Stanley Tucci is unabashed about stealing ideas from other actors

When it came to playing the arch villain in the big-budget fairy-tale adventure Jack The Giant Slayer, acclaimed character actor Stanley Tucci had a very cunning plan. "You steal ideas from other people's performances," says Tucci, whose character is the evil-doer Roderick with a silly hairstyle.

"You look at performances by people like Basil Rathbone or Alan Rickman."

Tucci, 53, has been in more than 50 feature films in his four-decade career and can boast a number of celebrated performances in recent years, including Julie & Julia (2009), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), The Terminal (2004) and Road To Perdition (2002).

His performance in The Lovely Bones (2009), where he played a child-killer, earned Tucci an Oscar nomination in 2010 for Best Supporting Actor, though he found the role difficult. "I didn't want to be that guy. It was very hard to play that guy. I didn't like that," he says.