Whether you love him for The Devil Wears Prada, Burlesque, Julie & Julia, or even his lockdown cocktail tutorial videos, admit it: you love Stanley Tucci. How could you not? This is a man who delivers the three Ws (that’s warmth, wit and wisdom) in abundance, no matter what he’s doing .

Naturally, then, the same is true of his recent appearance on Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett’s Dish podcast.

“My kids should be such great adventurous eaters and they’re not,” Tucci told his fellow foodies at one point. 

“We’ve raised them completely wrong.”

Chuckling to himself, Tucci added: “They’re lovely people, but we’ve been really bad about that. So, you make the same five fucking things every week, and you’re like, really? ‘I want my sausages.’ All right, you know, have sausages. 

“And then it’s like, ‘Would you like to try some mashed potatoes?’ Who doesn’t like mashed potatoes? I mean, they have a diet like Fagin is their father.”

Considering that this is the same man who travelled across Italy in order to discover the secrets and delights of the country’s regional cuisines for his addictive six-part TV series, Searching For Italy, you can understand Tucci’s anguish.

“CNN came to me and said, do you have any ideas for a show?” the actor told the hosts of the popular series, explaining he’d actually come up with the idea some 15 years before.

“I gave them three ideas, this was one of them, and as soon as I said it, you saw their eyes sort of go like, ‘Oh yes. We get to go to Italy.’ It’s really, really been great. When we go to Italy now and we’re filming, there are people who come up to you and go, ‘Oh my God, we’re here because of your show.’ Somebody told me that in Naples, people are doing a Stanley Tucci tour, which is going to the places that we went to in Naples, which of course I can’t remember now ‘cause it feels like a thousand years ago.”

Tucci added: “I think it’s opened up people’s minds about Italy in a way, not that they didn’t want to go before, but that they understand now. As Angela and I have talked about, it’s not just pasta and pizza. There are all these nuances to it. A dream show.”

It’s a dream that Tucci seems dead set on bringing to our own shores, too. Because – yes, truly – Tucci also revealed that he’s making a new TV series about just that: good old-fashioned British grub.

“I think what we’re gonna do Searching For The British Isles or whatever you call it. We’re gonna do that next year. And that’s exciting to me because yeah, I’ll be able to come home more often, I won’t have to fly for the most part. And there’s just so much here.”

Presumably planning to showcase more than our pie ‘n’ mash dishes, our Full English breakfasts and our jellied eels, Tucci added thoughtfully: “You know, England has so much to offer, and again, you sort of want to dispel the myth of, ‘Oh, in England nobody eats well.’ We know that’s not true. So like, ‘Italy is just pasta’ and whatever.

“The hope is to sort of educate people, I suppose, in a way, as I’ve been educated by living here.”

If you’re in need of even more Tucci than that (and, trust us, we relate), then don’t despair: the actor will be starring as record executive Clive Davis – aka the man who discovered Whitney Houston – in the upcoming musical biopic about the late singer, I Wanna Dance With Somebody.

“I’m so excited,” he said. “It was an amazing experience. I don’t often say that about films, you know, but it was really great. The people were so nice. And this young woman, Naomi Ackie, is just incredible. Incredible”

Tucci added: “They’re so smart to release it at Christmas because you want to go and you want to celebrate, even though it’s a tragic story. Because Whitney Houston still… well, when you listen to that voice, it just gives you joy. It gives you such happiness. I was in love with everyone I worked with after filming that. I was there for like three weeks and I didn’t want to go. It was wonderful.”

Dish, hosted by Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett, is available on all podcast providers now.

Images: Getty/CNN International