You may not know his name, but you almost certainly know his face. With movie star good looks and the impish spirit of a character actor, Alessandro Nivola has spent the past decade proving himself an ensemble’s best secret weapon. In “American Hustle,” he played a gloriously sideburned FBI agent; “Selma” saw him slip seamlessly into the role of real-life civil rights lawyer John Doar. And his turn as a mobbed-up businessman in “A Most Violent Year” is memorable.
Nivola’s had major parts before — as Arthur Capel in “Coco Before Chanel” and a bohemian father in “Ginger & Rosa” — but his star is again on the rise.
In “Disobedience” — which screened at the Independent Film Festival Boston and opens here Friday — he plays Dovid, a prominent rabbi in North London’s insular Jewish Orthodox community. When his wife (Rachel McAdams) reunites with a childhood friend (Rachel Weisz), long-suppressed passions between the pair reignite, leaving the conflicted Dovid as one point in a fraught romantic triangle. Ahead of the film’s release, the Globe spoke by phone with Nivola.
Q. What led you to this project?
A. It was very unexpected. As is often the case in an acting career, you never really know what’s around the corner. At the times when you’re expecting things to happen, they don’t, and when you’re not expecting them to, they do, or sometimes they do. The script just arrived out of the blue. I’m not really sure who was responsible for sending it to me, except I do know that the English casting director on it, Nina Gold — the best casting director in the UK — has been championing my career in recent years, so maybe she had something to do with it.
Q. What appealed to you about it?
A. One of the things I liked was the way that [director] Sebastián [Lelio] handled this character. I felt that it was obvious that there was no villain to the story, that it was a story about three good people who were thrust into an impossible situation. That is so true to life. I knew it was going to allow for real complexity in those relationships, as opposed to other similar kinds of stories about infidelity, where my character would have been set up as a straw man to be knocked down by the condemnation of the audience in order to allow them to approve of an extramarital love affair.
Q. It’s an incredibly complex role.
A. When something like this comes along, it feels like a gift from above because, especially for me, I’m an actor who has found my biggest successes in roles that have been different from myself and have required me to really change the way I look, behave, and sound. This was an extreme example of that. I knew the minute I read it that it was something I could bring something to and that would be really exciting for me to lose myself in.
Q. I can imagine.
A. Of course, as is often the case in life, this wonderful opportunity came, and — within a very short time after I got the offer — I found out my dad had three months to live. I was suddenly faced with this horrible dilemma about whether to pull out of the movie and just be with him at the end of his life. He and I had a long conversation about it where he just begged me to go and do the film, because he didn’t want me sitting around, waiting for him to die. It was this whole negotiation where the producers tried to arrange the schedule so that I could fly back to see him on a few occasions over the course of the filming, which I did. As luck would have it, he hung in there for two months after I wrapped the movie.
Q. How did that shape your performance?
A. The story of my character involves somebody who’s mourning a father figure, so it couldn’t be more literally pertinent. But more than that, it was just a feeling of a real sense of purpose and mission I had going into it, because I knew it was all time I was stealing away from being with my dad. I just was determined not to waste any of it.
Q. You’re based in New York now but grew up around Boston. Did living here impact your career at all?
A. It had an effect on my life. My first little drama school was a summer program at BU. I think that was the first acting class I ever took. I lived in the dorms over on Commonwealth Ave.
Q. What sparked your interest in acting?
A. My father was great at doing impersonations. I remember at the dinner table often watching him impersonate family friends. He always had a knack for it. I don’t remember the first time that I tried my hand at it, but I definitely believe watching him do that must have had an impact. He was the son of an Italian-Sardinian immigrant and a German-Jewish refugee from Frankfurt who had come to the country in the ’40s, during the war. He had to learn English in school but was a very driven student and ended up going to Harvard, going to grad school at Harvard, and then teaching there. I was born when he was an associate professor in the political science department. It was all because of his affiliation with the university that I ended up growing up [in Massachusetts].
Q. You’ve had a successful past few years. To what do you credit that?
A. I made a decision about five years ago to change the way I was going about my career. I up until that point had always just chosen roles based on the role, and I didn’t really pay much attention to who was directing it. I came to realize that movies completely belong to directors. I got really sick of being better than the movies I was in, because the directors weren’t special enough. I just decided I would do any role in a film that had a great director, and it just completely made all the difference. That was the moment where everything changed.
Isaac Feldberg can be reached at isaac.feldberg@globe.com, or on Twitter at @isaacfeldberg.