John Lithgow went to a wine shop in Italy with Stanley Tucci and the locals freaked out: “Ralph Fiennes and I felt like extras in Gandhi”

John Lithgow has said that Stanley Tucci made some locals particularly starstruck when he went to a wine shop in Italy with him and Ralph Fiennes – but in Italy, Lithgow himself was a “nobody”.

The three all appear in the mystery thriller film Conclave and Tucci had previously worked on a food and travel series called Searching For Italy in the country. During a break from filming, the three went into a wine shop to buy some wine for a party.

“It made you feel like a total nobody to walk down the streets of Rome with Stanley,” remarked Lithgow. “On the way home from work one day, at like 6:30 p.m., we stopped off to buy some wine. We’d all been invited to the same party, so Stanley, Ralph Fiennes, and I went into a wine shop.

“We just had the car stop and let us out, and we went in to buy wine for the hostess. And Stanley, of course, bought about eight bottles of wine. And everybody in that store, customers and service people alike, they [behaved] like a Beatle had walked into their door.”

He added: “Ralph and I felt like extras in Gandhi — absolutely no attention was paid! So you just had to swallow that bitter pill.”

Tucci, Lithgow and Fiennes all portray Catholic Cardinals in Conclave, a drama directed by Edward Berger based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris. It follows a group of cardinals in Vatican City attempting to elect a new Pope among themselves when the Supreme Pontiff dies, which sees plenty of backstabbing and posturing ensue.

In other news, Tucci has revealed that he struggled to “get a job” after starring in The Devil Wears Prada, telling Vanity Fair in a new interview: “After The Devil Wears Prada, I couldn’t get a job, and I didn’t quite understand that, but that’s just the way it was. So I went and did stuff that I didn’t necessarily want to do, but I did it.”

Although he appeared in films for the next couple of years, it wasn’t until 2009 that he featured in anything high profile such as Julie & Julia and Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones, the latter of which earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars.

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