‘It’s Nice to Be in a Hit Every Once in a While’

If you went to the movies this winter, between The Brutalist, Kraven the Hunter, and The Room Next Door, you noticed Alessandro Nivola’s face. Over nearly 30 years of steady character-actor work, Nivola has appeared in practically every genre of film possible: playing Nicolas Cage’s brother in Face/Off, working with his future wife, Emily Mortimer, on Love’s Labour’s Lost, making fans of queer excellence hate him for keeping Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams apart in Disobedience. His December cinema triptych, coupled with his co-starring role in the spring’s Apple TV+ miniseries The Big Cigar, are a reflection of all that effort — a quartet of projects that capture his vivid latitude, compact physicality, and “hey, that guy” appeal.

Nivola’s specialty is guys with a sort of chip on their shoulder, those who ache for a degree of admiration or love, and he possesses an easy ability to navigate among sundry emotional states. His devastating turn as the self-loathing Attila, cousin to genius architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), in Oscar favorite The Brutalist and his crowd-pleasing lunacy as the villain Rhino in Kraven the Hunter feel like the twin poles of that mercurial range, and in person, he’s pleasantly self-effacing and gabby.

What has your awards season been like? Do you expect to go to the Oscars? 
I’ve been back and forth between here and L.A. a lot over this past month for various stuff — although now, the place is burning to the ground, so I don’t know what it’s going to look like for the next few weeks. I assume this can’t go on indefinitely, but it certainly has made a mockery of everybody’s frenzy of online predictions. I don’t think anybody gives a shit about any of it at the moment. But if things are brought under control and it doesn’t end up making Los Angeles a no-fly zone, then, yeah, I’ll probably be out there for the Oscars. It’s exciting because even good movies don’t always have this kind of spotlight on them. It’s such a seemingly random set of chance-y factors that play into one movie or another having the privilege of everybody paying it attention. When it’s a movie that is made by really nice, dedicated people who actually care, it’s something to celebrate. And then, yeah, I mean, it’s nice to be in a hit every once in a while. [Laughs.]

Let’s talk about The Brutalist. Brady Corbet approaches you about the film and his plan to shoot in Poland before COVID shuts down that version of the movie. It’s then a number of years until you actually shoot the film, and while the cast changes in the meantime, you stay on. In those first conversations, what did you and Brady discuss about the film and about who Attila was? Had you read the script? 
I had read it. I mainly was interested to get his thoughts about the relationship between László and Attila. It almost feels like a short film at the beginning of the movie — a 45-minute short film, which in the context of this movie is a short film. [Laughs.] But that’s a kind of prologue and a road map for the film and lays out all the thematic stuff that’s going to play out in the rest of the movie. It really has its own self-contained story, and that relationship has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If I’m really honest, I don’t remember us getting into too much detail about the character and relationships. A lot of our conversation was more about bigger themes in the movie and the familiarity that I had with the world of the film because of crossover stuff with my family. My granddad was really close friends with Le Corbusier, who is considered the father of Brutalism. I had grown up with these two huge murals that he had painted in the middle of our house out in Long Island. They were these wildly colorful, semi-abstract murals that he had done, and I didn’t know anything about him or who he was. He was, like, a household name in our family always, but I didn’t know what the significance of it was until later on.

And also, European expatriation during the war and the idea of bohemian artist-intellectuals coming from Europe to New York in the ’40s and having to start their lives over — my grandparents, it was just so similar. My grandmother was a bourgeois German Jew, and my grandfather was the son of a stonemason in Sardinia. They weren’t from similar backgrounds, but they ended up in art school together in Milan, and they were part of a whole community of artists and writers and anti-fascists. It was a period of innovation and experimentation, and then they came to New York and they were working as janitors in a hospital in the city and nannies. Having had all of this culture, they were suddenly dropped down in the middle of this big city where nobody cared. We talked about that a lot because that’s so much at the heart of the story — the fact that it’s a surprise to Harrison Van Buren that László has this whole illustrious history, even before having come to America.

