiast roams different regions of his ancestral homeland learning about local cuisines. Best known for his roles in films including The Lovely Bones , Julie & Julia and The Devil Wears Prada , everyone’s favourite character actor has long sought to nourish his passion for food. He has released two family-centric cookbooks, The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table: Cooking With Family and Friends . Why the internet thinks Stanley Tucci is the ultimate ‘zaddy’ He’s been approached several times about doing a cooking show, he says it never felt like the right thing for him. The Searching for Italy series was, he says, “more right”. “If I wanted to cook something I could do that – like I do in one episode,” he says. “But really, I’m more interested in talking to people who cook, and being the liaison between the chef, or the home cook, or whoever it is, and the audience. Because I’m somewhere in between.” Tucci visited six regions in Italy, stopping in cities including Naples, Rome and Florence. Production on the six episodes was scattered. He shot two episodes in 2019 before pausing to film Supernova , starring opposite Colin Firth as a novelist in his 60s who is suffering from early onset dementia (a performance that’s been lauded by critics). He then shot two more episodes before the coronavirus pandemic hit, and resumed production on the final two as life was winding down after 2020’s first lockdown. Arriving at a time when people ache to travel and eat dinner among friends without worry, the opening minutes of the premiere come with an acknowledgement from Tucci that it was filmed during the summer of 2020, a short while after Covid-19 devastated Italy. “It’s hard to believe that just a few months ago the first wave of Covid-19 had emptied the streets of Naples, and Italy was in lockdown,” he says in the voice-over. “Thankfully, I’ve arrived during a brief moment of normality: Restaurants are open and masks are not required outside. We’ll be sticking to the local rules.” From there, the delectable journey begins. Tucci visits Michelin-rated pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia to learn the art of making a pie – including the importance of genuine San Marzano tomatoes – and explains how Italians fought Mussolini’s oppression through pasta. He even offers titbits about the Medici family while he ventures out for a grilled Fiorentina steak. Tucci caught the virus and lost his sense of taste for five days before recovering. “After the pandemic, it was harder, but it was incredible to see the resilience of the Italian people. And they are indefatigable – I mean, if we just look at their history, how many different invasions they have lived through, how many different plagues they have lived through, they figure it out. And they still make it work. They are incredibly self-sufficient and incredibly inventive.” Tucci is still making his way through the leftovers from that 40kg (88lbs) wheel of Parmigiano that nearly took out his back, which he eventually cut into 25 “chunks, huge chunks”. “I bought a vacuum sealer to seal them all so that it wouldn’t go bad,” he explains. “And now we’re just distributing them to people all over the place.” Tucci grew up in a family of people who cooked all the time. His food obsession didn’t really take shape until he began making Big Night – the 1996 film he co-wrote, co-directed and starred in about Italian brothers who open a restaurant on the 1950s Jersey shore. For the film, he shadowed famed maestro of Italian cuisine Gianni Scappin, who he says was central to igniting his appreciation; the two would later collaborate on The Tucci Cookbook , published in 2012. “I never really was a particularly good cook – I could cook certain things, but really, not much,” he says. “But once I went into Gianni’s kitchen, and I really started to understand what went into so many different dishes – besides my parents’ dishes – and the rigorous work that has to happen, it was fascinating. Food was the connective tissue that held the family together, both sides of the family. I have experienced my life, in a lot of ways, through my mouth Stanley Tucci “When I coupled that with my mother’s rigorous work, and my grandmother’s rigorous work, and then the work of a person who grew up in a family not dissimilar to mine, but then became a professional chef, it was amazing. “It was this conjoining of imagination and prowess, and it was just so exciting to me. I really thought, after the movie, ‘Well, I’ll keep cooking, and I’ll keep learning.’ But then I just really became head over heels in love with it.” His parents, Stanley senior and Joan, appear in one of the episodes in the series. In it, Tucci talks about the time in the 1970s, when he was 12, that his family uprooted from New York and spent a year living in Florence so his father, a high school art teacher, could follow his dream and study figure drawing and sculpture. In the episode, Tucci joins his mother, who studied Florentine cuisine while her kids were at school, to make a family-favourite dish named after one of their beloved former neighbours: Salsa Maria Rosa, a vegetable sauce that includes Italian soffritto – a combination of onions, carrots and celery cooked gently in olive oil – as its base. Tucci is looking to the written word as well. During the first phase of his Covid-19 confinement, he began working on a food memoir, Taste , that will be released later in 2021. “It kept me sane during the first lockdown, I’ll be honest,” he says. “It’s about growing up in a family that put a great importance on food, and on tradition, culinary traditions, and keeping those traditions going. And making those recipes again, and again, and again, and again. “Food was the connective tissue that held the family together, both sides of the family,” he continues. “I have experienced my life, in a lot of ways, through my mouth.” Putting the finishing touches on the book is largely why Tucci has fallen behind on entertaining the masses with his cocktail videos. A former bartender, Tucci describes the recent public attention as “flattering but weird”. “I’m completely shocked. But I’m not going to pretend I’m not glad about it. I mean, you’d be an idiot. ‘All it took was a negroni’ – that’s going to be on my tombstone.” His wife, Felicity Blunt, originally shot the cheeky video to send to her co-workers at Curtis Brown literary agency as a way to cheer them up in the early days of the lockdown. “I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’” he recalls. “So we did it, and then she and Lottie, my assistant, said, ‘Well, why don’t we put it on your Instagram?’ I was like, ‘All right, yeah, go ahead. I don’t know.’ And then … Lottie said to me, ‘Your Instagram is going mad.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ She goes, ‘You’re trending.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ Of course he read the comments. “Oh yes, oh yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they were … we had to kick the kids out of the room to read them out loud. They were filthy, and funny. I was crying, I was laughing so hard.” Highlights of Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy are available on CNN Travel