Anthem Magazine

Photography: Ariana Rodriguez
Styling: Michael Fisher @ The Wall Group
Stylist Assistants: Brodie Reardon & Georgia Fife
Grooming: Rheanne White @ Tracey Mattingly Agency

The name is Alessandro Nivola. If the name escapes you right now, chances are, you recognize his face. It’s the tantalizing, tip-of-tongue kind of celebrity enjoyed by certain actor’s actors lighting up our screens. They disappear into roles, unencumbered by blinding fame. They’re part of the That Guy Club. You know, he’s that guy you know from that thing. Or rather, more things than you probably even realize. Across theater, film and TV, and in a career that spans close to three decades now, the 52-year-old is one of the most consistently reliable and well-liked performers in town who never seems to want for work. In his debut film role, Nivola played Nicolas Cage’s severely neurotic brother in John Woo’s Face/Off. He’s the raptor eggs-stealing paleontologist chased through the jungle in Jurassic Park III. He’s behind the unforgettable Orthodox rabbi in Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience. He’s the overconfident alpha male karate sensei in Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense. More recently, he made a splash portraying Tony Soprano’s tragic mentor in The Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark. Junebug! A Most Violent Year! The Neon Demon!

And it’s okay, too, if you’re not up to speed on everything Nivola has on his plate right now, because there’s a lot. He’s making a big play this month with three film releases, each one distinctly different from the rest. Kraven the Hunter marks the actor’s first foray into the superhero genre, playing the longtime Marvel Comics antagonist The Rhino. On the arthouse side of things are A24’s Oscar-tipped The Brutalist from Brady Corbet and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door—the auteur’s first English-language film, which picked up the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival. In 2025, Nivola returns to the big screen in Downton Abbey 3.

Anthem connected with Nivola for an in-depth conversation, and a photoshoot in New York City.

Kraven the Hunter is now playing. The Brutalist and The Room Next Door open on December 20.

Hi, Alessandro. How are you doing, sir?

Good, good!

So what brings you out West?

Well, I’m in LA ‘cause we have some press here. And tonight is The Brutalist premiere. We had a SAG screening last night. I’m here all week and I’m happy to be here.

Beats the cold weather. I hear it’s colder in New York City than it is in Alaska this week.

[laughs] The world’s upside down, unfortunately.

Needless to say, this is an eventful month for you. Not only do you have three films, they’re wonderfully distinct from one another in subject, scope, and experiences I’d imagine.

They couldn’t be any more different if you tried. It’s just one of those weird coincidences. I made them at such different times: Kraven the Hunter two and a half years ago, The Brutalist a year and a half ago, and I feel like I stepped on set of the [Pedro] Almodóvar movie just a few months ago. Sometimes it happens that way. They’re all opening the same week pretty much. It’s kind of fun ‘cause people get to see these different characters side by side, if they care to do a triple feature. 

It’s certainly a showcase. And I do think that when you’re on the outside looking in, it’s easy to assume that actors have control over it. You couldn’t possibly engineer something like this.

No, no. You don’t have control over anything, starting with the edit.

But you can control some things, right? For instance, I understand that there was a point in your career where you decided to choose projects based on directors. I’m curious to know when that shift occurred. Was your decision a reaction to any particular experience?

I think it was around the time that I did American Hustle. I think that was sort of the first movie I did after having a conversation with my agents. And I don’t know that it was some rule I’d set for myself. Basically, I was just sick of giving performances that I had done such careful and detailed work on, and having those movies suck. I just got sick of that. I think I also came to understand and accept that movies belong to directors. The degree to which movies succeed or fail is really down to the director. If somebody doesn’t have something special about them, then the movie probably won’t work. So I kind of gave myself over to that. My role is in helping to tell the story, and to understand and feed the vision of the director. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t come to every job with the desire to impose my own ideas on the character, and to be free and spontaneous and allow for the possibility of something, you know? That’s totally invented by me to come out. But it’s all in aid of telling the story that the director is trying to tell.

To say that you chose well with Brady [Corbet] would be a huge understatement.

