ACTOR ALESSANDRO NIVOLA HAS THE ABILITY TO TRANSFORM HIMSELF INTO WILDLY DIFFERENT CHARACTERS SO EASILY THAT IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO RECOGNIZE HIM FROM ROLE TO ROLE. THIS YEAR NIVOLA IS EVERYWHERE, REPORTS TED HILDNER, FROM THE BRUTALIST TO THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, GIVING PERFORMANCES THAT PROVE HE’S ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING ACTORS OF OUR TIME.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LANDON NORDEMAN
It’s 11 AM on Bond Street. Alessandro Nivola—the ruggedly handsome actor seemingly everywhere this year, from Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic The Brutalist to Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door to popcorn blockbuster Kraven the Hunter—is being prepped for Avenue’s photo shoot at Jac’s on Bond, a swank lounge with a pool table and black-and-white photographs of Keith Haring, Fab 5 Freddy, and Deborah Harry on the walls. Out on the cobblestone NoHo street, Nivola poses for a shot when a friend waves him down. It’s Julianne Moore, his costar in The Room Next Door. The New York-based actors embrace and chat tête-à-tête while our photographer reluctantly lowers his camera. It’s a pure Hollywood-on-the-Hudson moment.
Alessandro Antine Nivola’s career launched in Hong Kong action director John Woo’s 1997 blockbuster Face/Off, opposite Nicolas Cage, whom he considers his first mentor. “It was my first movie. My first time in Hollywood,” Nivola remembers. “Nick helped me embrace the more eccentric aspects of my character. He gave me confidence to perform.”
Nivola is easygoing with an infectious, regular-guy charm. I quickly forget I’m talking to a Tony Award-nominated actor (for 2014’s The Elephant Man) who’s worked with directors like David O. Russell and Barry Levinson and starred opposite Robert De Niro, Frances McDormand, and Christopher Walken. He is about as un-Hollywood as you can get.
The son of an artist mother and an academic father, Nivola spent his childhood between Boston where he was born; Burlington, Vermont; and Washington, DC, before settling down at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he was a student. His family has a rich legacy in the arts and academia; his mother, aunt, and younger brother, Adrian, are all artists, while his grandfather was the renowned Italian sculptor Costantino Nivola. His father attended Harvard and was a respected professor of political science and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
After Exeter, Nivola was accepted at Yale. Yet, with one of the most prestigious drama programs in the world, he didn’t major in acting. By the time he got to college, he already had years of experience on stage. “I started very young. I had a cousin who wanted to be an actor who I had seen in some college productions and that inspired me,” he says. “I began taking acting classes when I was really young. I was involved in theater training throughout my childhood, which led to regional theater in various places around the country.” Nivola declared himself an English major at Yale and began acting in some of the drama school productions. He collaborated with his friend and fellow Yalie Paul Giamatti. “Paul and I were in a bunch of plays together in school, but it took us 30 years—until this past summer—before we starred opposite each other again in the third Downton Abbey movie!”
Armed with a BA in English, Nivola moved to New York in 1994 and got cast on Broadway alongside Helen Mirren and F. Murray Abraham in Scott Ellis’s revival of A Month in the Country, for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. The early ’90s was an exciting moment to be in New York. Nivola became part of a band of young actors making their Broadway debuts around the same time—guys like Jude Law, Damian Lewis, Rufus Sewell, and Billy Crudup. They became a tight cast of friends. “There was a place called Café in the Theater District, almost like a salon-type situation that Helen [Mirren] had started. All the different actors from other shows would meet up there to start the evening. We would have drinks, and then the younger ones would head down to the East Village, which was still pretty rough then. The 2A bar was the one we used to go to a lot down in Alphabet City before we ended up back at one of our apartments, usually Jude’s, right before the sun came up,” he confesses with a laugh.
Those rowdy late nights on Avenue A didn’t last forever. In 1997, Nivola went west—to Hollywood—in search of success on the silver screen. He nabbed a role in the coming-of-age film Inventing the Abbotts, but it was his searing portrayal of the twisted Pollux Troy in Face/Off that got him noticed.
“I find things that are very specific to each character, and I look for those similarities in people I know or people I’ve seen, and I mimic them.”
– Alessandro Nivola
Since then, Nivola has become one of Hollywood’s most versatile actors, shapeshifting so seamlessly from role to role that it’s hard to believe he’s the same guy playing the charming Henry Crawford in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and the deranged, violent karate teacher Sensei in Riley Stearns’s black comedy The Art of Self-Defense. Nivola mentions that The Art of Self-Defense is one of his favorite films that he’s made. I stream it and see why the movie, a jarring commentary on toxic masculinity, has become a cult classic. In The Many Saints of Newark—David Chase’s prequel to The Sopranos—critics agreed that Nivola’s performance as Tony Soprano’s ruthless uncle Dickie Moltisanti was one of the best things in a film that divided audiences and rabid fans of the HBO series.
