Though he's far from the most attention-grabbing villain in The Batman, it was still a nice surprise to see John Turturro inhabiting the role of Carmine Falcone. It’s a reflection of Turturro’s ability to make an impression by throwing himself into any role, no matter how small or thankless the part is. Turturro has made a name for himself over the decades as one of the more versatile character actors around, often able to play sullen and intense just as well as he can play broad and cartoonish. So in order to break down his most memorable performances, you get quite the variety in terms of how he fits into the landscape of the films in which he’s appeared. Though he has starred or co-starred in a number of movies, he’s capable of making as just as big of an impact in the ones where he basically just shows up for one really memorable scene. It speaks to why Turturro has been such a combustible screen presence for so long and why it’s easy to get excited every time he shows up in a movie.
Pino in Do The Right Thing (1989)
A good place to start in understanding John Turturro’s career is that he’s very much a part of a certain generation of New York-based actors and filmmakers that came to prominence in the '80s and ‘90s. So it should come as no surprise that Turturro made his way into several movies by one of the key New York filmmakers of this era — Spike Lee. In Lee’s masterpiece Do The Right Thing, Turturro plays Pino, one of the sons and employees of Sal (Danny Aiello), who owns the pizza shop that is destroyed and looted in the film’s searing climax. The role establishes a lack of vanity that Turturro would continue to bring to roles throughout his career, as he plays one of the more overtly racist characters in the movie. However, there’s a great little conversation that Mookie (Spike Lee) has with Pino about how he looks up to Black superstars like Magic Johnson and Eddie Murphy and yet treats all the Black people who come into the pizza shop with disdain. Though Pino is just one small part of the film’s sizable ensemble, he’s still an essential part of the film’s fascinating contradictions and willingness to probe each character’s (and the audience’s) individual biases.
Bernie 'The Shamata Kid' Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Just as you can’t talk about John Turturro’s career without talking about Spike Lee, it’s also impossible to talk about Turturro’s best performances without talking about the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. There’s just something about Turturro’s malleability that lends itself to several great Coen Brothers characters, some of which range from one scene wonders to being the titular role in one of their films. Turturro’s first collaboration with the Coens is closer to the former, as Bernie Bernbaum does not have a ton of screen time in Miller’s Crossing, but he’s the central figure in perhaps the film’s most memorable scene. Gabriel Byrne’s Irish gangster Tom is forced to enact a hit on Turturro’s character in the woods, though Bernbaum begs for his life, screaming the phrase “look in your heart!” Due to the overwrought pleas of Bernbaum, Tom eventually lets him go, showing a brief flash of humanity in a film filled with cold-hearted mobsters.
Barton Fink (1991)
After Turturro’s crucial performance in Miller’s Crossing, the Coens conceived of their follow-up project, Barton Fink, with him in mind to play the flustered screenwriter at the center of the film. In many ways, the character is a perfect combination of Turturro’s nerviness as an actor and the Coens’ sympathies for creative types who aren’t built for this world. Fink can be seen as a stand-in for any of the respected writing talents who made it out to Hollywood in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and were swallowed up by show business’s disregard for art. The character bears a striking resemblance to playwright Clifford Odets while John Mahoney plays a stand-in for William Faulkner). Though much of the character’s strikingness could be owed to his signature coke-bottle glasses and wall of curly hair, Turturro brings a great comic anguish to the tortured character wrestling with the world's worst writer’s block. It’s a performance that calls for just as much reacting as it does acting, as the film is filled with tons of offbeat characters that Fink encounters, and Turturro’s mix of perplexed and horrified stares make the character a fitting audience surrogate as the film just gets weirder and weirder.
Herb Stempel in Quiz Show (1994)
As great as Barton Fink is, it was far from a huge box office hit at the time. Still, you have to imagine that the film’s critical reception and Turturro’s performance led to him being cast in Robert Redford’s glossy Oscar player Quiz Show, based on the true story of the Twenty-One quiz show scandal of the 1950s. Turturro once again plays a fairly geeky character, though this one, Herb Stempel, has a pretty fascinating arc to watch. He was once the long-running king of the quiz show Twenty-One who has now been usurped by a handsome chap from an elite academic family, Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes). There’s a great dichotomy to Stempel having this endlessly nervous exterior while also being incredibly self-righteous in his crusade to prove that he, and by extension, Van Doren, were fed the answers during their quiz show runs. It makes for a situation where both the working class Stempel and the WASP-y Van Doren are seemingly two sides of the same coin, caught up in this scandal involving the TV networks and their corporate sponsors who couldn’t care less about either of them.