I think The Brutalist, more than most, is the kind of movie that belongs to its director. Every frame of it, and his way of using the camera and his way of storytelling, is an expression of Brady’s particular style and personality. And I don’t mean that it stylistically overwhelms the relationships and the performances and the humanity of its characters. There’s no mistaking that a director who loves celluloid has made this movie—that kind of thing. We had an amazing first meeting. He asked me to be in the movie four years ago during Covid when the lockdown had just started. I had kind of shut the door and put the cannellini beans in the cupboard. [laughs] I was ready to go into a major period of hibernation, you know? He called and said, “Listen, we’re gonna make this movie and we’re gonna shoot it in Poland in about three weeks. How ‘bout it?” I was like, “Are you outta your mind? Do you know what’s going on? The whole world has stopped.” He was like, “No, no, no, no. It’s happening.” Of course, I was thrilled that there was the possibility that we could somehow still work under the circumstances. It just ended up being three years later that we set foot on set, and by that time, most of the rest of the cast had changed. It was clear from talking to him that he was just so determined to make this movie. It took him so long. I think it took him seven years. I’d been attached for four years so that was just over half of the time that he’d been struggling to get it made. Brady is incredibly bright. If you’ve ever met him or heard him talk, you know there’s something about him that’s sort of different than other people. The way that he sees the world and the way he talks about movies is different. And then the subject matter of it was great. I think the first thing he said to me was, “I want to make a movie about an artist getting fucked by his patron.” [laughs] That resonated with me.

So the film stirs echoes of your experiences as artists. That’s reflected in this towering work.

And beyond that, the whole world of the movie was really familiar to me. My grandfather [Costantino Nivola] was a sculptor. He knew Le Corbusier intimately. In fact, Le Corbusier painted these huge murals on the walls of my grandparents’ house, which I grew up in over the summers. I was surrounded by art that was created by the father of the Brutalist movement. 

Holy shit.

My grandmother [Ruth Guggenheim] was a German-Jewish artist as well. She was a Holocaust refugee. My grandparents came here much like László Tóth [played by Adrien Brody], just after the war. They’d met in art school in Milan. My grandmother’s parents had fled Germany in the early thirties to get away from Hitler. Her parents had to come to New York during the war, meanwhile, my grandmother stayed behind to marry my grandfather. They were living in Sardinia until one day, in the middle of the night, they were woken up by one of their closest friends. He wept, telling them he’d been informing on them to the police for the past three months. They were gonna be arrested in the morning so they packed their bags and escaped to New York. So I was aware of this being a part of my personal history. The combination of their immigrant experience and being artists with ambitions to do great things was so clearly a parallel in The Brutalist script.

Spending your summers in that house surrounded by art and artmaking, that must seep in somehow, even if its unknowingly at a young age. So often, even actors talk about how when you come into this business with no real-life examples, this dream’s like a distant planet. Looking back, do you think your early surroundings pulled you towards the arts?

Probably, in some way. But interestingly, like my grandparents, I don’t think I really thought of film as art.

Really?

[laughs] They thought it was low art or something. They were kind of snobby about film. I mean, once I started getting into theater and movies and everything, they weren’t disparaging of me being an actor or anything. In fact, my grandmother helped me with my first professional experiences by getting me involved in script readings out there in Long Island. But she would always ask me: [Alessandro lays on a thick German accent] “But do you think film is art?”

[laughs] That’s brilliant.

So there was definitely no precedent in my family for performance. I think they thought of performance as a bit cheap, like there’s something a little bit desperate and attention-seeking about it and that wasn’t cool. So it was a departure. There was no one in my family that had paved the way for me. But of course, there is something about being around artistic people. And my dad was an academic. He was not in an artistic field at all. In fact, when I was at Yale, two years in, I started getting professional work and threatened to drop out, and he just wouldn’t have it. So I stuck it out for my four years there, largely because my dad was like, “If you wanna be an actor, you can do that, but not until you graduate.” He was basically saying to me: “Shut up and do it.”

Meanwhile, your younger brother, Adrian, he’s a painter, isn’t he?

Yeah.

So he took after your grandfather more closely.

He definitely followed much more directly in my grandfather’s line. He really grew up apprenticing for my grandfather. My grandfather taught him how to draw and everything. Yeah, he was much more directly descended from the family tradition.

You seemed well-prepared for the life of an actor as well. I know you had a very itinerant childhood. You never settled for long in any particular place so you got used to the feeling of transience and things being in flux all the time. You once said that you get bored easily.

No, that’s really true. When I was younger, it was sort of like being a military brat because my dad jumped from job to job for a while. I was born in Boston, and when I was about five, we moved up to rural Vermont. That was the second school I went to. I went to public school up there with all the farmers’ kids in Charlotte. In fourth grade, he did a year down at the Brookings Institution so I was down in D.C. I went to a different school down there. So I’d only been in Vermont three, four years before we moved down there. Then I moved back to Vermont and went to a different school in Burlington. That was three years. In seventh grade, we moved to North Shore, Massachusetts, and I went to a different school. Then in ninth grade, I went to boarding school. So yeah, I was never in one place for more than three or four years, I don’t think.

When Brady brought this movie to you, did he know anything about your family’s history?

He didn’t know anything about my family’s history. As for me, the main thing was watching his other two movies [The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux]. There was something unique about the way they looked, the edits, the rhythms, and the tone of them. It was clearly an artist at work.

What else did you feel that you needed in order to flesh out your character’s experience?

