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Forty years into a career that has made him one of American cinema’s most recognizable character actors, John Turturro has a Cannes best actor prize, an enviable résumé and exactly zero Oscar mornings when his name
was read aloud with the words “and the nominees are.”
Sony Pictures Classics is determined to end the drought with his work in the acclaimed “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” which premiered at Sundance last January and made its fall festival bow at Telluride this weekend, where the film and Turturro’s invigorating turn as an aging pickpocket are drawing acclaim.
Turturro, 69, has been making the rounds in the Colorado mountains, attending Q&As and a Saturday night dinner hosted by Sony Pictures Classics, where writer-director Noah Segan mingled with press and industry attendees.
Turturro has spent four decades operating in the space reserved for actors everyone recognizes and almost nobody thinks of as an Oscar nominee. He has worked with masters of cinema such as the Coen brothers, Spike Lee and Robert Redford and has appeared opposite everyone from Tom Hanks to Adam Sandler. He’s played gangsters, professors, detectives, eccentrics, husbands, fathers and men who seem to have wandered into the wrong movie and somehow made it better.
And yet, the Academy has never invited him to the party.
And it’s not like he hasn’t been close. Turturro won best actor at Cannes for the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” in 1991. Three years later, his combustible Herbie Stempel in Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show” collected Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations, the kind of precursor support that usually precedes an Oscar bid. But each time, the industry seemed to look elsewhere.
The television world has been kinder. His weary defense attorney in “The Night Of,” HBO’s 2016 crime drama, drew Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations. His tender, unraveling Irving Bailiff on “Severance,” Apple TV’s dystopian workplace thriller, has since earned him two Emmy nominations, the most recent lost to his own castmate Tramell Tillman in 2025.
“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” can change that.
In a similar vein to Richard Jenkins’ first career nomination for the 2007 drama “The Visitor,” Turturro can be the overdue veteran to finally see his name in lights. Segan’s Sundance breakout, acquired by SPC for a fall release, gives Turturro something four decades of great supporting performances never could: a movie that he leads, one that lives and dies on him.
He plays Harry Lehman, an analog thief operating in a city where the very concept of pickpocketing has become obsolete. Wallets increasingly contain less cash, phones have replaced maps and tickets and two-factor authentication has made the modern world almost aggressively hostile to the old-fashioned criminal. Harry is clinging to a disappearing profession while caring for his ailing wife, Rosie.
While that metaphor is hardly subtle, it’s also part of its appeal. Harry is not simply a thief whose trade is dying; he’s a man confronting his own obsolescence.
SPC calls it the finest performance of Turturro’s career. Distributor hyperbole is usually best treated as campaign copy. But here, it resonates. Turturro has never been an actor who needed to announce himself. He slips into other people’s scenes, finds the detail nobody else thought to play and then, almost imperceptibly, becomes the most interesting person in the room. The Academy has rewarded that instinct repeatedly, just not when Turturro has been the person standing at the center of the frame.
As an awards campaign, the studio is following a familiar formula: a beloved, never-nominated veteran finally gets a leading role worthy of his gifts. But the strongest version of the pitch is not “Give John Turturro an Oscar.” It is “Look at what John Turturro has been doing all along.”
The Academy has historically responded to overdue narratives, particularly when the performance provides a credible reason to act on the sentiment. Turturro has the résumé, the festival pedigree and the late-career showcase that can turn years of admiration into a voting impulse.
“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is a movie about a man whose skills belong to another era, trying to prove they still have value. The meta-text is impossible to miss. Turturro’s awards case makes essentially the same argument about the actor himself.
It also helps to have Steve Buscemi in the cast, who could mount his own first awards run for “Wild Horse Nine,” along with the best awards campaigner this side of the sun, Jamie Lee Curtis, who delivers a killer one-scene wonder.
Like a lot of SPC films, neither the movie nor Turturro may seem the loudest voice in the room right now and plenty of pundits will write it off early, especially once precursors start rolling in. But as the studio has shown with titles like “The Father,” “Parallel Mothers” and “I’m Still Here,” the ground game and striking when it matters most, is what wins these campaigns.
And Turturro may not even be the film’s only awards story. Segan, long a familiar face in front of the camera, wrote and directed “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” himself and a spare, mournful original like this one is exactly the kind of writer-director calling card the original screenplay race tends to reward. It happens more than voters remember. “Frozen River,” another SPC sleeper, paired Melissa Leo’s lead nomination with a surprise original screenplay nod for writer-director Courtney Hunt and “Nebraska” did the same for Bruce Dern and scribe Bob Nelson. If the film connects with voters, Segan’s script could ride in alongside its star.
The best actor field, notably, is shaping up to be incredibly crowded. Heading into the fall festivals, pundits had already penciled in the likes of Matt Damon (“The Odyssey”), Ryan Gosling (“Project Hail Mary”) and Sebastian Stan (“Fjord”), and Venice and Telluride added John Malkovich (“Wild Horse Nine”) and Andrew Scott (“Elsinore”) to the conversation. SPC will have to make noise without overselling a performance whose appeal lies in its subtlety. But if the campaign can persuade voters to see Harry not as a novelty but as the culmination of everything Turturro has spent a career doing, the narrative becomes difficult to ignore.
Let’s see if this pickpocket can steal some hearts along the way.
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