Will the real Stanley Tucci please stand up?
The trials and tribulations of what might have been the world's hardest working doppelgänger. Plus: notes on the word 'sonder' and a Gauche tribute
Greetings. We’ve entered the home stretch. The Oscar nominees attended a fancy dinner and posed for a class photo in Los Angeles this week, resulting in something akin to a very expensive Where’s Wally. Apparently, it was all very jovial – like a school prom in which “Wolfgang Puck personally oversaw the catering” (Vulture). Colman Domingo ki-kid, Jeremy Strong khakid (why is he so obsessed with green? I’m calling it his Elphaba complex) and Timothée Chalamet effed off to Chateau Marmont for his very own party and poker night. Karla Sofia Gascon, who will reportedly attend Sunday’s festivities, was nowhere to be found.
Someone else has been conspicuously absent from proceedings: Stanley Tucci. His co-stars in Conclave, Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rosselini, have been everywhere. What on earth is going on?
Okay, I get it. He’s not nominated – shocker! – for his performance as the Vatican’s token gangster cardinal. But his movie is, and in multiple categories to boot. Tucci features in pretty much every one of its clips when they run those in the background during nominee announcements (“Best Actor in A Leading Role… Ralph Fiennes… IT IS A WAR!”).
And, come on, it’s the Tootch. He should be there. Given his demonstrable track record as Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games, I daresay he should be hosting the bloody thing.
I’m reliably informed by PopBitch that Tucci is currently filming an Italian cooking show, where the production team has begun complaining that he doesn’t want to work after lunch (again, shocker – who knew he was so continental?).
But up until recently, I had a theory that would have meant he could film an Italian cooking show while also attending the Oscars. You see, I’ve long held the belief that there is not one, but two, Stanley Tuccis.
Art by Jacob Heylen
Let me take you back to last September. Somehow, I’ve managed to get tickets to the press night for Barcelona, a play starring Lily Collins and sex-on-legs Alvaro Morte. After giving it a standing ovation (because we have to do that these days), I joined a group going to the afterparty in the Crypt under St Martin’s Church.
I was hoping to interview Collins and get a few news lines for The Standard (“Does Emily Cooper want to come to London?” “Yes”; “what about the rumours that Lucas Bravo won’t be back as Gabriel?” “I have zero idea what’s happening”). But my attention was partly thwarted by the looming presence of Stanley Tucci standing in the corner of the press room. Or rather, the looming presence of a man who looked just like him.
It was not the first time I had spotted Tootch 2.0, as the doppelgänger shall henceforth be known. The first time I saw him was at the 2023 premiere of Ulster American, a play at the Riverside Studios starring Woody Harrelson and Andy Sirkus. The real Tootch was among the audience, wearing black trousers a tad too tight, thick black glasses and a black turtleneck. It was the exact same outfit as that worn by Tootch 2.0, also present.
“Do I have concussion?” I asked my theatre companion. I genuinely thought I was seeing double.
Three theories emerge. One: Tootch 2.0 is a decoy. He slides in when the real Tootch gets tired and slips out. This would make sense because they were wearing the same outfit at the Ulster American press night. The theory falls flat, however, when you consider they were in the same room at the same time, near enough to one another for all to notice.
Two: Tootch 2.0 is an identical twin, who the Tootch has failed to mention in his memoir, Taste - My Life Through Food, and whom his publicist and biographers have conveniently left off his Wikipedia page. Incidentally, My Life Through Food is a) a pile of shit (apologies to my friend Lucinda, who bought it for me as a birthday present when I was 23) and b) makes gloriously unsubtle references to his wife being unfaithful (“Felicity didn’t return home until late, so I ate alone. She said it’s a work thing and I chose to believe her.”).
Three: Tootch 2.0 is a paid actor whose job is to a) impersonate Stanley Tucci and b) confuse people when the two are in the same room. Perhaps the real Tootch really, really doesn’t like strangers coming up to him to say they love his work. So when such a stranger attempts to make conversation (“Hey man, loved you as Caesar Flickerman”), he redirects them towards Tootch 2.0, saying, “This is your guy”, with a nod of his glistening cranium.
