John Turturro Learned to Pick Pockets for His Darkest Role Yet

By Marcus Bennett

John Turturro, 69, spent his time on the set of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York lifting wallets from unsuspecting crew members. He had professional instruction. Apollo Robbins, the famed sleight-of-hand artist, coached him in the art of misdirection. "He really helped me, gave me exercises, and worked with me," Turturro says. "I [practiced picking pockets] in the production office and on the set all the time."

The actor has views on which marks are easiest. "Horizontal pockets that are really tight with tight jeans are hard; back pockets are easier," he says. Even better: "If your purse or your backpack is on your back and your zipper isn't completely zipped up."

In the new film, Turturro plays Harry, a skilled pickpocket and the primary caretaker for his wife, who lives in a catatonic state. Harry's life turns when he steals the backpack of a college-age kid who turns out to be the grandson of a crime boss. Harry joins a long line of morally dubious characters in a career that includes Five Corners, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Do the Right Thing. Recent television work spans The Night Of, The Plot Against America and Severance.

Why does risk attract him?

Turturro describes himself as a perpetual student of his craft. "I really do try to take the elevator down into the sub-basement and mine everything I possibly can because I'm a student," he says. "I love to begin something because you never know. There's the unknown of, 'I may fail. I may not be able to do that.' And I find that exciting."

What did caregiving teach him?

The role of a caretaker carries personal weight. Turturro served as legal guardian to his late brother, who had schizophrenia. He found residences, hired aides and supervised the supervisors. "He could be very abusive and very unpredictable, so you never knew what was going to happen," Turturro recalls. "So I was always on sort of a high alert. No matter where I was in the world, I tried to protect my own family from him."

His brother was repeatedly hospitalized and evicted from apartments. "It was really hard to do because there's no system," Turturro says of caring for the mentally ill. "[Many] mentally ill people, they wind up on the streets." At New York Presbyterian, Turturro sometimes brought his brother lunch; in a bad mood, his brother would throw it over him. "Do I leave? Do I stay?" the actor asked himself.

The brother was also, in Turturro's words, "a very complex and very perceptive person" and "a very good musician." He once told his famous sibling: "I've given you a lot of material." Turturro answered: "You're really right — but at a high cost."

How did his childhood shape his acting?

Volatility was the family norm. His father served in World War II, hit a mine on a destroyer at D-Day and suffered PTSD. Combined with his brother's illness, the household was combustible. "I was sort of the person who would calm things down," Turturro says. "I became like my mom's protector for a lot of my life growing up. ... It was like being in an acting class, but it was real-life in some ways."

He watched violence and learned to defuse it. "When I was younger and I played all these explosive characters and stuff, I understood the reality of that, versus just the imaginative reality of that," he says. Women, he adds, held those households together: "They were the glue." His mother, a dressmaker, once had him model a wedding dress so she could hem and bead it. "It was a pretty free household that way," he says.

What bound him to Spike Lee?

Turturro spent his first six years in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Hollis, Queens. "I had no white friends," he says. Moving to Rosedale, an Italian, Irish and somewhat Jewish area, he first experienced prejudice over his skin color. Those experiences, he says, helped him navigate a multicultural world — and bonded him with Spike Lee, who grew up in an Italian neighborhood.

Reading Lee's screenplay for Do the Right Thing, Turturro chose the racist. "I'd rather play the racist guy because that's what it's about, the movie," he says. "He doesn't have a Ku Klux Klan hood on him. He's just the guy who sells pizza. I worked in a pizzeria before that and the guy wasn't that different from the guy I was playing. The thing was to expose it, in a way."

What does age change for an actor?

"Seventy is the new 50, I guess," Turturro says. He cannot jump a fence as quickly or run as fast, but he can "distill things and understand what stillness is and be really precise because your toolbox is much fuller." He adds: "I feel very rich in that way right now." Of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, he says: "I see a person who has lived a lot of life that way, and that's me too."

Lauren Krenzel and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited the broadcast interview; Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.