“In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast” features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and Awards Editor Jack Smart for this guide on how to live the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
Alessandro Nivola’s career trajectory—from regional theater to transformative character actor to, finally, leading a buzzy Hollywood hit—is proof that actors must continue to reinvent and dream big. “It’s part of staying alive, always kind of having new cravings and goals and longings,” he says.
“Of course,” he adds with a grin, “when you get the thing that you’ve just longed for and craved so much, it’s almost overnight that suddenly you want something else! That’s just ambition and it’s a pretty miserable state.... One has to battle those feelings on some level and try and feel grateful for what you have.”
On first the stage and then the screen, Nivola has carved out a niche as a so-called character actor, morphing into roles “very unlike” himself, as he tells Backstage. A Boston native who studied acting at regional theaters, he fulfilled his stage career dreams not long after an undergraduate degree at Yale University: award-nominated for his Broadway debut opposite Helen Mirren in “A Month in the Country.”
After watching theater peers like Jude Law, Damian Lewis, and Billy Crudup cross over to screen work (“I hadn’t really conceived of it as a stepping stone until I saw those guys go off into the glamour of Hollywood and then I got really jealous!”), Nivola did the same with “Face/Off” and began working in film, particularly in England. He appeared in “Laurel Canyon,” “Junebug,” “Selma,” “A Most Violent Year,” “The Wizard of Lies,” “Disobedience,” “The Art of Self Defense,” “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” and in many more roles he dubs “characterful.” Tony-nominated for “The Elephant Man” and a SAG Award ensemble winner for “American Hustle,” he also runs the company behind “Doll & Em” and “To Dust,” King Bee Productions, with his wife Emily Mortimer.
This year marks Nivola’s first time at the center of the spotlight with “The Many Saints of Newark,” Warner Bros.’ new prequel to “The Sopranos” from creator David Chase and director Alan Taylor. As the felonious yet charismatic Dickie Moltisanti (a.k.a. uncle to a young Tony Soprano, played by Michael Gandolfini), the actor was able to “find behavior and vocal things and physical things that were really specific and unique to one person who was not me—while still being the guy that the story is really about.”
There’s a reason many actors admire the “movie star character actors of the ’70s and ’80s when the whole notion of what a movie star could be had started to change,” as Nivola points out. “There were these guys like Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro and [Al] Pacino and Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall who were playing misfit characters who were odd and flawed and not traditionally romantic, but who were commanding the central focus of the story.” Those stars’ most iconic roles are proof that actors don’t have to choose between a career in either leading or supporting roles.
Dickie Moltisanti follows in that tradition. “If you think about the great antiheroes in stories, you feel by the end that even though you don’t necessarily love them, you care about them or feel that their downfall has some kind of tragic sense to it,” says Nivola. “I definitely feel that it’s important as much as possible to maintain that relationship with the audience.”
Gabriella Piazza Booked ‘The Sopranos’ Prequel by Screaming About Pork Chops He also reveals the thinking behind his preparation for a role like Dickie: plan a character’s arc extensively, but then each day on set, throw it all out the window. “Two totally different things happen,” he explains. “One is about preparation. And the other is performance. And performance has, ideally, no intellectual element to it at all.”
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