I like the third theory best. It leads me to wonder whether Tootch 2.0 really looks like the Tootch at all. He could be relying heavily on makeup and prosthetics. Maybe he isn’t even bald. Perhaps his glasses have no prescription.
But if, indeed, Tootch 2.0 is a freak accident – a simulacrum of the real thing who seems to have been put on god’s green earth for the very purpose which he now serves: to be Stanley Tucci – then his and Tucci’s fates feel comparable to those of Christian Bale’s characters in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, where the actor plays his own stunt double in a drama about the rivalry between two magicians in Victorian London.
In defence of this whole setup, the Tootch is an undoubtedly desirable candidate for a double act. He leads an enviable life making mostly excellent films and enjoys the kind of fame that might occasionally involve a selfie but where he’s mostly left to be. He is reportedly worth $25 million, which means he’s set for life without being so ludicrously wealthy he loses the common touch. He lives in a townhouse in Barnes with his second wife, Felicity Blunt – sister of Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt, the literary agent behind the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals and the one unsubtly accused of cheating in Tucci’s memoir.
The actor experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic when he began posting sensual, tonally pornographic videos of himself cooking the Italian classics which he grew up with.
Yes, the business of being Stanley Tucci is a deeply seductive affair. And it’s no wonder men of a certain age are gagging to be him. If one of them – the so-called Tootch 2.0 – can earn extra money while doing so, the more power to him.
You can imagine my disappointment when I recently found this particular theory, along with theories one and two above, is incorrect. I’d thought about publishing my conspiracies for some time – but for legal and editorial reasons, I felt compelled to actually identify Tootch 2.0. So I asked someone who knows more about celebrity doppelgängers than I do: my dear friend, James Lane.
I showed James a picture of Tootch 2.0 which I’d managed to take surreptitiously while waiting for Lily Collins. “That’s Olivier Sultan,” James said without missing a beat. Oh, I thought. Am I meant to know who this is?
Olivier Sultan is an agent at CAA, one of the top talent agencies in America. He is, I’m told, a very discrete person – though from his Instagram (@sassyfrenchienyc) I was able to glean he represents Matthew Lopez and John Mellencamp. But not, sadly, Stanley Tucci, who is represented by another at CAA (Andrea Weintraub).
The whole thing strikes me as a massive missed opportunity. What if the Tootch falls ill and can’t attend the Graham Norton Show and has to call an actual doppelgänger to fill in for him? Things would be a whole lot easier if said doppelgänger was his agent: someone who already knew exactly what Tucci’s lines were, and could slip seamlessly into his alter ego. Same goes for film premieres, galas and press conferences. And hosting the Oscars.
What a neat, Prestige-adjacent reality it could have been. Alas, life is not a Christopher Nolan film – and we have to make do with Conan O’Brien hosting the Academy Awards on Sunday. Still, I’m quite fond of the plot I’ve just elaborated. Lawyers at the ready: I’m pitching it to Netflix.
WH
This week’s kinks and cringes
Kinks
Compilation videos of Timothée Chalamet’s digital footprint returning to the top of our feeds since he beat Adrien Brody to win Best Actor at the SAG Awards last week (and delivered a blinder of a speech)
The new White Lotus theme tune (contrary to popular belief, this is a banger)
Countess Luann’s birthday party
Colin D Jones at the D Squared show in Milan. A star is born!
Cringes
Jeff Bezos instigating a new editorial policy for the opinion pages of the Washington Post (“viewpoints opposing the two pillars of personal liberties and free markets will be left to be published by others”). Mm-hm
Harris Dickinson on Chicken Shop Date. (Sorry, girls. We just don’t see it)
‘Good girl’, the world’s new best-selling perfume and the equally oversmelt babygirl epithet
Skims X Nike. Bad news for sweatshop workers the world over
I’m sorry, I am you
Words by Connor Davis
If only for reference, what we’re talking about today is the noun ‘sonder’. As a word that’s little known and used even less, here’s a description. Sonder is ‘the feeling that everyone else has a life as complex and full as your own. It can also be described as the realization that you are a supporting cast member, hero, and extra in other people’s lives.’One crucial omission there is ‘villain’. Some roles we play in the lives of others are not positive and heroic despite our best intentions. Maybe not for you, maybe you're amazing. I recently had an instance of sonder on platform one of London Bridge station, under the menacing shadow of the Shard and the Latin American workers cleaning it through the night.