Detective Larry Mazilla in Clockers (1995)
There are certainly more crucial performances in Spike Lee’s first foray into the crime genre (among them Mekhi Phifer, Harvey Keitel, and Delroy Lindo), but Turturro’s appearance is an example of what a great utility player he is in Lee’s filmography. Whether it’s the more racially open-minded character butting up against his conservative family in Jungle Fever (as a contrast to his turn in Do The Right Thing) or (I kid you not) the voice of the dog that told David Berkowitz to go on his infamous killing spree in Summer of Sam, Lee can always count on Turturro to step in and add something to any scene. Here, he plays a homicide detective who’s partnered with Harvey Keitel’s Rocco, often being the “good cop” when Rocco pushes too hard on the case or hanging back in a kind of amusement when watching where Rocco plans on going with all this. It’s a character often on the fringes of the film, and yet Turturro infuses him with such a “just another day’s work” swagger while going about this potentially harrowing job that you still get a sense of exactly who this fast-talking guy is, even if he’s never the focal point of any particular scene.
Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski (1998)
It feels fitting that what is probably John Turturro’s most iconic role is also one of his briefest. Jesus “The Jesus” Quintana essentially has one pivotal, throwaway scene, where we see his distinct (and somewhat off-putting) approach to bowling matched with his distinct look, involving both a hairnet and a coke nail. It’s one of those performances where every moment that the character is onscreen is memorable, while The Jesus's threatening demeanor and status as “a pederast” makes him a hard character to get out of your head. It’s a great example of Turturro’s ability to throw himself into over-the-top comedic characters armed with thoroughly ridiculous accents, which explains why he would later make appearances in Adam Sandler vehicles like Mr. Deeds and You Don’t Mess With The Zohan. In a recent interview with GQ, Turturro remarked that he was initially embarrassed by The Jesus, but has come to embrace the character over the years, even writing and directing a spin-off movie in 2020 called The Jesus Rolls.
Pete Hogwallop in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Yes, this is another Coen Brothers movie. But it’s hard to deny that they knew how to use John Turturro perfectly in each of the films they cast him in. Here, he’s a part of The Soggy Bottom Boys, a trio of escaped convicts making their way across the American South in search of hidden treasure in this period-piece interpretation of Homer’s The Odyssey. While George Clooney's Everett is the brains of the operation, Turturro’s Pete is more of the silent type, though is also the kind of wild card that entangles them in being seduced by these river-bathing Sirens who momentarily appear to have turned Pete into a frog. There’s even a connection to Barton Fink when John Goodman shows up as a similarly menacing character and squashes the frog that is supposedly Pete. It’s a role where you can’t help but notice how much Turturro’s face communicates the interior life of his character, as his vacant stares convey all we need to know about this character’s lack of complexity, even if he’s not always merely content to go along with the movie’s seemingly preordained adventure.
Alan Jacobs in Landline (2017)
Though Landline is a low-key little dramedy that doesn’t have quite the name recognition of many of the other films mentioned here, it still feels like a vital reflection of John Turturro’s eventual mellowing out as an actor. Here, he’s playing a much more down-to-earth guy, as the patriarch of a middle-class New York family going through their own different crises. The movie’s relatively thin plot is set in motion by Turturro’s daughters (played by Jenny Slate and Abby Quinn) finding out that their father is having an affair. Despite the fact that it’s another Turturro character who’s often hard to completely like, he still fills the character with a modest warmth that makes you wish he’d do better. Also, it’s a joy to watch him play against Edie Falco as his wife in film, as she feels like a very similar type of performer — a perpetually underrated product of the New York stage who is a delight to watch any time she shows up in a movie.
Arnold in Gloria Bell (2018)
It’s not often that you see a seasoned character actor like John Turturro get the chance to play the main love interest in a movie in his early 60s, but that just speaks to the affection this film has for its portrayal of the realities of middle-aged people trying to find romance. Much like Landline, this is a much softer Turturro, as he plays an introverted divorced dad who the film’s titular Gloria (played by Julianne Moore) meets at a singles bar. Since this is still a Turturro character, there’s something a little off about Arnold, who becomes increasingly cagey about letting Gloria into his life completely. You do almost expect Arnold to really go off the rails at some point considering the nature of so many of Turturro’s past characters, but here he plays a subtler kind of flawed guy. It’s just a testament to Turturro’s unpredictability that the role shows him doing new things decades into his career, and considering The Batman is also his first foray into the superhero genre, it’s safe to say he’ll keep figuring out new ways to steal scenes for years to come.