Alessandro Nivola is somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, holding his phone vertically.
He is heading from New Jersey to New York for the 2026 Gotham TV Awards, where his “Love Story: John F. Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette” co-star Sarah Pidgeon is nominated, and the 25 minutes he has carved out for this conversation are the only ones he could find in a schedule that has, by his own admission, finally caught up to him. The Manhattan-bound trip is sandwiched between multiple obligations.
“It was certainly a surprise to me,” Nivola says of the response to the Ryan Murphy-produced limited series, in which he plays Calvin Klein. “The impact that the show had, I did not expect that.”
For an actor who has spent nearly three decades being among the most respected names in the room without often being the most discussed one, he’s been content with just getting to make art.
Nivola, 53, has accumulated the career that working actors recognize as enviable and that the wider awards apparatus has historically overlooked. From the Hasidic Jewish rabbi in “Disobedience,” to the power-hungry prosecutor overseeing the FBI’s Abscam operation in “American Hustle,” to real-life civil rights lawyer John Doar in “Selma,” he’s acquired plenty of “that guy” roles, but he’s also made his mark in them. And then there are the fan-favorites such as his turns in “The Many Saints of Newark” and “The Brutalist.” A run of performances stitched into films that almost all earned recognition without ever quite carrying him with them.
The current Emmy conversation around his work in FX’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette” is the first time the awards radar and the work seem to be synchronizing.
A name as synonymous with fashion as the icon Calvin Klein, the man he would play, Nivola says, was found on YouTube.
“I hadn’t actually ever seen him talk. I’d never seen an interview with Calvin, and I’ve never met him in person,” Nivola tells Variety. “I went on YouTube and typed his name in, and up came an interview that he had done sometime in the ’80s. His behavior, his voice, his accent, his physical mannerisms, everything was so particular to him, but also to New York at a certain time, and in a certain kind of crowd. It was familiar to me, but also just so specific.”
The series finds Klein at a hinge moment, freshly out of rehab, attempting to present a dignified face to the world while still carrying every previous version of himself underneath. Nivola has a challenge ahead of him.
“The trick to me was to present somebody who had the kind of authority, elegance and grace of somebody who had recently decided that the person he was presenting to the world was no longer going to be this wild man up all night with Steve Rubell,” he explains. “But to have that be thinly covering this naughty, mischievous, devilish, funny, sexy, flirtatious and often deeply passionate person. All those things are there if you watch the videos.”
He committed to the speech work in particular, building out the Bronx accent Klein spent decades trying to lose without ever fully losing it. “He even took speech therapy classes to try and lose it, but it’s still kind of there,” Nivola says. “It comes through, despite the cosmopolitan sophistication that he’s got on top of it.”
The car enters the Holland Tunnel and the video connection is breaking up, but the audio is still holding. The conversation continues into the dark.
The question of whether all of this finally puts Nivola in the company of the transformative actors he has spent his life studying is one he resists answering directly. The label “character actor,” he says, never really fit and never quite didn’t.
“All acting to me is character acting,” he shares. “I can’t imagine going about it any other way. Every person is so specific and unique, and the joy of it for me is trying to get as much detail and specificity to each individual character, and that way they become universal and recognizable.”
The Boston-born actor cites Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar-nominated turn in “In the Name of the Father” as a north star, and the performance that made him truly fall in love with acting. He explains the performance as “really sexy, really handsome, and really cool and lovable, but also eccentric and a unique person from a particular part of Belfast and a particular time.”
Interestingly, it traces to his own first-movie instinct back to Nicolas Cage on the set of John Woo’s “Face/Off.”
“I created that character after watching the documentary about Robert Crumb that Terry Zwigoff directed,” Nivola recalls of his “Face/Off” role, Pollux Troy. And then, in perfect pitch, he imitates Cage while telling a story of a conversation they had.
“Nic was just so fired up. He kept telling me, ‘Yeah, you know, Alessandro, I like it, very dark. I think you should go with it.’ He was getting such a kick out of all this sort of weird shit that I was doing, and I think if he hadn’t been there, I would have been too afraid to do it and commit to it in a way that was real. He was like my protection.”
The film he is least at peace with, however, is one that never happened.
“Fever,” Todd Haynes’ long-developed Peggy Lee biopic with Michelle Williams, seems to have collapsed before cameras rolled. Nivola was attached as Lee’s longtime guitarist and collaborator. He still does not know exactly why the financing fell apart.
“I cannot believe that thing fell apart,” he says with passion, still yearning for the opportunity, but also seeing the potential for his would-be co-star. “There was an Oscar in the making for her, 100%. It just was crying out to be made. I never got to the bottom of what happened with the financiers. I just don’t know why they got cold feet. But maybe it will. I’m working on another project with Christine Vachon, so I’ll have to call her up after we get off and say, what the fuck is going on with it? I’d had all my jazz guitar chops ready to go, and then it was all called off. It was just such a disappointment.”
Only a few weeks after this conversation, Vachon, and her producing partner Pamela Koffler, would be named one of the recipients of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at this year’s Governors Awards.
In the meantime, Nivola is filming “The 99ers,” Nicole Kassell’s film about the 1999 US women’s national soccer team. He plays Tony DiCicco, the team’s coach. He just walked off the set the morning of this conversation, where he stars with Emilia Jones.
“It’s actually one of the first times in a while that I’ve played somebody who’s totally lovable,” he says. “It’s kind of really nice.”
The car emerges from the tunnel into Manhattan and Nivola adjusts the phone, the skyline can barely be seen as the sun is setting behind him. As he prepares to exit the car, we ask whether he ever expected this version of his career, the one where the awards conversation is no longer hypothetical.
“I’m definitely a late bloomer,” he chuckles. “Better that than the other way around.”