In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Alessandro Nivola discusses the big career change that has led to him starring in two of the year's most acclaimed films, The Brutalist and The Room Next Door.

Some lucky moviegoers had the chance to see Alessandro Nivola in not one, not two, but three significant releases over the holiday break, including some heavy-hitting awards contenders. Over Zoom on a mid-December afternoon, when I suggest to the veteran character actor that he’s in the midst of a busy year, he chuckles and shakes his head: “Well, busy week.” Indeed, these are projects he’d shot at different times over the last two and a half years; that they all came out the same weekend was the work of the Hollywood gods.

Nivola’s steady, increasingly impressive career as a prestige utility player owes a lot to accepting that kind of unpredictability. The Boston native has gradually learned what he can and cannot control as an oft-undersung actor in this business, using that earned wisdom to dictate the trajectory of his life onscreen. It’s a big reason why he gets to steal scenes in both Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, two of the top prizewinners in Venice last fall, and why he comes out not only unscathed but boldly outrageous in J.C. Chandor’s Spider-Man spinoff movie Kraven the Hunter, which premiered in December to dismal reviews and worse box-office results.

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“If she’s the only one who chooses the triple feature, my mom gets to see three wildly different performances in the course of a few days,” Nivola says. “I’ve probably never had a career-defining role. To me, what has defined my career is its range and variety and transformation.”

Nivola is one of the first faces you see in The Brutalist, an epic immigrant tale centered on László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who’s just escaped the Holocaust and landed in Philadelphia. In a stirring opening sequence, he meets his cousin, Attila (Nivola), who left for the US years earlier and has built a life for himself as a furniture store owner. László and Attila reunite at the train station in a moment captured in overpowering VistaVision, the midcentury technology that had not been used for an American film in decades.

The camera “was only three or four feet away from us in profile in that scene, and it was so loud that we could hardly hear each other speak,” Nivola says. “It echoed the madness of the world around us as we were playing this scene—the hysteria and horror of the concentration camps. László having just endured that, and Attila’s shame at having escaped it 10 years earlier as an immigrant prior to the war.”

Though he appears only in a small part of The Brutalist’s monumental whole, Atilla gets a full arc. The movie’s first 45 minutes play like a tragicomic mini film about once inseparable cousins navigating deep love, trauma, and resentment. That it works as well as it does isn’t a surprise to Nivola, but does reflect the actor’s new method for choosing roles. “If you look at the list of directors I’ve worked with from American Hustle until now, compared to before—maybe I'm wrong, but I think you’d see a change there,” Nivola says. Since making that Oscar contender with David O. Russell, he’s worked with some impressive names: Chandor, Ava DuVernay, Nicolas Winding Refn, Lynne Ramsay, Sebastián Lelio, and now Almodóvar and Corbet.

Early in his career, Nivola was drawn to big parts he could make a meal of. Sometimes he managed that, like in Lauren Canyon, Lisa Cholodenko’s lauded indie in which Frances McDormand’s record producer romances Nivola’s shameless budding rock star. “I was lucky to work with her,” Nivola says of Cholodenko. On other projects, though the jobs sounded just as exciting on paper, he was left at sea.

“Some directors have pissed me off and gotten in the way of my performance. But you have to find a way to be able to escape into the world of your imagination regardless of what you’re being told, or how you’re being manipulated by a director,” Nivola says. “The movies just started getting better.”

If Nivola helps set the tone for The Brutalist, he brilliantly shakes things up at the end of The Room Next Door. Almodóvar’s English-language debut is mostly tightly focused on two old friends (Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton) coming back together after one of them decides to end her life. No spoilers as to how Nivola’s brash upstate New York cop enters the picture, but his bluster provides a different energy from the lengthy, meditative, feminine conversations that lead to his arrival on the scene.

When Nivola arrived in Madrid (where the film was shot) for rehearsals and fittings, he had an idea to pitch. He grew up in northern Vermont, “just across the lake from where this character probably grew up,” and felt like he knew this type inside and out. “When I first got there, my costumes, man—he had me in a beautifully tailored designer suit with a pink tie and everything,” Nivola says with a laugh. “I was, like, ‘Oh, okay. I’m an Almodóvar cop.’” Still, even fully aware of and embracing Almodóvar’s signature style, the look didn’t sit well.

“I’d been watching a lot of detective interrogations in upstate New York, and they wore exactly the same thing—this black short-sleeve polo and khaki pants,” Nivola says. “I took screengrabs of these YouTube interrogations and I sent them to Pedro and I said, ‘Listen, I have no idea if this fits into your world, but for what it’s worth, every time I’ve watched one of these interrogations, they always are wearing the same thing. And it’s not a pink tie.’” Almodóvar wrote back politely. He thanked Nivola, called the observation interesting, and said he’d think about it.

Nivola never heard another word until the time came to shoot the scene. He opened the closet door of his dressing room, without a clue as to what awaited him, and saw, essentially, the exact look he’d described from the interrogation videos. Costume designer Bina Daigeler had nailed every detail.

“I knew then that that was his license for me to play this character in all the specificity of a real person from that part of the world,” Nivola says. That extended to the actual filming. Almodóvar famously doesn’t ask for many takes; he figures out exactly how his movie will look and feel during those painstaking fittings and rehearsals. “The whole reason I became an actor is just to stop my brain driving me insane,” Nivola says. “Once we were in performance, he just completely let us go.”

Until recently, the last time Nivola auditioned for a part was for The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase’s feature-length prequel to The Sopranos. He gives a subtly brilliant turn as Dickie Moltisanti, father of The Sopranos’ Christopher (Michael Imperioli). The performance is wily, charming, fearsome, and curious; it’s always hard to pin down and does a great deal of work in executing the film’s mission of broadening the Sopranos universe’s myths and legacies.

Nivola is thinking back to that role because he’s currently on deadline to send Christopher Nolan a tape for the director’s next movie (which was later announced to be a take on The Odyssey). “Just being asked to do that—I guess there’s been some kind of weeding out,” Nivola says with a shy smile, indicating a bit of justified pride. “They don’t tell you anything about the movie, so I have to rely on friends who are in it to tell me. Obviously, everybody wants to work with him because there are only a handful of directors who are working on that level, on that scale.”

Nivola has never felt typecast in the industry, despite rising to a level where he’s often directly offered roles by significant filmmakers. It’s important for him to be seen as the opposite of a guy who does one thing very well. Take his relationship with Chandor, who first cast the actor in A Most Violent Year as a chilly, Mafia-aligned oil distributor. When Nivola got the call to work with him again for Kraven the Hunter, the job description wasn't so straightforward.

He based his memorably unhinged villain, the Rhino, on a family friend, the eccentric Russian poet Philip Nikolayev. Kraven, which went through rounds of reshoots and comes on the heels of another Spider-Man-adjacent flop in Madame Web, is not a good movie—but Nivola gamely gave it his all anyway. “It was like playing a Bond villain—it was important for me to have a balance of humor and menace in it,” he says. “These movies, in my opinion, need to have a little of both.”

And how many actors can say they’ve played the Rhino in a $100-million plus blockbuster? Well, there is one more guy. Nivola’s next project is the third Downton Abbey film, and he teases for me that he gets to play a “double act” with Paul Giamatti—who himself played the Rhino in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with Andrew Garfield. But that’s not the only reason the pairing felt special.

“We’ve grown up together,” Nivola says. “I was at Yale as an undergrad, and he was a grad student at the Yale School of Drama when I was about 18, and we were in a couple of plays together. Then, our kids went to the same school here in Brooklyn. We’ve known each other for more than half of my life.” For them to still be working together, decades later? That’s a sign of a career well spent.