Truth and beauty may have been compatible for Keats, but Alessandro Nivola learned early on that nothing gets in the way of honest work like actorly narcissism. It's hard to imagine now, but Nivola—best known for his nuanced, self-subsuming turns in such character-driven films as Mansfield Park, Laurel Canyon, and Junebug—was originally a bit of a divo. As a preening adolescent thespian, he attended an acting workshop in which he was asked to pass 10 minutes on an empty stage. "I brought my guitar in," he recalls, "and then pretended to go take a shower and came back in with my shirt off and a towel wrapped around my waist! The teacher just tore me apart." These days, however, Nivola tends more toward The Thinker than Adonis. On a recent morning, he has hauled himself from Brooklyn to the Museum of Modern Art in a rumpled cotton button-down, threads hanging from the cuffs, and Levi's while clutching a creased edition of The New York Times. "If you don't get over your self-consciousness and vanity," he says, "you'll never be a good actor."
Nivola's haute-boho vibe is rare among actors his age (34), nationality (American), and physiognomy (lithe golden boy). The son of a public-policy wise man, he graduated from Exeter and Yale before being championed by the director Michael Winterbottom. Thanks to his Brooks Brotherish provenance, Nivola is often cast as an Englishman, and has played the husband of a gallerist. (Coincidentally, his real-life wife, the Oxford-educated British actress Emily Mortimer, played an art dealer in Match Point and again on 30 Rock.) "The fact that I went to fancy schools and all that sort of thing and am married to Em, these things conspire to make me seem sort of cosmopolitan," Nivola says, insisting he's hardly some sort of Thomas Crown.
Standing in front of Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, Nivola explains that his grandfather Constantino Nivola, the son of a stonemason, grew up "totally impoverished" in Italy before becoming an apprentice to a local fresco painter—"He slept in freezing cold churches while the master slept in a warm bed"—and, eventually, a well-regarded sculptor in his own right. (Nivola's younger brother, Adrian, is a painter in Brooklyn.) Nivola sketches a quasi-anthropomorphic figure that, he attests, was his grandfather's signature form. "He was very good friends with Le Corbusier," Nivola says, "and was very derivative of him until he discovered this shape. It's called the Sardinian Widow." He laughs at his dirty line drawing and moves on to things more worthy of framing: "Pollock apparently gave my grandmother a painting and my grandfather gave it back to him. Said to him"—Nivola launches into his best nonno voice—"Jackson, I don't like thees splatter business!'?"
This summer Nivola stars in The Company, a miniseries that Ridley Scott produced for TNT about the beginnings of the CIA, as "a guy from a working-class Jewish background, coming up in the early days when the CIA's offices were still called Cockroach Alley." In Grace Is Gone, a favorite at Sundance, he channels "a hopeless liberal slacker who's right about everything but completely ineffectual—what the British call a pub philosopher." Nivola isn't shaking off the mantle of urban sophistication for good. "I have romantic ideas about living in the country somewhere," he admits, "but I probably wouldn't last long."—LAUREN COLLINS
Nivola wears: Black Fleece by Brooks Brothers herringbone coat, $2,900, oxford shirt, $150, flannel pants, $800, rep tie, $150, and shoes; brooksbrothers.com.
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