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. 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.
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