Alessandro Nivola and the art of versatility.
Alessandro Nivola headlines December. Photography: Eric Ogden. Stylist: Michael Fisher for The Wall Group. Stylist Assistant: Molly MacIntosh. Grooming: Dana Boyer. Suit, Shirt: Boglioli. Belt: Madewell. Shoes: Bally. Sunglasses: Sestini.
Award-winning actor Alessandro Nivola’s eclectic career has seen him starring in the likes of American Hustle (2013), Disobedience (2017) and The Many Saints of Newark (2021). This winter he appears on the big screen in three very different films: The Room Next Door, Kraven the Hunter and The Brutalist.
Although Nivola achieved widespread recognition with Face/Off, his first lead role was filmed several months earlier in John Hughes’s 1998 comedy-drama Reach the Rock. “It was a movie that he had, I guess, written years and years ago, back at the peak of his filmmaking, and had shelved it and just not made it at the time.” Acting as producer, Hughes handed directing duties to his protégé William Ryan, and filming took place at Hughes’s Chicago studio with a cast that included William Sadler, Bruce Norris, Norman Reedus and Brooke Langton. “It was a really cool experience: a very intimate set-up, all totally contained on these sound stages. It was almost like doing a play: there were big, long scenes, lots of dialogue between two people. It was a good first experience in front of the camera. I had come from theatre, so I was used to handling a lot of text. So it was a perfect segue into movies.”
Reach the Rock was to be Hughes’s last film as writer-producer. “He was a legend then, for sure – I’d grown up watching Ferris Bueller and all that stuff. He was an incredibly sweet guy, and just wanted everything to be nice and for everybody to have a good time.” Since then, Nivola has worked with many other filmmaking legends. “Of all the directors I’ve worked with, the most unorthodox was David O. Russell, who I’ve done two movies with: American Hustle and Amsterdam. His shooting style is so different from everybody else’s. There’s something really bracing and exhilarating about it – also kind of scary.” Although working from a script, the cast are not told when they will have close-ups and during filming Russell shouts out extra dialogue for the actors to repeat back while the camera roams around the set. “So he’s kind of orchestrating the whole thing while the camera is rolling. If you give yourself over to it, it becomes almost a psychedelic experience where you completely let go of all control, and he talks through you. If your character and your behaviour are carefully enough developed then it doesn’t really matter, you can say anything, and there’s something kind of wild and free. I couldn’t shoot every movie that way, but once every five years it’s been fun.”
Sweater: Boglioli. Pants: Bonobos. Jacket: AMI. Shoes: Russel and Brinkley. Belt: Morjas.
“I do really pay attention to details of vocal things and the way I look and move. Usually, I start to get interested in who the person might be – as your imagination starts to work, you start to think about people in your real life that might have something of the character in them”
Another experience that had a big impact on him was working with Robert De Niro, who was to change Nivola’s acting method for good. “Up until that point I’d always been wary of spending too much time with the text and the script. I spent more time on character research, behavioural stuff, my imagination and letting myself live in the world of the character. I felt the words were unimportant and that if I spent too much time with them, it was going to suck the life out of the performance.” He was therefore surprised to find that De Niro had learned and studied his lines months in advance of filming. “He’s the freest actor I’ve ever worked with – he’s totally spontaneous – and I came to discover that it was because he was so familiar with it that he didn’t have to think about the words, so he could be alive, listen and be present in the scene. That’s how I’ve worked ever since.”
Nivola has two films out this month which together typify his genre-spanning career choices: Marvel blockbuster Kraven the Hunter and The Room Next Door, an adaptation of a Sigrid Nunez novel directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Although they seem to be worlds apart, Nivola says that he approaches both kinds of work in the same way: by nailing down every physical and psychological detail of his character. “What’s specific and original and surprising and compelling about a character generally arrives after spending time working on it. I do really pay attention to details of vocal things and the way I look and move. Usually, I start to get interested in who the person might be – as your imagination starts to work, you start to think about people in your real life that might have something of the character in them, and something about their rhythms, something about their way of being in the world, then you start to draw on little elements from those different people, and start to piece together this 3D relief. Inevitably it starts to become its own thing that’s not really like anything else. So that’s the fun part.”
