‘I was thrilled’: Tony Shalhoub looks back at ‘Big Night,’ the ultimate Jersey Shore movie that turns 30

Big Night is a food movie, an Italian American movie, a movie about brotherhood, and a movie about the immigrant experience. And on top of all of that, it’s a Jersey Shore movie.

Released in 1996, it stars Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci as Primo and Secondo, a pair of Italian immigrant brothers who operate an authentic but failing Italian restaurant in an unnamed Jersey Shore town in the 1950s.

Chafing under the competition of the more successful but less authentic restaurant across the street, the brothers stake it all on the eponymous “Big Night” when they’ve been told the jazz bandleader Louis Prima is coming to dine at their spot. Presumably, he’d then talk up the food and save their restaurant.

Big Night is full of mouth-watering food, starting with the timpano, a complex dish that includes a crust, meat, pasta, and more.

While the film’s exteriors were shot in Red Bank and Keyport, the film never specifies exactly where it is set. The interiors were shot on a soundstage in New York City.

“It was really one of those towns that had not changed too much,” Shalhoub said to The Inquirer. “The town, the outside of the restaurant, the beach sequences, were all shot in Jersey.” And even in 1996, they easily stood in for the 1950s’ Jersey Shore.

Shalhoub, well-known for the TV series Monk and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, among numerous movie roles, shot Big Night during a summer hiatus from his sitcom, Wings.

“I knew Stanley Tucci; we had done a play together in the late ‘80s,” he said. “We were both actors in New York, I had seen his work in the theater, [and] we had similar friends and directors in common.”

There was a specific reason Tucci decided to make Big Night, Shalhoub said.

“[He wanted] to sort of begin to establish himself as an actor … not to be pigeonholed into the stereotypical Italian Mafia zone.”

There was no mention of that in Big Night.

“It’s all about the brothers,” Shalhoub said, “It’s about the period, it’s about the food, it’s about the old country, Primo having one foot still in the old country.”

“The closest we get to violence is those two clowns rolling around. They don’t even know how to fight,” the actor mentioned during a conversation following a special screening of the film at the Lighthouse International Film Festival on Long Beach Island, recently.

Big Night had been “in the pipeline” for many years, and Shalhoub had originally auditioned for the role of Pascal, the rival restaurant owner ultimately played in the film by Ian Holm.

It finally came together in the summer of 1995; the shoot lasted about four weeks.

“I was thrilled,” Shalhoub said. “Any part, either part, I was happy to join, because I loved the material, and I had a lot of respect for Stanley.”

Tucci and Campbell Scott, actors who had been high school classmates, co-directed the film, which was co-written by Tucci and his cousin, Joseph Tropiano.

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“I don’t know how he wore all those hats,” Shalhoub said of Tucci. “Being a cowriter … and co-directing, and being in almost every scene, and it being his first film.”

Shalhoub, who is from a large Lebanese American family in Green Bay, Wisc., had limited exposure to Italian American food and culture while growing up. He also didn’t live anywhere near an ocean.

The Big Night shoot was his first time at the Jersey Shore. He had, however, had some experience with Italian food.

Growing up, he remembers being taken to a family friend’s apartment, where an “older Italian woman” made “some pasta dishes.”

“I don’t know what I was eating, but I couldn’t get enough of it.”

At 19, after heading East for college at the University of Southern Maine, Shalhoub had his first “Italian sandwich, which I’d never heard of before … And all the variations on an Italian sub, and all those great Italian deli meats.”

On the sets of Big Night, he said, the crew had food stylists preparing the dinners shown in the film.

“All these meals that we had to consume on camera … it was delicious!” he said.

The film ends with a famous scene — five minutes of no dialogue, just Tucci cooking an omelet and the brothers sitting down to eat it.

The film’s financiers didn’t understand that scene and wanted it changed or removed, Scott said at the film screening. The directors then pulled the old Mel Brooks trick; they said they’d take the scene out, but didn’t.

Tucci and Shalhoub, 30 years later, are not only very busy actors, but both have recently hosted food-focused travel shows: Hulu’s Tucci in Italy and HBO’s Breaking Bread, respectively.

“I could never have imagined that this movie would have the legs that it has, that 30 years in, it would still be a film that people go back to, and consider one of the best food movies,” Shalhoub said.

Philadelphia chef and restaurateur Marc Vetri is a fan.

“In 1996, chefs were in this kind of zone,” said Vetri, who watched the film shortly after it came out. “We all made the menus, and we had our visions, and we didn’t want to alter anything, and [said] ‘this is how we do it’.”

He still remembers the unveiling of the timpano in the film.

“For me, that was magic,” he said. “I was like, ‘I gotta make that’ … I get that because when I finish something that I’m working on, I have that same look, that same feeling; it looks like I’m in love. That never leaves us.”

Vetri, who has gone on to cook for many famous people, said the film always reminds him of when, early in the life of his first restaurant, he cooked for the famed French chef Jacques Pépin. He cooked his whole roasted fish, with cherry tomatoes and olives.

Thirty years on, Vetri — like many others — remains a fan.

“The music, the vibes, and even the ending … Everything [with] cooking, you always just want to make it the most awesome thing. Having them make that omelet- it’s just that magical thing that they’re sharing.”