The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power star on his muddy marriage proposal, controversial cheese opinions, memories of Sam Neill and having a good evil face

You once played Basil Fawlty in an amateur student production of Fawlty Towers at Queen’s College in Melbourne. How amateur was your Basil Fawlty moustache?

It was terrible. It was real but it was definitely coloured in – I still have holes in my beard. I’d also shaved my head, so if you look at the early promo posters, you can clearly see I’m wearing a wig. Our theatre was closed so we had to perform in a circus tent in the middle of winter, on an oval in the university grounds, which was all very Fawlty Towers.

A ‘family’ of criminals attempt to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in pulpy and forgettable thriller

In the last half-decade Stanley Tucci has been a source of near-inexhaustible on- screen delight, whether making friends with nonnas in his delightful cooking shows or smartly judged supporting turns in Conclave and The Devil Wears Prada 2. He is an actor well placed for a star vehicle of his own, and this one, Masterplan, sounds good on paper: an art heist fronted by the actor at his most debonair, flanked by a grandson of a French New Wave legend (Victor Belmondo, related to Breathless star Jean-Paul) and a buzzy breakout of The White Lotus (Simona Tabasco, winning in season two of Mike White’s comedy).

There’s a good bit of pulpy fun to have here, with double, triple and quadruple crossing, silly spy gadgetry which has been updated to include retina scan cloning and something called “VR intrusion”. As British criminal mastermind Roger, Tucci is game to send up aristo archetypes, even if his character often veers into parody. “I’m English,” his character says at one point. “‘Not bad’ is what I say when I orgasm.”