John Turturro, the actor who built a career on the men New York leaves behind

John Turturro

Photo: PhilipRomanoPhoto / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 28, 1957 Brooklyn, New York City, United States
Occupation	Actor and filmmaker
Known for	The Big Lebowski, The Batman, Raging Bull
Awards	Obie · Cannes Film Festival · Caméra d'Or, Cannes Film Festival · Emmy · Zurich Film Festival Golden Eye

Harry Lehman still picks pockets for a living in a New York where the pockets no longer hold cash, only cards their owners can cancel before he reaches the corner. He is the hero of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Noah Segan’s crime film, and John Turturro plays him as an artisan whose trade the city has quietly retired. Reviewers keep calling it one of the best roles of his career. The odder fact is how long such a part took to arrive. For most of his working life Turturro has been the man at the edge of the frame, remembered from a single scene, while the films he directed himself kept drifting back to his father’s trade and his family’s Italian roots.

Think of the parts people quote. A bowler in a purple jumpsuit licking his ball in The Big Lebowski. Pino, the pizzeria son whose resentment curdles into racism in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Bernie Bernbaum begging for his life in the woods of Miller’s Crossing. The Coen brothers and Lee built some of their sharpest scenes around him, rarely with much screen time. Even when Hollywood paid him well, as Agent Simmons in four Transformers films, it paid him to be the strange one.

The strangeness had a source. Turturro was born on February 28, 1957, in Brooklyn, the middle son of Nicholas Turturro, a carpenter who had emigrated as a six-year-old from Giovinazzo, on the Apulian coast, and Katherine Incerella, an amateur jazz singer with Sicilian roots. The family moved to Rosedale, in Queens, when John was six. He studied theater at the State University of New York at New Paltz and then at the Yale School of Drama, finishing his MFA in 1983. His first film appearance was as a non-speaking extra in Martin Scorsese‘s Raging Bull.

The theater noticed him first. In 1983 he created the title role in John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and won an Obie when the production moved Off-Broadway. Five Corners, in 1987, did the decisive work: Spike Lee saw that performance and cast him in Do the Right Thing, the start of a partnership that ran to nine films, more than any other actor has made with Lee.

With the Coen brothers he found a second home. Miller’s Crossing made him its most memorable coward, and Barton Fink handed him the lead: a New York playwright who goes to Hollywood in 1941 and cannot write a line in his peeling hotel room. Cannes gave the film the Palme d’Or in 1991 and gave Turturro its prize for best actor. Three years later Robert Redford cast him as Herbie Stempel, the quiz contestant told to lose on live television, in Quiz Show, which brought a Golden Globe nomination. Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski and the convict Pete in O Brother, Where Art Thou? followed.

Directing pulled him somewhere else. His first feature, Mac, follows three brothers who start their own construction firm after their father dies; Turturro’s father had died of lung cancer in 1988, and the film won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 1992. Passione, in 2010, was a documentary built from the songs of Naples. These are the films of a man working out where he came from, and they carry a tenderness his screen roles rarely allowed.

They are also where the doubts gather. Romance & Cigarettes, a working-class musical with James Gandolfini and Kate Winslet, premiered in Venice in 2005 and took two years to reach American theaters. Fading Gigolo, with Woody Allen as his improbable pimp, drew mixed reviews. The Jesus Rolls was the project he chased longest: the Coens had always refused a sequel to The Big Lebowski, so Turturro got their permission and made his own Quintana spin-off without them. When it opened in 2020, critics were mostly hostile and audiences stayed away. It proved what his career had hinted all along, that a character built for a few minutes of screen time rarely carries a whole film.

Television gave him the room cinema had not. He had already won an Emmy in 2004 as Ambrose, the agoraphobic brother of the detective in Monk. In HBO’s The Night Of, in 2016, he played John Stone, a low-rent defense lawyer with eczema, a part first meant for James Gandolfini, and earned an Emmy nomination. Since 2022 he has played Irving, the rule-bound office worker who falls for Christopher Walken’s Burt in Apple TV’s Severance, a performance nominated for Emmys after both seasons. Matt Reeves cast him as the mob boss Carmine Falcone in The Batman, though Turturro told Variety in 2024 that he turned down The Penguin, the spin-off series, because of its violence toward women. Pedro Almodóvar then gave him a quieter part in The Room Next Door.

Which is why this year reads like a correction. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York premiered at Sundance in January 2026, traveled to the Berlinale, and was bought by Sony Pictures Classics, which opened it in New York and Los Angeles on October 23 and nationwide on October 30. Giancarlo Esposito and Steve Buscemi share the streets with Harry, and Turturro’s cousin Aida Turturro has a part as well. Zurich’s film festival gave him its Golden Eye. Earlier in October he was at the New York Film Festival with Tom McCarthy’s A Statement, playing the nuclear engineer David J. Rose in a film built from the transcript of a 1980 climate conference.

He has gone back to the stage, too. This autumn at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he played Bérenger, the last man in town who will not turn into a beast, in Diane Paulus’s revival of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. The production opens on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theatre on April 25, 2027, with Tatiana Maslany again beside him and Tony Shalhoub replacing Paul Giamatti. In November, Stockholm’s film festival will present him with its Achievement Award. He is also directing a documentary on the Yankees manager Joe Torre, and Severance started shooting its third season in July, though Apple has not said whether Irving returns.

Turturro has been married since 1985 to the actress Katherine Borowitz, who appeared in Mac before moving into social work; they have two children. His younger brother Nicholas also acts.

Harry Lehman is a man whose skill is real and whose city has stopped needing it, and he keeps working anyway. Turturro has spent four decades proving the edge of the frame can hold an entire performance. Next spring on Broadway he plays the one man who refuses to change, from the middle of the stage.