Alessandro Nivola on Calvin Klein, ‘Love Story’ Emmy Buzz, Michelle Williams

Alessandro Nivola is standing somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, holding his phone vertically.

He’s on his way 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 has been nominated, and the 25 minutes he’s carved out for this conversation are all he could find in a schedule that, he says, has finally caught up with him. The trip to Manhattan is sandwiched between several obligations.

“It was definitely a surprise to me,” Nivola says of the reaction to the Ryan Murphy-produced limited series, in which he plays Calvin Klein. “I didn’t expect the impact the show had.”

For an actor who has been one of the most respected names in the room for almost thirty years, without often being the most talked about name, he’s content with making art.

Nivola, 53, has built a career that working actors consider enviable and one that the broader compensation 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 attorney John Doar in “Selma,” he’s landed plenty of “that guy” roles, but he’s also left his mark on them. And then there are the fan favorites like his turns in “The Many Saints of Newark” and “The Brutalist.” A string of performances rolled into films that almost all earned recognition without ever quite carrying him around.

The current Emmy conversation about his work in FX’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette” marks the first time the awards radar and the work appear to be in sync.

A name as synonymous with fashion as icon Calvin Klein, the man he would play, Nivola says, was found on YouTube.

“I had actually never seen him talk. I had never seen an interview with Calvin and I had never met him in person,” says Nivola. Variety. “I went to YouTube and typed in his name, and up came an interview he had done sometime in the ’80s. His demeanor, his voice, his accent, his physical mannerisms, everything was so specific to him, but also to New York at a certain time, and to a certain kind of audience. It was familiar to me, but also just so specific.”

In the series, Klein finds himself at a pivotal moment, fresh out of rehab, as he tries to present a dignified face to the world while still carrying every previous version of himself with him. Nivola has a challenge ahead of her.

“The trick for me was to present someone who had the kind of authority, elegance and grace of someone who had recently decided that the person he was presenting to the world was no longer going to be this wild man who would be up all night with Steve Rubell,” he explains. “But that hardly covers this mischievous, mischievous, devilish, funny, sexy, flirty and often deeply passionate individual. All of those things are there when you watch the videos.”

He mainly focused on speech work, developing the Bronx accent. Klein tried to lose for decades without ever completely losing it. “He even took speech therapy classes to try to get rid of it, but it’s still there,” Nivola says. “It comes through despite the cosmopolitan sophistication he has on top.”

The car enters the Holland Tunnel and the video connection is lost, but the audio still holds up. The conversation continues into the dark.

The question of whether all this ultimately places Nivola in the company of the transformative actors he has studied all his life is one he does not want to answer directly. The “character actor” label, he says, never really fit, never quite fit.

“All acting for me is character acting,” he says. “I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Each person is so specific and unique, and the fun of it for me is that I try to give as much detail and specificity to each individual character as possible, and that way they become universal and relatable.”

The Boston-born actor cites Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar-nominated role in “In the Name of the Father” as a north star, and the performance that really made him fall in love with acting. He describes the performance as “very sexy, very personable, and very cool and sweet, but also eccentric and a unique person from a certain part of Belfast and a certain time.”

Interestingly enough, his own instinct for the first film can be traced back to Nicolas Cage on the set of John Woo’s ‘Face/Off’.

“I created that character after seeing the documentary about Robert Crumb that Terry Zwigoff directed,” Nivola recalls of his role in “Face/Off,” Pollux Troy. And then, in perfect pitch, he imitates Cage as he tells a story about a conversation they had.

“Nic was just so excited. He kept saying to me, ‘Yes, you know, Alessandro, I like it, very dark. I think you should continue with it.’ He got such a kick out of all this weird stuff I did, and I think if it wasn’t for him, I would have been too scared to do it and commit to it in a way that was real. He was like my protection.”
The film he is least happy with, however, is one that never happened.

“Fever,” Todd Haynes’ long-developed Peggy Lee biopic starring Michelle Williams, appears to have collapsed before the cameras rolled. Nivola was attached as Lee’s longtime guitarist and collaborator. He still doesn’t know exactly why the financing fell apart.

“I can’t believe that thing fell apart,” he says with passion, still longing for the opportunity but also seeing the potential for his future co-star. “There was an Oscar in the making for her, 100%. It was just crying out to be made. I never got to the bottom of what happened to the financiers. I just don’t know why they got cold feet. But maybe that’s because I’m working on another project with Christine Vachon, so I’m going to have to call her after we get out and say, what the hell is going on? I had all my jazz guitar chops ready to go, and then everything became canceled.” It was just such a disappointment.”

Just a few weeks after this conversation, Vachon and her producing partner Pamela Koffler would be named among 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 someone who’s really sweet,” he says. “It’s quite fun.”

The car emerges from the tunnel into Manhattan and Nivola sets the phone, the skyline barely visible as the sun sets behind him. As he prepares to get out of the car, we wonder if he ever expected this version of his career, where the price conversation is no longer hypothetical.

“I’m definitely a late bloomer,” he chuckles. “Better this way than the other way around.”