There is this moment in Attila’s Miller and Sons’ furniture store where you’re speaking to László, and you say of yourself and your wife, “We are Catholic.” There’s a long pause after you say it, and the camera stays on your face as you’re looking away from László and knocking your cigarette ash onto an ashtray. There’s a lot of internal agony to that moment. Tell me about it. 
I don’t think that pause in particular was planned. The exact delivery of lines in that scene, or any of the others, isn’t something that I had worked out in front of a mirror or anything. That moment is informed by all these different things that are playing subtextually between them. I think they’ve grown up very close together because they’re cousins; I imagined that in Budapest, they knew each other, really, as siblings. László has this aura around him and the confidence of a genius and the arrogance of a genius. I think that was always annoying to Attila and it was also something Attila wished he had. He’s desperate to prove to László that in this one situation, he has it figured out before László does and that he has something to be proud of. He’s gamed the system, and László might have something to learn from him and something to take from his generosity.

But on the other hand, he’s just got this shadow hanging over him, which is the shame of having escaped the camps. He’s come 10 years before and avoided the whole horror. There’s something emasculating about that feeling — that László has just seen more suffering than one could possibly imagine and that he has come out of it alive and somehow hardened and stronger as a result. Attila feels humbled and sort of humiliated by that imbalance. This whole sort of introduction to their relationship is one where Attila is trying to create this impression of himself as a guy who’s made it in America and is ready to extend a hand of generosity to someone who needs it because that’s all he’s ever wanted in his life: to be in a position to help László, as opposed to the other way around. And László, of course, sees through all of it. Attila knows that his furniture’s ugly and that this shop is kind of pathetic, that he’s living in a small apartment, that he only has this shitty little storeroom to offer László as a place to live, that he has to kiss ass to all these rich robber barons. He’s just being completely exposed at every moment of their interaction for being full of shit.

I will say, even as you’re saying this, I have so much sympathy for Attila because I feel like that is the American experience. 
No, totally! What I was trying to make the audience feel about him — and I think what Brady wants, although we’ve never really talked about it — is for the audience to recognize Attila as a kind of desperate attempt at assimilation that is painfully unsuccessful. The result is cruelty passed on, almost in cycles of abuse. In my opinion, when I ask László to leave, it’s coming from legitimate reasons for feeling enraged by him. His arrogance has completely ruined this commission that was the biggest opportunity that I’ve ever had in America, and I’m having to pay for it. He’s tried to fuck my wife, as far as I know. He’s shit on my generosity, and I can’t live with that. Attila is somebody who is not a strong enough person to know how to keep a sense of himself and his roots and his identity, and all those feelings that can allow you to remain strong in the face of discrimination. This moment is so laced with so much stuff. I’m trying to project some sort of pride in having been shrewd enough, clever enough, savvy enough to figure out how to bullshit this society in a way that would allow me to excel and to succeed. But I’ve compromised myself, and I know it, and László knows it.

Attila thinking that László made a pass at his wife is connected to the scene where the three of you are dancing together. How did you decide how Attila would dance? What went into the choreography of that?
I asked Brady before we started shooting, the minute that I got to Budapest, if he could set up a session with me and Emma Laird with a swing-dance instructor — not that we had to choreograph out specific moves but so that I could know how people at that time would have danced together in that kind of a setting. We went and did a day with this guy, and I started realizing how goofy all the swing-dance improvisation is, like the chicken dance. There’s a lot of that self-aware comic dancing.

Like peacocking. 
Exactly. I saw it as an opportunity to establish an atmosphere of a raucous, slightly out of control, performative, wild energy that could then lay the bedrock for all of this kind of confused aggression and love and admiration to play out on top of it. That whole scene was pretty much improvised, both the dancing and the dialogue — the thing of me pretending to be a woman, all the apron stuff, my kind of coquettishly teasing him. That all came out of the moment. The basic framework was: We’re celebrating this incredible success that we’ve just had, and we’re drunk, and there’s this latent jealousy that I feel. My wife has a fascination with László that is threatening to me and that I assume must be the result of some kind of signal that he’s giving to her, and so I start almost egging him on and encouraging him to do the thing that I am most afraid of.

