Alessandro Nivola: ’It’s been nice picking through my dad’s experiences for the Sopranos film’
The American actor on playing a rabbi, jet ski racing with Robert De Niro and exploring his Italian-American heritage
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.