Alessandro Nivola was born in Boston in 1972. Graduating from Yale, he made his Broadway debut in 1995 opposite Helen Mirren in A Month in the Country. Two years later he played Nicholas Cage’s villainous younger brother in Face/Off, before decamping to Britain to star in a series of independent films including Love’s Labour’s Lost (where he met his future wife, Emily Mortimer). Last year he played a London rabbi in Sebastian Lelio’s Disobedience and, in the forthcoming Channel 4 adaptation of Lucy Kirkwood’s play Chimerica, he stars as a war photographer haunted by his image of a Tiananmen Square protester in 1989. Nivola lives in Brooklyn, New York, with Mortimer and their two children.
Where are you right now?
I’m in a car in Manhattan, going home from a rehearsal for the Sopranos prequel film [The Many Saints of Newark] that I’m about to start shooting in three days.
You play Dickie Moltisanti, father of Christopher, who mentors young Tony Soprano. What research did you do?
My main point of contact has been an Italian-American priest. He knows everything about the history of Newark and everybody who lived there, some of whom have had a brush with organised crime. If the guys I’ve met were in a film, you’d think it was a terrible caricature, so I can’t act anything like the real thing – it would be way over the top.
Has your Italian-American heritage helped?
Well, listen, my name has been such an impediment to my career, but finally after all these years I’ve got a job because of it. My dad passed away a year and a half ago, so there’s something nice about being able to pick through his experience growing up as a first-generation Italian-American in New York. More than any other job I’ve done, I wish he were still around to talk about it with.
How did you prepare for your role in Chimerica? Did you hang out with any war photographers?
After my dad died, I was in touch with an Italian photographer called Tony Vaccaro, who had photographed my father when he was a little kid. When I met him, it turned out that Tony had been a war photographer during the second world war. He was suddenly the perfect resource for me for this role. I think that war photographers tend to experience a lot of the same kind of trauma that soldiers do. They tend to be restless souls who live in a state of heightened adrenaline when they’re working, but otherwise feel empty and strangely miss the charge that they get from near-death experience. I think some of those elements are visible in my character, who becomes monomaniacally obsessed with tracking down a man whose picture he’d taken nearly 30 years ago.
That man is Tank Man, the unknown protester who blocked the tanks at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Did you pick up any clues to his identity?
There are blogs and forums online where people speculate about this at length. I remember that event happening – I would have been about 17 – but I only recently saw the video footage of him climbing on to the tank. What’s strange is that most of the other prominent protesters were publicly executed afterwards but there was never any sign of him, hence the curiosity. It’s a great conceit for a drama.
For your role as a rabbi in Disobedience, you spent time with members of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. What was that like?
This was one of the most satisfying and fascinating experiences I’ve ever had as an actor. I had four or five months before filming to find my way into the community, until I was having Shabbat dinners with a Hasidic family in Crown Heights. It was such an eye-opener. I had the impression that everybody in that community was very serious and studious and there wasn’t much joy. I was totally wrong. Family life was really raucous and full of humour and a lot of drinking. I made some lifelong friends there.
How come you play so many British characters?
After Face/Off, Michael Winterbottom brought me over to do a little movie called I Want You, in which I played a Hastings fisherman who’d been in Brixton prison for eight years. I was really young and just starting out, and because I was unquantifiable in London as far as class background went, people were offering me such a wide range of jobs, so I stayed. All the English actors who were desperate to go to Hollywood were totally baffled by why I wanted to be doing English independent movies. I won a British independent film award for Disobedience last year and that was a huge deal for me, because I felt like I’d invested so much of my career in British independent cinema but I still felt like an outsider somehow. That put an end to it.
Who made you most starstruck on set?
Robert De Niro is my all-time favourite actor and I think his performance in Raging Bull is the best ever. When I was working with him on The Wizard of Lies [a 2017 TV movie about the Madoffs], I tried to forget what a giant he is. I was lucky because before we started shooting, he invited me to spend a few days with him on a yacht off the coast of Corsica, where he was on a family holiday. By the time we were on set, we’d been racing each other on jet skis in the Mediterranean. That took the pressure off a bit.
You married Emily Mortimer 16 years ago. What are the pros and cons of being married to an actor?
Being married to anybody who’s in freelance work is a nightmare, because you never know what the schedule is going to be from one month to the next. It’s a very emotionally volatile job and I think we are both difficult to live with when we’re preparing for roles. The upside is that you’re with somebody who is incredibly passionate and creative and original-minded and curious about people and characters in ways that sometimes people in more conventional jobs aren’t.
You also run a production company together.
We initially set up the company to produce a TV show that Emily wrote called Doll & Em. We didn’t really know what we were getting into and it was a brutalising experience at first, because we didn’t have any help, but now we’ve hired people and it’s taken on a life of its own. We work well together. Producing is a relief from acting because you can use a different part of your brain. When you’re acting it’s so solipsistic, but producing is all practical work and it pulls you out of yourself.
Do your kids watch your films?
Yeah, some. My nine-year-old daughter wants to come to the premieres now. I took her to the premiere of The Wizard of Lies and there was a scene at the end where my character hangs himself. It’s really grim and I warned her about it, but as the scene approached I got more and more nervous and became conscious of people looking at me, thinking I was a bad parent. But when I went to put my hand over her eyes, she was fast asleep, snoring and drooling in the seat next to me.
Chimerica starts on Channel 4 on 17 April