I also want to ask you about the final good-bye between Attila and László. From how visually precise the lighting of that scene is, I assume you couldn’t deviate from the planned blocking, unlike in the dancing scene. During the good-bye, you’re in such dark shadows that we only see your silhouette. 
From one scene to the next, the camera work that Brady and [cinematographer] Lol [Crowley] were doing was wildly different. The dancing scene was all handheld. There were only practical lights in the room so the camera could shoot anything in the room, and there was no kind of formal setup beyond the overhead lamp, a lamp in the corner, and light coming in through the window. There were no boundaries or formal restrictions in the scene. There was a funny thing where when I sat down in Adrien’s lap and I started talking to him, I’ve got my arm around him, and it’s almost too much. I’m in his face, and I’m being slightly lascivious but then also joking and kind of sweet; it’s, like, all those things back and forth and back and forth. The first time I sat down in his lap, I was improvising and talking to him, and we shot a whole take where I’d done the whole thing, and Adrien finally just said, “Hang on a second — he’s not even on you!” [Laughs.] Lol had been shooting some lightbulb or something and had completely missed everything that was going on in the scene. And Adrien was like, “I’m getting gold here, and he’s not even shooting it!” [Laughs.]

Those are the outtakes we need. 
In the scene, you’ll just hear my voice saying all kinds of shit to Adrien and the camera will be focusing on the needle of the record player or something. [Laughs.] The farewell scene, we’ll call it, was just a completely different situation, where it was very formally set up. But truth be told, I didn’t know anything about the lighting setup. Sometimes I’ll look at the monitor just to see what the frame is before we shoot so I’m aware, but I don’t go running back and watch my own takes. Some actors do that a lot, and I can’t stand it. It makes me self-conscious, and I don’t even want to think about it. We did a bunch of different takes. It got more emotional as it went on, and the line that really started to become the most important was, “I know what you’ve been through.” I feel like I have no choice but to make him leave, but I feel disgusted with myself for doing it. I feel the weight of the whole Holocaust in that moment, as I tell him to leave. More and more, that came to define the performance of that scene.

The framing of that scene creates such menace in how Attila is treating László. It’s essentially like an interrogation. 
The contrast between Adrien, who’s almost in a spotlight, and me, as the kind of shrouded, hidden figure looming over him — it just creates its own power.

You were also in Kraven the Hunter last year, which was essentially aMost Violent Year reunion with you, director J.C. Chandor, and co-star Christopher Abbott. Are you aware that your tennis outfit from A Most Violent Year has a thirsty following online?
Yeah. Someone once sent me, I don’t know what you call it — a GIF, a meme, something — of that scene where I’m in my very short tennis shorts and there was some repeating thing of my ass filling up the camera frame. I figured somebody had posted it. I didn’t know that this was reaching a wider audience. [Laughs.] But I couldn’t be more thrilled.

I’m glad you know about it. Did J.C. reach out to you about playing Rhino? 
I’m sure there had been a whole process before he asked me to do it with Sony and all the producers. But he asked if I wanted to get the old gang back together, and I didn’t hesitate in wanting to do it. I thought that the role offered a great opportunity to play an interesting character that was both comic and menacing. In those kinds of movies, the villains are always the fun parts.

What were some of the ways you informed the character? 
My wife is making a film about an experience she had living in Moscow when she was 17. She has a friend from that time, a poet named Philip Nikolayev. He started coming down to the house a lot as she was doing research for her movie, and he is a really wonderful, incredibly bright, hilarious, and eccentric person. I was starting to work out how I was going to play Aleksei Sytsevich, and it suddenly struck me that I just wanted to be him. He has a very particular accent because he learned to speak English from an English person, and it’s a refined sound. I didn’t want to be this typical Russian gangster guy. His voice was more kind of intellectual, and that seemed to play completely against your notions of what a gangster should sound like. That was the genesis of it all. I had Philip record my entire script into my iPhone, and I basically did an imitation of him. I showed it to J.C. and he loved the idea. It wasn’t random. This was a character who was a bit of an oddball, who had grown up not having a lot of ease socially. You get a feeling in the beginning of the movie, with this exchange with Russell Crowe, that he’s been humiliated a lot by these powerful oligarchs. I needed to create a character who was believably somebody who had problems with his health and fitting in.

Once we got into shooting it, there were just opportunities for comedy. I wanted as much as I could to have humorous moments followed by menacing moments, without any transition. I had developed a whole relationship with Aleksei’s Rottweiler, Raja, that I had been encouraging everybody to lean into, and a little bit of it made it into the movie but not nearly enough for my taste. The relationship with the dog, for me, was a metaphor for my interaction with everyone. I need the dog’s approval and love and respect, and the dog is kind of my best friend, but when the dog doesn’t endow me with enough authority, I have this abusive cruelty toward it. J.C. really let me go with that, and I was improvising some of that. Not all of it made it in there, but some of it did.