Nivola averages two films a year. He has portrayed nearly every type of character imaginable, from vicious villains to heroes. “I find things that are very specific to each character, and I look for those similarities in people I know or people I’ve seen, and I mimic them,” he explains. He analyzes, draws comparisons, and practices their every movement until it becomes second nature, making him forget he’s even acting. In The Brutalist, he becomes Attila Miller, a Hungarian immigrant who helps an old friend and fellow Jew find a new life in America after the horrors of World War II. In Kraven the Hunter, he manages to make a comic book villain seem real, and he delivers a compelling portrayal as a tough, cross-examining investigator in The Room Next Door. Nivola really is everywhere this year. “It’s one of those odd coincidences where things you’ve filmed at entirely different times end up being released simultaneously, so I recommend a triple feature!” he suggests with a chuckle.
The filming of The Brutalist was an extraordinary experience for Nivola. His grandmother Ruth Guggenheim, a Jew who fled Germany in the early 1930s, spent her adolescent years in Italy, where she met his grandfather, a young art student with exceptional talent. As the war approached, they fled to New York together, escaping the Holocaust. For his role, Nivola drew from his own heritage, finding inspiration and understanding through family history, forming a deep personal connection to the story.
The Brutalist is the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect (played by fellow New York actor Adrien Brody) who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to the United States in pursuit of the American dream, relying heavily on his childhood friend Attila, played by Nivola, for support and guidance. “I feel like the first 45 minutes of the movie is really my little story with Adrien. It’s almost like a short film that serves as the prologue and establishes the overall themes.” Attila, who is both insecure and desperate to assimilate as an American, has given up most of his heritage (and his accent) and denied his personal history in trying hard to make it in America. For the first part of what is arguably the best film of the year, Nivola gives a haunting, heartbreaking performance of the sacrifices one makes to change who they are at their core.
In Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, The Room Next Door, the Oscar-winning Spanish director cast Nivola as a cop from upstate New York. His hard-hitting character represents a questioning, opposing viewpoint to that of Julianne Moore’s Ingrid, who is protecting a friend who has decided to take her own life. In the drama, Tilda Swinton and Moore are old friends who reunite after years apart when Swinton’s character is diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Although Nivola appears only once, he recognizes that his character must be impactful without stealing the scene. And collaborating with a director who doesn’t speak English fluently could have been daunting; however, for Nivola, it was terrific. “Pedro’s attention to detail in both the script and visuals is remarkable,” he says. “I traveled to Spain to rehearse and then returned later to film the final scene. During filming, Pedro was pretty hands-off and allowed us to act as we practiced, giving us free rein.” In December, Cinema Society’s Andrew Saffir screened The Room Next Door with Moore in SoHo to a packed house of critics and actors like Edie Falco and John Turturro (who also stars in the film), who thought Nivola and the movie were brilliant. Catching up with him afterward, I get the impression he was pleased as well.
What makes Nivola happiest, however, comes from the current role he’s playing alongside his wife of 22 years, British actress Emily Mortimer. Together, the couple run King Bee Productions and have two kids, Sam, 21, and May, 15, who, like their father, got an early start in show business. Sam made his acting debut in an episode of the 2013 comedy Doll & Em, produced by Mortimer, and appeared alongside May in The Pursuit of Love and once again in Noah Baumbach’s White Noise. Since then, Sam has gone on to appear in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, the Netflix series The Perfect Couple, and has been cast in the new season of The White Lotus. As for May, Nivola tells me she’s back in school at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn enjoying being a regular high schooler. But, given her legacy, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see her captivating audiences like the rest of her family.
So, 30 years after his Broadway debut, we find our leading man and his talented family of thespians back in New York, living what he describes as a fairly “local life” in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. “I wouldn’t say we moved here before it was gentrified, but there definitely weren’t many entertainment types when we arrived,” he says. As with his early days in New York, Nivola appears happy, surrounded by a cast of characters with whom he can collaborate and enjoy life. With neighbors like Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Peter Dinklage, Hope Davis, and The Brutalist director Brady Corbet, to name a few, Nivola has a new salon, where, he says, “it’s always fun to head down to our local spot on the corner.” Welcome to Hollywood on the Hudson.
(Styling by Michael Fisher for The Wall Group. Stylist Assistant: Molly McIntosh)
