Alessandro Nivola

Alessandro Antine Nivola was born on June 28, 1972, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Virginia (née Davis), an artist, and Pietro Salvatore Nivola, a professor of political science and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His paternal grandfather was the Sardinian sculptor Costantino Nivola, and his paternal grandmother, Ruth Guggenheim, was a Jewish refugee from Germany. Nivola is the elder of two brothers; his younger brother, Adrian Nivola, is a painter and five years his junior. His childhood was divided among Boston, Burlington, Vermont, where he attended the Mater Christi School, and Washington, D.C. He later attended Phillips Exeter Academy before enrolling at Yale University, where he earned a BA in English in 1994.

Nivola made his Broadway debut in 1995 in the drama A Month in the Country, appearing opposite Helen Mirren. The role earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play. That same year, he appeared in the Williamstown Theater Festival production of Shakespeare's As You Like It alongside Gwyneth Paltrow. He returned to Broadway in 2012 in a revival of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy, and in 2014 starred in a revival of Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man opposite Bradley Cooper, a performance that brought him a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play. Between his Broadway engagements, he appeared off-Broadway in a 2010 revival of Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, directed by Ethan Hawke and co-starring Laurie Metcalf.

His screen career began with a supporting role in John Woo's Face/Off in 1997, in which he played Pollux Troy, the brother of Nicolas Cage's character. Subsequent film credits include Mansfield Park (1999), Jurassic Park III (2001), Laurel Canyon (2002), Junebug (2005), Coco Before Chanel (2009), Ginger & Rosa (2012), American Hustle (2013), Selma (2014), A Most Violent Year (2014), Disobedience (2017), You Were Never Really Here (2017), The Art of Self-Defense (2019), and The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019). He took on the lead role of Dickie Moltisanti in The Many Saints of Newark (2021), the feature film prequel to The Sopranos created by David Chase. He also appeared in Amsterdam (2022) opposite Christian Bale and Margot Robbie, and in the comedy Spin Me Round (2022) alongside Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza. In 2024, he portrayed Aleksei Sytsevich, also known as Rhino, in the Marvel film Kraven the Hunter, and appeared in both The Room Next Door and The Brutalist.

On television, Nivola starred opposite Robert De Niro in Barry Levinson's The Wizard of Lies (2017), portraying Mark Madoff. He appeared in the TNT miniseries The Company (2007), the UK Channel 4 series Chimerica (2019), and the three-part BBC miniseries Black Narcissus, broadcast in December 2020, in which he played Mr. Dean. He subsequently portrayed Bert Schneider in the Apple TV+ miniseries The Big Cigar (2024) and Calvin Klein in the FX/Hulu drama miniseries Love Story.

In 2013, Nivola and his wife, British actress Emily Mortimer, whom he married in Buckinghamshire in January 2003, co-founded the production company King Bee Productions. The company produced two seasons of the HBO and BSkyB comedy series Doll & Em (2015), which Nivola also acted in and produced. King Bee also produced To Dust, starring Matthew Broderick, which won the Audience Award at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and received a 2020 Independent Spirit Award nomination. Nivola's accolades include a Screen Actors Guild Award, a British Independent Film Award, and the Best Actor Award at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, in addition to his Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations. He and Mortimer have two children, a son named Sam, born September 26, 2003, and a daughter named May, born in 2010. The family resides in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.