Stanley Tucci has proven himself a chameleonic talent over his four-decade career, but it took a couple of decades to show he was capable of more than mob roles.

“The idea was that we wanted to show the Italian immigrant experience in a way that it really hadn’t been shown before,” Tucci said of his directorial debut, the 1996 comedy-drama Big Night, on Monday’s episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast With. “In other words, there was no mention of the mafia,” host David Tennant ribbed.

Tucci half-jokingly bragged that Big Night is “one of the only films made about Italian Americans where the mafia doesn’t exist.” When Tennant asked about his history of mafioso roles, Tucci revealed that he’d gotten so fed up with the typecasting that it took a real gem of an offer to break a 10-year hiatus from the on-screen underworld.

“Had you been playing a lot of mafioso up to that point?” Tennant asked. Tucci said that he had, “because that’s where you get your work.”

By the time of Big Night‘s mid-’90s release, Tucci had only been acting on screen for a little over a decade. In that time, Tucci appeared in a number of films as either a foot soldier, don, or other apparatchik of an underground criminal organization, including Quick Change, Men of Respect, Billy Bathgate, and The Public Eye. But even when not directly tied to a mob, Tucci played tough guys and enforcers on both sides of the law, from muggers and thieves (Beethoven, Undercover Blues), to cops and district attorneys (The Feud, Kiss of Death) to straight-up killers (The Pelican Brief, Jury Duty).

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After finally succeeding in bringing forth a vision of Italian-American life that wasn’t intimately tied up with crime, Tucci had had enough. Ten years had passed since he’d last appeared as a mafioso, in 1992’s crime thriller The Public Eye, costarring Barbara Hershey and Joe Pesci, who’s continued to star in a number of mafia films. Then a script for a crime film called Road to Perdition came along.

“I did it when Sam Mendes asked me to do Road to Perdition,” Tucci said, explaining, “Because it was Sam Mendes and nobody was good in the script.” Tucci explained that in the film, “the Irishmen and the Italians were all questionable…. It wasn’t like you’re bad because you’re Italian, which is normally the way Italians are portrayed.”

Mendes’s pitch-black crime drama, adapted from the graphic novel series of the same name by David Self, tells an Oresteia-type fable of cyclical vengeance, in which a mobster seeks retribution against those who killed his family. As in Billy Bathgate, in which Tucci played the famed gangster Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, he starred in Road to Perdition as the real-life mob member Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s right-hand man in the Chicago Outfit.

Tucci has opened up about his reluctance to dive into dark roles before, sharing in 2023 that he tried to get out of playing the serial killer in 2009’s The Lovely Bones. “I would not play George Harvey again in The Lovely Bones, that was horrible,” he said. “It’s a wonderful movie, but it was a tough experience simply because of the role,” one which he “tried to get out of” at first.

Tucci won glowing notices for his performances in both The Lovely Bones and Road to Perdition, and last year got to explore another facet of Italian identity as the Catholic Cardinal Aldo Bellini in the Oscar-winning drama Conclave.