In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Alessandro Nivola discusses the big career change that has led to him starring in two of the year’s most acclaimed films, The Brutalist and The Room Next Door.
Some lucky moviegoers had the chance to see Alessandro Nivola in not one, not two, but three significant releases over the holiday break, including some heavy-hitting awards contenders. Over Zoom on a mid-December afternoon, when I suggest to the veteran character actor that he’s in the midst of a busy year, he chuckles and shakes his head: “Well, busy week.” Indeed, these are projects he’d shot at different times over the last two and a half years; that they all came out the same weekend was the work of the Hollywood gods.
Nivola’s steady, increasingly impressive career as a prestige utility player owes a lot to accepting that kind of unpredictability. The Boston native has gradually learned what he can and cannot control as an oft-undersung actor in this business, using that earned wisdom to dictate the trajectory of his life onscreen. It’s a big reason why he gets to steal scenes in both Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, two of the top prizewinners in Venice last fall, and why he comes out not only unscathed but boldly outrageous in J.C. Chandor’s Spider-Man spinoff movie Kraven the Hunter, which premiered in December to dismal reviews and worse box-office results.
“If she’s the only one who chooses the triple feature, my mom gets to see three wildly different performances in the course of a few days,” Nivola says. “I’ve probably never had a career-defining role. To me, what has defined my career is its range and variety and transformation.”
Nivola is one of the first faces you see in The Brutalist, an epic immigrant tale centered on László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who’s just escaped the Holocaust and landed in Philadelphia. In a stirring opening sequence, he meets his cousin, Attila (Nivola), who left for the US years earlier and has built a life for himself as a furniture store owner. László and Attila reunite at the train station in a moment captured in overpowering VistaVision, the midcentury technology that had not been used for an American film in decades.
The camera “was only three or four feet away from us in profile in that scene, and it was so loud that we could hardly hear each other speak,” Nivola says. “It echoed the madness of the world around us as we were playing this scene—the hysteria and horror of the concentration camps. László having just endured that, and Attila’s shame at having escaped it 10 years earlier as an immigrant prior to the war.”
Though he appears only in a small part of The Brutalist’s monumental whole, Atilla gets a full arc. The movie’s first 45 minutes play like a tragicomic mini film about once inseparable cousins navigating deep love, trauma, and resentment. That it works as well as it does isn’t a surprise to Nivola, but does reflect the actor’s new method for choosing roles. “If you look at the list of directors I’ve worked with from American Hustle until now, compared to before—maybe I’m wrong, but I think you’d see a change there,” Nivola says. Since making that Oscar contender with David O. Russell, he’s worked with some impressive names: Chandor, Ava DuVernay, Nicolas Winding Refn, Lynne Ramsay, Sebastián Lelio, and now Almodóvar and Corbet.
Early in his career, Nivola was drawn to big parts he could make a meal of. Sometimes he managed that, like in Lauren Canyon, Lisa Cholodenko’s lauded indie in which Frances McDormand’s record producer romances Nivola’s shameless budding rock star. “I was lucky to work with her,” Nivola says of Cholodenko. On other projects, though the jobs sounded just as exciting on paper, he was left at sea.
“Some directors have pissed me off and gotten in the way of my performance. But you have to find a way to be able to escape into the world of your imagination regardless of what you’re being told, or how you’re being manipulated by a director,” Nivola says. “The movies just started getting better.”
If Nivola helps set the tone for The Brutalist, he brilliantly shakes things up at the end of The Room Next Door. Almodóvar’s English-language debut is mostly tightly focused on two old friends (Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton) coming back together after one of them decides to end her life. No spoilers as to how Nivola’s brash upstate New York cop enters the picture, but his bluster provides a different energy from the lengthy, meditative, feminine conversations that lead to his arrival on the scene.
When Nivola arrived in Madrid (where the film was shot) for rehearsals and fittings, he had an idea to pitch. He grew up in northern Vermont, “just across the lake from where this character probably grew up,” and felt like he knew this type inside and out. “When I first got there, my costumes, man—he had me in a beautifully tailored designer suit with a pink tie and everything,” Nivola says with a laugh. “I was, like, ‘Oh, okay. I’m an Almodóvar cop.’” Still, even fully aware of and embracing Almodóvar’s signature style, the look didn’t sit well.
