Alessandro Antine Nivola is an American actor and producer. He has been nominated for many awards including a Tony Award, a Critics Choice Award, and an Independent Spirit Award and has won a Screen Actors Guild Award, a British Independent Film Award, and the Best Actor Award at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival among others. He has starred in Hollywood blockbusters such as Face/Off, Jurassic Park III and the upcoming Sopranos feature film prequel The Many Saints of Newark, as well as in critically acclaimed independent films, among them Disobedience, A Most Violent Year, Junebug and Laurel Canyon. He has also starred three times on Broadway, most recently opposite Bradley Cooper in the 2014 revival of The Elephant Man which earned him a Tony Award nomination. As a producer he runs King Bee Productions which made two seasons of the HBO comedy Doll & Em and the Independent Spirit Award nominated feature film To Dust. He is married to actress and director Emily Mortimer and they have two children together, Sam and May.
Early life
Nivola was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, Virginia, is an artist, and his father, Pietro Salvatore Nivola, was a professor of political science and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. Nivola's paternal grandfather was the Italian sculptor Costantino Nivola, and his paternal grandmother, Ruth Guggenheim, was a Jewish refugee from Germany. He was born first of two boys; his brother, Adrian Nivola, a painter, is five years younger. Nivola attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University. His family also lived in Burlington, Vermont, where he attended Mater Christi School, a ministry of the Sisters of Mercy.
Career
Nivola graduated from Yale University with a BA in English in 1994 and a year later made his Broadway debut opposite Helen Mirren in A Month in the Country earning a Drama Desk Award nomination. Shortly after that came his breakthrough performance in John Woo’s feature film Face/Off playing Nicolas Cage’s brother Pollux Troy. In the ensuing years he has starred in many films including Mansfield Park, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Jurassic Park 3, Laurel Canyon, Junebug, Goal! 1 & 2, Coco Before Chanel, Ginger and Rosa, American Hustle, A Most Violent Year, Selma, The Neon Demon, One Percent More Humid, You Were Never Really Here, Disobedience, and The Art of Self Defense. He will next be seen as Dickie Moltisanti, the lead role in The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase’s feature film prequel to his heralded television series The Sopranos. Nivola has also worked frequently in television, starring opposite Robert DeNiro in Barry Levinson’s Madoff family biopic The Wizard of Lies, as well as the TNT miniseries The Company, the UK Chanel 4 series Chimerica, the Netflix film The Red Sea Diving Resort, and the upcoming BBC series Black Narcissus. On stage, in addition to A Month in the Country, he starred on Broadway in 2013 in The Winslow Boy, and in 2014 in The Elephant Man opposite Bradley Cooper, and off-Broadway in the Ethan Hawke directed Sam Shepard play A Lie of the Mind with Laurie Metcalfe. He also starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1995 Williamstown Theater Festival production of Shakespeare's As You Like It. In 2013 Nivola established King Bee Productions with his wife Emily Mortimer. The company produced two seasons of the half hour comedy Doll & Em for HBO and BSkyB. He also produced To Dust starring Matthew Broderick which won the Audience Award at the 2018 TriBeCa Film Festival and was nominated for a 2020 Independent Spirit Award.
