Alessandro Nivola On “The Brutalist”, “Kraven”, & “The Room Next Door”

When Alessandro Nivola first learned about The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s epic deconstruction of the American dream through the lens of an immigrant architect, he was inside his Brooklyn apartment — a nice but old brownstone where “everything is broken and the ceilings are falling in.” It’s a far cry from the minimalist, monumental concrete facades of the architectural style that gives the film its name.

“To try and impose some kind of Brutalist flare onto it would really be a losing battle,” Nivola says, though he suspects his two children, tired of a cozy ol’ brownstone where nothing works, “have fantasies of, like, minimalist, polished cement somewhere.”

“So, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up in some Brutalism,” he says with a laugh.

Nivola would become even more familiar with that brownstone before The Brutalist broke ground, so to speak. Corbet offered him the role during the second week of COVID lockdown, just after he’d stashed his cannellini beans.   

“He got in touch saying that they were gonna shoot this movie in Poland three weeks from then,” Nivola recalls. “And I thought he was insane, ’cause he obviously hadn’t looked out his window to see that the world had stopped.”

Nivola was right. It would take three and a half years before production began, and almost all of the other actors Corbet first approached dropped out for one reason or another and were replaced, though Nivola remained. It was another year more before The Brutalist would premiere to critical acclaim at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. The film opens wide on December 20, but by chance, two other movies Nivola starred in are coming out within a week of The Brutalist: Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door and the superhero flick Kraven the Hunter.

“The wider the range of roles and films and experiences that I can have as an actor, the more fulfilling it is to me.”

Alessandro Nivola

Of those three The Brutalist is by far the buzziest as awards season kicks into gear, and the one that Nivola has the deepest personal connection with. As he puts it, “Brutalism has been staring me in the face since the day I was born.” His grandfather was best friends with Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect widely considered to be one of the godfathers of Brutalism. The pair worked together often, and “Corbu” even graced his friend’s house with two huge murals that Nivola saw with each visit to his grandparents, though he didn’t appreciate their significance as a child. (Corbet had no idea about this bit of trivia when he first approached Nivola.)

Beyond his early exposure to the titular style, there’s a more profound connection between Nivola’s story and that of The Brutalist: one of immigration and assimilation. The film stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a brilliant Hungarian-Jewish architect who flees the Holocaust and escapes to America, where he’s initially taken in by his cousin, Attila (Nivola). Attila came to the States well before WWII and believed himself to have fully assimilated. He’s married to a Catholic wife, converted, and runs a furniture store in the suburbs of Philly called “Miller & Son” — never mind that the Anglicized surname isn’t his own, nor is he a father. 

Nivola’s Attila is almost the co-lead of the first hour of the three-and-a-half-hour epic, which sees László struggle with the weight of his art, a wealthy patron played by Guy Pierce, the plight of his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) who is still stuck in Europe, and perhaps most pressingly whether or not he wants to — or even can — fit his ambition into this thing we call America. If the typical immigrant story celebrates assimilation, The Brutalist is a much more complex interrogation, and Attila, a person who “thinks he’s cracked the code of how to be a man in this country and he totally hasn’t,” is portrayed almost as a cautionary foil to the film’s protagonist. Attila ultimately kicks out his cousin after László’s attitude cost him an important job. He also alleges that László made a pass at his wife, but perhaps the deeper reason for the dismissal is that László is exposing the limitations of his American dreaming.

Nivola understands this tension. In a way, he has both Lászlós and Attilas in his family tree. His paternal grandmother was a Jewish refugee from Germany, not too dissimilar from László. She married his grandfather, Sicilian sculptor Costantino Nivola (best friend to Le Corbusier), and the two enjoyed a Bohemian existence in the U.S. where Nivola says they didn’t feel much pressure to conform to mainstream American society — not unlike László, though his reticence to change is a struggle that causes great stress. Nivola’s father, meanwhile, was named Pietro Salvatore Nivola but went by “Pete” in high school. Attila would sympathize.

“I think he really wanted to be accepted into a kind of preppy American establishment society, at least as a young man,” Nivola says. “He evolved over the course of his life. And by the time I was born, of course, he became really proud of his Italian heritage again and he gave me an unpronounceable name for Middle America.”

Nivola is also married to an immigrant, for what it’s worth, though British actress Emily Mortimer’s experience is quite dissimilar from anything Attila or László experienced.

“English expatriates in America have just this great advantage because everybody thinks they’re brilliant no matter what they say the minute they open their mouth and have a British accent of any kind,” says Nivola, who married Mortimer in 2003. It doesn’t work the other way around, though. Nivola has British citizenship to match Mortimer’s American citizenship, and he recalls feeling a sense of inferiority when he was first spending time on his partner’s home turf across the pond. “There’s such a stereotype of Americans lacking worldliness and a sense of a place in history. It’s all about, you know, baseball and hot dogs and whatever.” 