Well, there were clues in the script that allowed me to build out a whole world in my imagination for the character. Most obviously, it’s the way in which he tries to assimilate in the story. Unlike László, who has this competitive arrogance about him, refusing to subjugate himself to the rich power brokers, Attila is much more desperate to fit in and to be perceived as an American, and even wanting László to perceive him as having figured out the system in the new world. There’s a kind of insecurity to that. I mean, he’s changed his name. He’s trying to sound American. He ass-kisses the rich patrons who are potentially offering them these commissions and doesn’t wanna rock the apple cart at all. And then it’s also understanding that my dad’s name is Pietro Salvatore Nivola, but he went through high school calling himself Pete! [laughs] There’s a pressure to fit in, being the child of immigrants. And I also pieced together in my mind a complicated and detailed history of the relationship between Attila and László. On the one hand, these cousins are almost like brothers. I think growing up, they spent a lot of time together as children and adolescents. I think Attila had both idolized László’s talent and genius, which I assume was on display even in their early days, and felt resentful and jealous of it. I think that also played out in a kind of sexual rivalry. I think they were very competitive as adolescents. There’s a line where I’m telling him to leave in that final scene between us. I make reference to something that happened with a girlfriend of mine when we were younger. László probably slept with her. So there’s subtle rage under the surface of Attila’s feelings of weakness and inadequacy that comes out. On top of all that, there’s this shame that he feels about having avoided the Holocaust because he came ten years earlier than László after the First World War. He basically managed to avoid all the horror that László just endured. All those things were there in the script, but in a kind of mysterious way of hinting at them. For me, those were all important things from which to build out in my imaginary world. The degree to which the audience is aware of all those things? I don’t know… But hopefully, some of it is kind of instinctively felt.

And how wonderful is it that these intricacies and nuances in Attila and László’s dynamic are allowed to play out and coexist? It reflects reality. That’s how people are. That’s how life is.

Absolutely. I mean, that was definitely one of the attractive things about the film that made me want to take part. I think that’s true for all of us because each character has that.

How do you normally like to work, and adapt going from J.C. [Chandor] to Brady to Pedro?

Each movie and each story has its own particulars—tone, style, and rhythm. Your job is to tap into what that is in order to help tell the story and not just exist in a vacuum. J.C., Brady, and Pedro all have very different ways of going about it. Pedro really likes to rehearse a lot. Even for the sort of cameo I had in his movie, he flew me over to Madrid for a whole week. Julianne [Moore] and I worked through that scene with him several times in rehearsals. He was very detailed-orientated about the costumes and all that kind of thing. Whereas with Brady, we didn’t rehearse at all. I just had a lot of conversations with him about the character. Particularly, it was about the sound of my voice because it was important that Attila sounded like he’d been living in America a long time and had this hip urban swagger to the Philadelphia/New York sound, which he couldn’t quite pull off so there were shades of Hungarian still left in his voice. I had found these interviews with a Hungarian cinematographer named Andrew Laszlo, who shot the cult film The Warriors and the original Shōgun miniseries. In fact, he, too, had changed his name from András Laszlo to Andrew Laszlo. He really had that sound of a guy who almost totally passed as American, almost New York-y, but just didn’t quite get certain rhythms right, which ultimately gave him away. So I really fixated on his voice and started making recordings into my phone. I would experiment and send them to Brady and he would sort of respond favorably, or not. That was the rehearsal for us in a way, which is very different. Pedro was taking it line by line, talking about intentions and what’s going on in the subtext of the script. It was literally going over every sentence with him. And interestingly, after we’d done all that rehearsing with Pedro, once I flew back to Madrid to shoot the scene, there were only three setups, so three angles: one on the two of us facing each other, one over my shoulder onto Julianne, and one over her shoulder onto me. And with each of those setups, we shot one take. We didn’t go again. I’d never had that happen in my life. We didn’t even go twice. I guess it was partly due to the amount of detail that we rehearsed with. And I wouldn’t say that I like one way of working better than another. That was just Pedro’s way of going about it. 

By the way, I just so happened to catch The Room Next Door when I was in South Korea. I was surprised to find it playing in a local cinema a month before the official US release.

Yeah, it’s a different distributor. In America, it’s Sony Classics. Overseas, it’s Warner Brothers. 

I was worried that you were never gonna show up. I mean, am I getting punked or what?

[laughs] It’s an interesting device because the tension gets ratcheted up when my character is finally introduced. He really is this sudden threat to—well, I should’t give any of this away.

I don’t think we’re ruining anything. He is someone to fear in that situation. And as you say, it is a cameo. And yet, your role feels bigger in ways, too, because the ensemble is so tidy.

