While he’s been making a strong impression in films from the likes of John Woo and Nicolas Winding Refn for the last three decades, 2024 marks a major year for Alessandro Nivola. Earlier this year saw the release of Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat and, this Friday, Nivola can be seen in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (not to mention a reunion with his A Most Violent Year director J.C. Chandor in Kraven the Hunter, now in theaters).
In The Brutalist, Nivola gives a formidable performance as Attila, immigrant cousin to Adrien Brody’s László Tóth and his sole connection to America. The backbone of the epic film’s first act, Attila provides an entry point into assimilation and the sacrifices and consolations one must shed in pursuit of the American Dream.
Ahead of the film’s release, Conor O’Donnell and I spoke with Nivola, who returned to The B-Side to discuss working with auteurs, conveying the process of assimilation, and the “total mayhem” of working with Lynne Ramsay on You Were Never Really Here. Find a transcription below, edited for clarity, and listen to the full conversation here.
The Film Stage: Assimilation is portrayed in a lot of different ways in The Brutalist, and I feel like your character is the most direct version of it. How do you approach that? What are the conversations you’re having with Brady?
Alessandro Nivola: Well, we didn’t have that many conversations about it, but to me, all the clues were there in the script. I understood instinctively what was going on. My dad’s name was Pietro Salvatore Nivola, and he went through high school being called Pete. You know, it was familiar to me: the need to fit in and to feel like you belonged, and in Attila’s case, not really being able to pull it off––despite all the kind of puffing out of his chest and changing of his name and changing his religious affiliation and trying to do everything he could to seem as American as possible. There’s something that just smacks of inauthenticity about it and a lot of it started with voice stuff.
Brady and I agreed that… and there’s even a reference in the script to the way that he talks, because to Laszlo’s ear he just sounds totally Americanized, and to the wife’s ear, she’s like, “He doesn’t sound like any American I know.” So we were like, “What is that sound?” It has to be the sound of somebody trying to sort of sound cool and Yankee, you know, and not quite pulling it off. And so I started watching a lot of interviews with… it turns out there’s a lot of Hungarian cinematographers. One of them I came across was this guy named Andrew Laszlo, and Andrew Laszlo shot, among other things, the cult film The Warriors, and he shot the original Shogun series, and he seemed like a cool guy, but he really had the sound of a guy who sounded sort of New York-y, kind of urban, and sort of had a colloquial, hip, like, local New York City voice, but had these shades of Hungarian that just––he hadn’t lost. And sometimes he would say kind of colloquial things that had the stress or the rhythms just wrong. And it was, in his case, really kind of sweet and charming, but I felt like I could use that to apply to this character in a way that would be both a little goofy and a little bit sad. I can’t really remember the details now, but there are certain words in Hungarian that you always stress different syllables, different than in English, and so I was kind of aware of that.
Had you worked with Adrien before? You have such great chemistry, especially in that drinking montage that leads to drama.
No, no. We never even met before.
Really? That’s actually kind of surprising.
Yeah, we didn’t pass together. We had some friends in common and stuff, but we never met, never worked together. From the very first scene that we were shooting together, we were very tactile with each other, and so there was no feeling of kind of tiptoeing around each other at all, and it wasn’t really a spoken thing. It just sort of happened that way, and I think we both sensed that that was helpful to create this feeling that we really were a family. In my mind, they were almost like brothers. Their families, I think, were very close and grew up in the same town in Budapest and they were in the same neighborhood, and they were blood, and that had its own complicated history to it.
I think Attila both idolized Laszlo’s talent and genius, which I’m sure was apparent even when they were adolescents, and was kind of impressed by his attitude and arrogance and confidence, but also resented him for all those things and felt jealous of him sexually. And there’s a reference in the script to him having kind of stolen a girlfriend of mine or slept with a girlfriend of mine when we were younger, and so there’s, like, a kind of competitive edge to them as well. And then on top of all that, there’s the shame that Attila felt about having managed to avoid the Holocaust, because he’d come 10 years earlier and managed to avoid the camps. He’s just come back from hell. So there’s a heavy survivor’s guilt and feeling a kind of emasculation from having kind of run away and not had to endure the horror, and this guy having just come through it and survived it.
So I think there’s that feeling of genuinely wanting to provide safe haven for him as a result, and when he first arrives I really think Attila is dying to sort of have his home be a kind of place for recovery for this man who’s just endured the most awful thing you could imagine, and at the same time he’s dying to impress him and wants Laszlo to think that he’s made it in America, and he so clearly hasn’t. He’s living in this shitty little apartment and has this kind of crappy furniture store, but he’s trying to sort of act like he’s figured out how to operate in America and wants Laszlo to be impressed by that. And of course, Laszlo sees right through it, which is really a source of pain and frustration for Attila. So Adrien and I, we just sort of instinctively understood all those things. We never really talked about any of this stuff. This was all kind of just in each of our own heads and our imaginations, but we immediately had a really easy time filming together, and that carried on right through it.
I suppose that speaks to the strength of the script, in that regard, if you’re both reading the same thing and just kind of instinctively coming away with all that.
Yeah, the script never overshares, and so a lot of this stuff is somewhat mysterious, and I’ve described some of the things that I’m just telling you to people who’ve seen the film and they haven’t gleaned every detail of that at all. But I think they sort of sense it somehow, that they have a feeling that there’s some kind of history between us that could have that kind of relationship. So there’s a mystery to the script, but the clues are there for us as actors.
There’s an interesting thing to your character specifically, this sort of desperation that’s running through everything, borne from the fact the whole swath of the movie is about this need to perform––to be able to survive within the grander context of the American capitalist system.
Yeah, totally.
And that’s with you, and then you’re that first benchmark for audiences to see where that goes.
