John Turturro could pick your pocket (if he wanted to)

Terry Gross introduces John Turturro’s new film, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, in which he plays Harry, a skilled thief whose trade is fading because he has no phone or computer and finds wallets full of cards but little cash. He also cares for a wife left unresponsive, probably after a stroke, and steals a backpack belonging to the grandson of a crime boss. Turturro researched the role with magician-pickpocket Apollo Robbins, practicing constantly. He explains that tight horizontal pockets are difficult, while back pockets, loose overcoat pockets, and partly unzipped backpacks are easier targets.

Turturro tells Gross that pickpockets often work in teams, with one person distracting and repositioning a victim while the other approaches from the side and gradually moves from a social distance into intimate physical space. He practiced removing a leather-banded watch with one hand. He calls pickpocketing a violation but a nonviolent crime, contrasting it with anonymous digital theft and noting that traditional thieves might take spending money rather than someone’s entire bank account. Drawing on the book Whiz Mob, he describes pickpockets’ informal morality: they would avoid stealing from drunk people or very elderly people who could not move easily.

The film’s emotional center is Harry’s care for his unresponsive wife: carrying her upstairs, bathing and cleaning her, combing her hair, keeping her hydrated, and managing her catheter. Turturro says the character has learned that love is an action, not merely a word, and that people may grow even if they do not fundamentally change. Gross connects this to Turturro’s guardianship of his brother, who had paranoid schizophrenia, OCD, bipolar disorder, and depression. After their parents died, Turturro arranged residences, aides, and supervision, remaining on high alert because his brother could be abusive and unpredictable.

Turturro says his brother was violent and was hospitalized at Creedmoor for eleven years after escalating behavior endangered their mother. He found that structured activity helped: his brother did well working on the hospital’s animal farm and participating in painting and music at Creedmoor’s living museum. A monthly medication eventually reduced his volatility, and Turturro found a health advocate, Heidi Levy, who helped them. Though the mental-health system often leaves people on the streets, Turturro and his brother became close during the last five years of his life. His brother once told him he had given Turturro “a lot of material”; Turturro replied, “at a high cost.”

Turturro’s father had wartime PTSD after his destroyer hit a mine during D-Day, while his brother’s illness made the household volatile. As the middle child, Turturro became his mother’s protector and learned to calm confrontations. He compares his parents to The Honeymooners as if written by Charles Bukowski or Joe Orton: turbulent but funny. He says that seeing violence in real life helped him distinguish actual behavior from an actor’s imagined version of it. That experience informed his breakout role as Hines in Five Corners, a violent sociopath who throws his mother through a high apartment window.

Turturro says playwright John Patrick Shanley championed him for Five Corners after they worked together on Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. His parents watched the film: his mother cried, while his father enjoyed seeing him play a character as bad as Richard Widmark’s killer in Kiss of Death. Turturro acknowledges that Hines’s bulging-eyed look drew partly on his brother and other volatile people. For Miller’s Crossing, he prepared Bernie’s frantic plea by interviewing his honest accountant, Abe, and borrowing his cadence, including Yiddish rhythms. A childhood incident in which a policeman pointed a gun at Turturro’s head helped him imagine Bernie’s bodily terror.

Turturro worked many summers for his father as a laborer, carpenter, and cement worker, sometimes on open floors 70 or 80 stories above the ground. He saw the danger construction workers accepted and remembers his father witnessing people fall. Although some coworkers whistled at women during the early feminist era, his father did not. Turturro also helped his mother, a dressmaker, with patterns, hems, beads, and wedding dresses; when a mannequin was too short, he wore a dress so she could finish it. He says women held volatile households together and that his mother’s competence and encouragement made him comfortable working with women.

Turturro says he spent his first six years in predominantly Black Hollis, Queens, where his best friend, the bully, and the nerdy child were all Black. After moving to more Italian, Irish, and Jewish Rosedale, he experienced prejudice himself because people assumed he was Puerto Rican. He later attended integrated and largely Black schools during the volatile 1968 period. Those experiences helped him connect with Spike Lee, whose Italian neighborhood background overlapped with Turturro’s. In Do the Right Thing, Turturro chose to play the racist pizzeria owner’s son because the character had no obvious extremist costume; he was an ordinary man embodying everyday racism.

In The Night Of, Turturro plays lawyer John Stone, a smart but disheveled courthouse solicitor who finds low-level clients and suffers severe eczema. In a scene with Riz Ahmed’s Nas, Stone insists that lawyers and prosecutors will develop competing “stories” for the jury, warning Nas not to commit himself to the truth before knowing the other side’s case. Turturro says Richard Price’s dialogue was “delicious,” and he studied real defense lawyers, including Kenny Montgomery. He researched how people scratch inaccessible eczema with tools such as chopsticks, learned that stress worsens the itch-scratch cycle, and walked through New York in full makeup while strangers looked away.

Gross asks about Turturro’s Washington Post essay on his Sicilian grandmother’s fatal, botched abortion. Already raising six children, his grandmother was advised by her sister that another child was unaffordable; a supposedly helpful potion was toxic and killed her. Turturro’s mother was sent to an Irish-run St. Joseph’s orphanage, while the children were separated into different institutions. After six years, a family friend named Lena took his mother out, but Lena died three years later of a brain hemorrhage, meaning Turturro’s mother lost two mother figures by age fourteen. He calls his mother remarkably resilient, talented, and capable of doing everything from sewing to electrical work.

Gross notes that Turturro continues receiving major roles in The Night Of, The Plot Against America, Severance, and The Only Living Pickpocket in New York despite approaching 70. He says age brings a fuller “toolbox” of experience: although he cannot run or jump as quickly, he can use stillness, precision, and accumulated observation. He explains that Harry’s elegant black-and-white tweed coat makes him look too well-dressed to be a pickpocket and functions like armor, with many useful pockets. The costume also evokes old movies and shows how lessons from both his father’s construction and mother’s dressmaking remain present in his work.