“You’re just trying to be in the world of your imagination and completely commit to that, and let the world fade away.”

Alessandro Nivola

Nivola, now 52, is a Boston-born all-American, to the point where in his early days he wasn’t getting cast as Italian much, despite the very Italian name that his father, Pietro “Pete” Nivola, bestowed upon him. His first major role was as Pollux Troy, Nicholas Cage’s brother in the wonderfully unhinged action classic Face/Off. Since then, he’s been working consistently at a high level, boasting credits in films like Jurassic Park III, American Hustle, Selma, A Most Violent Year, The Neon Demon, the Orthodox Jewish-set drama Disobedience opposite Rachel Weisz, and as an Italian mob boss in The Sopranos prequel film The Many Saints of Newark, to name a few.

“Really, the story of my career has been one of transformation,” Nivola reflects.

Like, say, a Russian crime kingpin who can transform into a human-rhino?

Kraven the Hunter, where Nivola plays the main villain Aleksei Sytsevich, a.k.a Rhino, could not be a more different film than The Brutalist. It’s not just the movies’ respective awards chances or reviews — though it’s worth noting that even the Kraven pans are essentially united in praise for Nivola’s silly, unexpected turn as the Spider-Man baddie. Aleksei is an ambitious, insecure criminal climber who wears a tight little fashion backpack filled with medicine that prevents his transformation into a humanoid rhinoceros — the outcome of an experimental procedure to make him strong. (Nivola based his character’s accent and demeanor on his friend Philip Nikolayev. He says Nikolayev, a Russian poet, is aware of this and is “looking forward to seeing it.”)

“I was excited to be in a Marvel movie,” Nivola says, adding that his past work with Kraven director J.C. Chandor on A Most Violent Year made him jump at the opportunity to re-team. “The wider the range of roles and films and experiences that I can have as an actor, the more fulfilling it is to me.”

Nivola’s name — the one that he joked Middle America can’t pronounce (it’s not that hard) — isn’t exactly a household one, despite his accomplished filmography. No matter; his body of work certainly stands for itself, and he pushes back on any suggestion that the Kraven gig was an attempt to assimilate into mainstream, popcorn stuff.

“It’s not like I’ve turned my nose up at commercial Hollywood fare. I have done a fair number of these kinds of things. I mean, I was in the third Jurassic Park movie,” he says. That is not a role he looks back too fondly on, as in 2012 he called it a “really trying experience” playing a character with “nothing for me to latch on to.” Thankfully, this wasn’t the case with Kraven.

“It’s almost hilarious how wildly they occupy opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum and how diverse the characters are. Anybody who is brave enough to do the triple feature will get to see three totally different performances.”

Alessandro Nivola on his upcoming projects.

“Rhino was a character like any other,” Nivola says, noting that his process as an actor makes things like Kraven’s $130 million budget (compared to The Brutalist’s shockingly frugal $10 million) seem irrelevant. “You’re just trying to be in the world of your imagination and completely commit to that, and let the world fade away.”

Well, almost. Expensive would-be blockbusters are awash in extra cameras and redundant coverage. The Brutalist was shot in VistaVision, a high-resolution, widescreen format that had its heyday in the mid-twentieth century and hadn’t been used for a film prior to The Brutalist since 1997. The elaborate, loud cameras just a few feet from Nivola’s face while filming “supercharged the moment.” Nivola used the word “heightened,” which feels extremely apt for a work of The Brutalist’s towering magnitude.

The stock of film they were captured on aside, is it possible that Attila and Rhino maybe aren’t so dissimilar? One character changed his religion and his way of life to try to become an American; the other turned into an animal-hybrid supervillain because he wanted to be a respected crime lord.

…No? In any case, Nivola’s third role to close out the year presented another opportunity to transform. He jumped at the chance to work with Pedro Almodóvar in The Room Next Door, playing a policeman in a big scene towards the end of the acclaimed Spanish director’s English-language feature debut.

“I was playing an upstate New York cop from a really specific cultural background and time and place, and his movies, they exist outside reality, really,” he says. “Each time with these projects, it’s been a whole new challenge and whole new adventure.”

It’s just one of those quirks of the movie business that all three of these films, each very different in style and substance, and each completed at different times over the past few years, are coming out on top of one another. Kraven opens on December 13th, with The Brutalist and The Room Next Door debuting the following weekend.

“I like it because it’s almost hilarious how wildly they occupy opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum and how diverse the characters are. Anybody who is brave enough to do the triple feature will get to see three totally different performances because each of these different movies required such different things of me. It’s been great,” Nivola says, noting that his mother has seen all three “within a couple of days.”

The Brutalist is her favourite of them, for the record, and since it was his dad’s side of the family that grew up in a home with Brutalist art from the style’s founding father, there’s no bias on that particular front. Nivola just transformed himself, yet again, in one of the most compelling movies of the year.

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