Traipsing home from a bad date, I stopped on the platform and sat down on one of the low metal bars to pass five minutes thinking about the sins and mistakes of the past. To relax.
Hearing the kind of endless sniffing you’d expect from a middle manager at a KPMG Christmas party, I turned to my right to find someone who reminded me of my sister – who turns 21 in May.
She was in floods of tears, drunk, with mascara running down her face. She turned to look left and caught my eye.
Mine softened as my eyebrows arched, my lips receding into one of those pained smiles that are meant to show empathy.
‘Are you alright?’
‘No, sorry,’ she replied, as if to apologise for being upset in public.
Sorry for having feelings. Sorry I exist. In a real sonder moment, I thought how sad it was to apologise for showing how she felt.
It transpired her grandmother was unwell and she’d just found out she was approaching the end of her days.
In the five minutes before our train arrived and the five minutes we spent on it before I got off, I could not ease the fresh pain in her soul. I did try.
In talking to her, part of me thought about my grandmother, still rocking on at 82, and her own, limited time on Earth. I remember thinking, ‘There’s my ghost of Christmas future’.
It’s inevitable that our own hinterland will colour how we respond to a stranger – what of their life, indeed, can we draw on? Me and the girl on the train found a common ground in the idea that her gran means just as much as mine – an unspoken truth that served as a backdrop for an interaction that really was just a matter of me listening. Call it sonder selfishness: but you can only truly experience sonder by relating another’s cosmos to your own.
Getting off a bus in Brixton last Saturday, I walked past a homeless man and wondered, ‘what’s his favourite flavour of crisp.’ ‘Fuck me,’ my thoughts continued, ‘he’s got a dad!’
Catching the eye of a passer-by, whispering, ‘Don’t worry, I know you’ve got a dad as well – you’re as real as me’.
You may have heard, read, or experienced some people who feel a bit lonely. Disconnected. Adrift in ways that are both big and small. Previously, I’ve written about the effect I think loneliness has had on the success of the parties of the populist right across the globe – partially, by giving people the idea that they’re understood or known by others.
When you wake up tomorrow morning and commute into work, ask yourself about the people who happen to cross you through the twists and turns of fate. Take the time to consider the homeless woman outside your local station. The ticketing officer. The bus driver who ferries you from A to B. The people on the platform next to you; on the escalator in front of you.
‘Am I about to view the person I’m interacting with as capable of being as complex and difficult as I can be, as interesting and fun?’
‘Are they capable of being an excellent family member and friend, and equally capable of casually letting people down by not thinking or caring in the moment?’
‘Am I happy to accept that even if they are a total prick to me in this encounter, that it may not be entirely reflective of them, as I'd hope it isn’t of me when I'm a prick to others?’
‘Have I caught them on a bad day, like I have bad days? Are they more like me than not?’
‘No,’ I hear you grunt. ‘I’m late for the 8:03 to London Bridge and they have the audacity to be recovering from a leg injury and existing in front of me.’
It might be time to realise how much we get out of life and of other people, if we start trying to answer those questions with 'yes'.
This is an edited version of a story. For the full version visit https://atseedavis.weebly.com/blog/im-sorry-i-am-you
RIP Michelle Trachtenberg. You were TV’s greatest villain and a Gauche icon for the ages. <3
End Credits: Who Gauche needs on the next season of The White Lotus
Marcia Cross as Bree Van Der Kamp
Prince Harry as a celibate yoga instructor
Greg Davies as the reincarnation of Tanya McQuoid
Gwyneth Paltrow as Tanya McQuoid’s long-suffering younger sister
Ralph Fiennes as the resort manager (reprising his role from the Grand Budapest Hotel)
George Clooney as the family patriarch
Carson Cressley as the family gaytriarch
Jeremy Allen White as Carmie from The Bear (he’s defeated Luigi from Ratatouille to win a residency in the hotel restaurant)
Kelly Rutherford as Lily Van Der Woodsen
I am obsessed with Tucci and Tootch! Can we devise the collective noun Twocci for the pair?