This detailed characterization is just as important for big action films as for subtler dramas, he says – “Otherwise, it’s just a video game.” But the process was made more complicated on Kraven by the fact that there have been multiple different renderings of his character, Rhino, in comic books over the years. Nivola’s way in was to find the common thread throughout, which he saw as “the portrait of a man who was somehow trapped physically, often because of a scientific experiment gone wrong. So I was most interested in why he felt he needed to experiment with his own biology to overcome his feelings of impotence. There is a tragic element to his story: that the very thing which gives him superhuman strength is too physically painful to endure and so he goes to elaborate means to keep himself in his weakened state to avoid the suffering. It’s a parable about messing with nature.” Nivola hoped to crystallize this interpretation in a scene where he explains his history to Dmitri Smerdyakov/Chameleon (Fred Hechinger): “I show him the antidote that I feed myself with. When we filmed it, I played it like I was injecting myself with heroin and went into a state of ecstasy. Everyone clapped me on the back at the end of the shooting day, saying how surprising and great it was. And then they cut it from the movie in the edit ...”
Sweater: Boglioli. Pants: Bonobos. Jacket: AMI. Overcoat: Loro Piana. Shoes: Russel and Brinkley. Belt: Morjas.
The noticeable difference between the two films, from Nivola’s point of view, was the number of people who needed to be involved in creative decisions. “I had decided to base the character in Kraven on a friend of mine who is a great Russian poet and professor at Harvard named Philip Nikolayev. I wanted to look and sound exactly like him and that was how I prepared. But the studio and the producers needed to approve my wig and my accent and all the behavioural things I had developed, and [they] took some convincing!” Similar discussions for The Room Next Door were smaller affairs between Almodóvar, the costume designers and Nivola, who had a strong sense of how he wanted to play his character, a detective from upstate New York. “I wanted to speak and look the way they do up there. I grew up in rural Vermont not far from where the movie is set, so I know what people sound like, but it was very specific and Pedro’s worlds exist outside of reality in certain ways. So we needed to be sure my performance would still sit in the world that he was creating.”
Next month, Brady Corbet’s historical drama The Brutalist arrives in UK cinemas, starring Adrien Brody as Jewish architect László Tóth who flees Hungary for the States during the Second World War. Nivola plays László’s cousin Atila, who gives him work and a place to live but subsequently evicts him when his wife claims he’s made a pass at her. “The moment is so emotionally complicated because Atila is ashamed of having managed to avoid the Holocaust. He came after the First World War and therefore was already in America when all the Jews in Europe were being rounded up and murdered. So László having just come from seeing the horror, come from hell, there’s a feeling that Atila has of ‘Why him and not me? Am I less of a man for having scampered off and not had to endure that trauma?’” Blaming László for his own feelings of guilt at abandoning his religion and escaping persecution in Europe, Atila’s resentment turns to rage, then self-disgust at deserting his cousin. Nivola’s face is in shadow throughout, meaning all the emotional weight of the scene must be carried by his voice alone. “Fucking Brady, if he’d just put a light on my face, I’d be winning an Oscar next month!” he laughs. “It was the most emotional moment of my performance, and it was real. You only get a tiny hint of it in the movie – it’s a stylistic choice on Brady’s part, which gave the scene a kind of strange tension, and it’s a brilliant artistic choice. But some part of me, of course, feels sad that you can’t see it.”
Shirt: Brooks Brothers. Jacket: Schott. Pants: Levis. Shoes: Frye. Glasses: Sestini
The Brutalist won Corbet the Silver Lion at what turned out to be an extraordinary Venice Film Festival for Nivola, with the Golden Lion going to The Room Next Door. It was the first time Nivola had seen the finished version of The Brutalist but earlier glimpses had given him a sense that it was going to be special. “Brady was always sending me stills from the shoot, just saying, ‘God, look at this shot from today’s filming’, because he would get excited about it.” Nivola particularly recalls a scene where László, Atila and his wife are partying in their apartment to celebrate winning a big commission. “I have this strange sexual jealousy with him about women, so I start almost egging him on in the way that some people when they get drunk start to – they want to start a fight basically, they want to put their finger on the nerve. So it takes that turn for a second, and then becomes again this fun, loving thing, because he also really loves his cousin – that’s the beauty of the relationship, it’s totally complicated that way.” When Corbet sent it to Nivola about six months after filming wrapped, he was immediately struck by the effective use of lighting and handheld cameras. “It’s so mysterious and authentic but beautiful. And then the way it was edited is jumping back and forth in time, and there’s dialogue happening over a different part of the scene. That kind of stuff could potentially be annoying and self-conscious but it was so perfect and surprising and awesome. I knew already then that it was going to be something major.”
Suit: Umit Benan. Shirt: Canali. Belt: Madewell. Shoes: Morjas.
Kraven the Hunter is released 13th December (UK). The Room Next Door is released 20th January (U.S.). The Brutalist is released 24th January (UK)
Author: Rachel Goodyear