It’s a long, pivotal scene. I was definitely excited to do it. I mean, I wanted to work with Pedro. He is one of the all-time greats. I was friends with Julianne a bit from before so I was excited for us to work together. I knew [John] Turturro as well through The Sopranos family. He was doing a little role in Pedro’s movie, too. All in all, it just seemed like such an enticing thing to be a part of.

Any opportunity to work with Almodóvar is obviously a great one. Was he a fan of yours?

I guess so. I really don’t know… I was grateful to him for thinking of me. You know, it was interesting. The challenge of it was that the character was so specifically from Upstate New York, from a certain cultural background. He was a very religious guy from a working-class background. Those people are very specific, especially with the politics now and the divisions in the country between the liberals and conservatives. All of that would’ve been so much a part of the unspoken dynamic between a character like him and a character like Ingrid [Moore’s character], a bohemian New York writer. She’s someone who he would probably really resent, especially considering her lack of respect for the sanctity of human life, according to him. It was important for me to be detailed about that. I grew up for a bunch of years in northern Vermont, just across Lake Champlain, where a guy like this would’ve lived. I went to school with a lot of guys just like him. The way he spoke was something I was familiar with. At the same time, Pedro’s worlds also exist outside of reality. They’re hyperreal and not usually rooted in like a kitchen-sink reality. So I’m trying to marry that with his universe, which was a little bit tricky and an unknown to be honest. I didn’t know how they would fit together. Initially when I’d gone over to Madrid, I did all these costume fittings and he had me dressed in this really beautifully tailored suit with a pink tie. [laughs] Sure enough, there was one blue chair and one red chair—it was right out of a Pedro movie. When I went back home and started researching these interrogations in New York State, every single one of those detectives was wearing the same black short sleeve polo and khaki pants. I sent a bunch of screenshots of the interrogations I’d watched on YouTube to Pedro and said, “Listen, just for what its worth, this is what the real guys wear. I don’t know if this fits into the world of your movie. Maybe it’s not the kind of thing that you want… I know that the production design is such a particular thing for you, and the colors.” He wrote back saying, “Thank you very much. I was thinking about it.” Right up until I walked into my dressing room on the first day of the shoot, I didn’t know if he was gonna go that route or the original thing I had been trying out with him over there during rehearsals. And it may seem like a small thing, but in fact, which way it went was gonna be telling me that he either wants me to play this archetype of a policeman that’s in the Almodóvar fantasy world, or the real guy. In the end, when I walked into my dressing room, hanging in there was what I had sent him in the photos down to every detail. I was the real guy.

So you were relieved. 

Yeah, well, it would’ve changed it tonally, I think. Maybe the voice of the character might’ve needed to change a little bit because it’s specific to a very small region of America. Anyway, no, I was. I was relieved ‘cause I kind of rolled the dice and had been doing my work with that real person in mind. It was an interesting marriage between his movie and that character.

Is your approach to playing a character like The Rhino any different? The packaging is obviously different. The scope of these films are very different. But it still sounds very much like a character part for you in the way you’ve discussed it thus far.

Yeah, yeah. I love the character I play in it. They really let me kind of create this from scratch. I’m playing this Russian cryptocurrency farmer who, early on in the story, gets humiliated by Russell Crowe’s Russian oligarch character. I make a business proposition to him and get made fun of, so I wage a personal vendetta against him and his family. It was as much of a character to create as I did on the other two movies, or any of the other films I’ve done. My wife [Emily Mortimer] is actually making a movie for A24 about her childhood. She lived in Moscow for a year. She’d been having a series of meetings with this Russian poet named Philip Nikolayev who teaches up at Harvard. He had known her back when she was 17. They’d gotten back in touch and he’d been coming up to our house and staying with us for periods of time while I was preparing to do Kraven the Hunter. Long story short, I just decided that I was gonna play him. [laughs] He has a very particular look and voice and accent and everything. I’m gonna show you a picture of him. I showed J.C. this photo. I played him a recording of Philip talking. J.C. loved it. So this guy ended up becoming my inspiration for the role. I had them make me a wig to look like him.

I love that. Also, this is not at all what I expected you to look like in this movie, Alessandro…

[laughs] The producers were a little scared about what I was up to. One of them ended up having to go home to LA because his son had broken his arm and it happened to be the week that we started shooting. So I just said to J.C., “I’m doing it. I’m doing it. No one’s gonna stop me. He’s gone.” And J.C. was like, “Just go for it.” It’s a very eccentric and particular character that I play in the movie. You’ll see. I had a ball doing it. And the studio ended up loving it once they started to see it as the dailies were coming in. It ended up being a great time. J.C. and I’d already done A Most Violent Year together, along with Christopher Abbott. So the three of us were already close and it was a really creative experience for me—and not at all like what I’ve heard filming these movies can be like. I didn’t really have any CGI to do. It was all character work.