Yeah, I mean, in my mind, the first 45 minutes of the movie––that’s mainly me and Adrien––is basically like a short film that is like a prologue to the movie. It’s setting out all the themes, all the sort of emotional things that are going to resonate for the rest of the film, and it’s exactly what you just described.
In that regard, are you taking cues from latter elements in the story? You mentioned even sexual jealousy. There are certain scenes where there is this kind of psychosexual nature to your relationship and even your character’s wife plays into that––how that feeds through to the sexual violence that happens later in the film. Is that something you’re reaching out later in the movie and bringing back to kind of thread through, or is it just, like you said, something you’re all sort of collectively, instinctively picking up on?
It’s definitely part of it. As an actor, you’re trying to figure out how you can best serve the story. Of course, you want to bring your own kind of creative spontaneity to your performance, and you want to discover things that neither you nor the director had planned or had mapped out, and you want to impose your power and your freedom of expression on the performance. But despite all that, you’re there to serve the whole story, and you need to understand how your character fits into the whole story and helps tell the story and what it needs to accomplish in order for the story to be best told. So you’re always looking at the beginning, the middle, and the end, and how your part of it helps drive it forward and will resonate in later scenes in the movie.
We’ve been lucky enough to talk to you about a lot of B-sides over the last couple of times we’ve talked, but I wanted to bring this up just because it’s a fascinating one, I think. You Were Never Really Here. You only have a couple lines, right? It’s a quiet performance.
I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen that movie.
Oh, really? Okay.
Lynne had me playing a character in that movie that it turned out I wasn’t playing. I was playing somebody else, and she never told me. And it was the most fucked-up, weird gaslighting experience I’ve ever had.
Oh, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.
Honestly, it was just total mayhem. Like, we’d get to the set and just sit around and talk for hours before shooting anything. I don’t think she was clear who my character was and what the story was, and she changed her mind, I think, halfway through the thing, and I just didn’t know what was going on. Before I knew it, it turned out I was playing somebody else. [Laughs]
[Laughs] That’s fascinating. Well, asked and answered.
People keep telling me, “Hey, you’re in that great movie, You Were Never Really Here.” I was like, “I was never really here.”
You leave quite an impression in the film, to be honest. We won’t belabor it, but my question was literally going to be: you do so much with so little. How did you do it?
She’s a legendary filmmaker. She’s a little nutty…
Well, along with The Brutalist, you’re in The Room Next Door this year as well. You’re working in these kind of auteur-driven films. How do those processes differ? Do you try and kind of maintain any of your own processes, jumping from two very different directors with very distinct styles, or are you their instrument?
Well, yes and yes. I mean, the two directors couldn’t be more different in terms of just the way that they set up their movies. I mean, Pedro wanted to rehearse every word of every sentence of every line, and he flew me over. I was playing an upstate New York cop and, of course, we filmed it in Madrid. [Laughs] And he flew me over there a month before it was even time to shoot the thing. And Julianne and I rehearsed with him, and he was just incredibly detail-oriented about the script and the text and the moment-to-moment of the scenes.
And I had all these costume-fittings––which, by the way, was a whole different character altogether. When I went over to Madrid for the first costume-fittings, they had me in this beautifully tailored suit with a pink tie and everything. I’m a real Pedro cop, you know? [Laughs]
Yeah. [Laughs]
I then went home. I grew up in northern Vermont just across the lake from where this character probably lived, and so I had gone to school with a lot of guys like him, and I knew what they sounded like and what his accent was like and just what his house would have looked like and all of it. And so I was just getting as specific with this character as I have with any of them and trying to build out the sort of world in my imagination and root it in the reality of a time and place.
But at the same time, Pedro’s movies exist kind of outside of time and place, and they’re heavily stylized. And so there was always this kind of voice of doubt in my head about whether this character that I was preparing to play as a completely real person from that part of the world and that kind of culture and class background and religious youth and everything––whether that was going to marry with the sort of hyper-real world of a Pedro movie. And I had been looking at all these YouTube videos of police interrogations in New York state, and almost every single detective was wearing the same thing, which was, like, these black polo shirts and khakis. And I started sending Pedro these screenshots off of these YouTube clips: “Just for what it’s worth, this is what the real guys look like. And I don’t know if that marries with your production design and the world of the movie,” because obviously his color scheme and everything is so specific. And of course, when I actually got there, one chair was blue and one chair was red. So I sent it off and he wrote back saying, “Thank you very much. And I will think about it.”
Then a month went by and I was doing all of my preparation and I never really heard back from him. And so when I flew over there to film, I was driving to work on my first day, still not knowing if he was going to dress me the way that I had offered up as an option or with what I had done those fittings before. And to me, that was going to tell me one way or another, whether this real person that I had invented was going to be what he wanted or if I needed to, in the half hour in my makeup chair, kind of reinvent the whole thing as some sort of more archetypal person who lived outside of reality. And I walked into my dressing room that morning and hanging in my closet was, down to every detail, exactly the photos that I had sent him. And to me, that just gave me my answer, which was: he wants the real guy.
Then, after all that sort of preparation and rehearsing and him stopping me word-by-word and everything, we went in to actually shoot and we did three set-ups––a two-shot with me and Julie looking at each other in profile, then one over my shoulder on her and one over her shoulder on me. And we did one take on each of the setups. We didn’t do a second take on any of the set-ups and he didn’t say anything and it was done. And he was like, “Yes, it was very good.”
That’s amazing. He’s a pro.
I didn’t know how that character, as I had imagined, how it was going to fit, but it did. And he felt it was going to fit and that’s how it all played out.
The Brutalist and The Room Next Door open in limited release on Friday, December 20 and expand nationwide in January.