There’s some confusion about this very memorable moment in the film where you scream for a second. I heard the scream was added in post. Can you clear up what happened there? 
In the actual moment, I just [pantomimes gripping a table and silently screaming]. There’s a shot where the camera’s on me and there’s my henchman behind me giving me some bad news, and I did this silent scream. Maybe there was the tiniest bit of some sound, but it was pretty much silent. The idea was the henchman doesn’t know what I’m doing. As far as he knows, I’m standing there expressionless, but the audience sees that I’m having this fucking meltdown, and then I turn around to him like nothing’s happened. That was the design of it from my point of view. It wasn’t something I really planned. Everybody burst out laughing when they called “cut,” and so I was like, “All right, let me play with this. I did it a bunch of different ways, I think I did ten takes of it, and everybody just was getting a kick out of it — and not just because it was funny; because somehow it made sense for the scene. In ADR, J.C. had me vocalize the scream a little bit. It’s still not fully vocalized, but it’s a caught-in-my-throat kind of scream. I think it could have worked either way. Some people think that it’s a birdcall. To me, it was about expressing the kind of impotence and frustration of somebody who feels that he’s been stepped on all his life and has rage but also an inability to allow it out. The fact that I’m having to medicate myself to keep myself in a weakened state — it’s a mirror of that condition.

You’re also in The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s first film fully in English. He sought you out for this role. His worlds are so surreal and fantastical, and then I almost feel like you, as this suspicious New York cop, have the task of disrupting that color and bringing the story down to the physical, grounded plane. That feels like a unique responsibility in Almodóvar’s filmography. How did you go about that? 
I worked on a voice for the character that was a particular accent and speech pattern that is specific to upstate New York State, which I was familiar with because I grew up in rural Vermont, just across Lake Champlain. I’d been hearing that voice all through my life. I don’t really know how to go about playing a character except to get into the details of behavior, and the voice is where I start with almost every role I do, even if it isn’t from a background that’s different from my own. Everybody’s voice and accent and speech patterns and rhythms and stresses and way they form words tell a story about their whole life’s experience. To me, it’s the first little doorway into a whole world of detailed personal history for any character. The language of the film was not kitchen-sink American vernacular; it was like a heightened language. When you’re starting to try and marry that to a regional class accent, it can be a little bit confusing and tricky and maybe feel like a mismatch. Regardless of how I prepared, I was ready to, in the moment, completely change everything if he had asked me to. I’ll do all this detailed work, and then if I have to throw it away, I throw it away. It’s just a way in. The most important thing is feeling spontaneous.

We did the whole scene in one take, and he didn’t say anything except, “It was very good!” Honestly, I’m not sure whether, to his ear, if he knew what I was doing with my voice. Maybe he did. I was trying to bring a conversational, everyday feeling to a scene that was written as heavily confrontational. I was going to be dressed with a pink shirt and pink tie, and I sent Pedro all these screenshots that I’d taken off the internet of detectives in those interrogations. [Holds phone up to the screen] Every single one of them had this same black polo with khaki pants. Every single one. When I arrived to shoot the scene, he’d had the exact same thing mocked up for me. That all came out of him embracing some kind of reality, which was completely stripped of all that color.

You co-starred in the dark comedy Spin Me Round, which was the final film Jeff Baena directed before his recent death. Do you have memories of working with Jeff that you would feel comfortable sharing? 
I’m happy to talk about him. I didn’t know him like a best friend, but we had a wonderful time working together, and I stayed in touch with him in the years after. He was a gentle soul, and a really dryly funny one, and somebody who had created a kind of family of actors and artists around him who all loved working with him and with each other. I was privileged enough to be dropped into the midst of this kind of traveling band of gypsies that had done a series of movies together: Aubrey [Plaza] and Alison [Brie], Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Lauren Weedman, Debby Ryan, Tim Heidecker. They all had been working with him for three or four movies straight. He had an exacting comedic sense, and from a technical standpoint, he knew what he thought was funny and what wasn’t and how to arrive at that. But he wasn’t precious at all. He had a kind of loose and easy style of shooting, and it was a big priority to him for everybody to be having a good time together in a place that would be fun to shoot a movie, which was partly why we set this thing in Tuscany. He was a self-contained person. He wasn’t demonstrative. He had a kind of laconic, wry glint in his eye, but his smile was just a hint.