John Turturro says he came “really close” to trying his pickpocketing skills on New York subway riders while preparing to play thief Harry Lehman in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.
“I just wanted to feel the thrill, the nerves of what that would be,” the 69-year-old actor said. The possibility of getting arrested made him question how he’d explain himself: “What was I going to say? That I was doing research?”
Turturro trained with pickpocketing expert Apollo Robins, who assigned him coin exercises and showed him how to bump into someone. Robins could remove Turturro’s watch without him noticing, even after doing it repeatedly.
On set, Turturro practiced on his castmates and crew. “I pickpocketed a lot of people. Sometimes they would catch me, but a lot of times they didn’t know.”
The role also appealed to him because Harry has to learn to care for someone as his own life and profession change. Turturro said that part of the script resonated with him: “At a certain age, you know what loss is, you know what failure is.”