Alessandro Nivola has just been served a plate of prosciutto that even the famously voracious Tony Soprano might have trouble polishing off. Sequestered in a café on a tiny piazza in Lucca, Italy, across from a glittering, mosaic-encrusted church, Nivola is back in the ancestral homeland of The Sopranos’ famous mobster antihero, ahead of the release of the upcoming prequel film, The Many Saints Of Newark. He plays Tony’s mentor and father figure, Dickie Moltisanti, a man only a generation or two removed from life in the old country; as he chats with the waiter in Italian, it’s not hard to see why Nivola was cast. “È molto grande,” he jokes, pointing to the ham.
Since his breakout playing Nicolas Cage’s creepy brother, Pollux Troy, in Face/Off in 1997, Nivola has established himself as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand supporting actors. He has had roles in Selma and You Were Never Really Here and a brilliant turn as Dovid, a devout orthodox Jew caught in a love triangle alongside Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz, in 2017’s Disobedience. In 2019, he played a psychopathic karate sensei in pitch-black comedy The Art Of Self-Defence opposite Jesse Eisenberg and starred in Channel 4 series Chimerica as an imagined version of the photographer who took the “Tank Man” image near Tiananmen Square in 1989. But The Many Saints Of Newark promises a gear change for Nivola: the lead in a blockbuster film, the massively anticipated cinematic follow-up, no less, to a TV show widely regarded as the greatest of all time.
Dickie, who is the closest The Many Saints Of Newark really has to a protagonist, is the father of Christopher Moltisanti, Tony Soprano’s errant “nephew” from the original series. Never seen on screen during the show, other than in photographs, the long-dead Dickie is only alluded to in passing by the older generation of made men. Even his son’s stories might not be wholly true. “Christopher is a liar,” says Nivola, “and has created his own mythology about his father that may or may not be accurate.” As such, Nivola says he felt like he had “carte blanche” to invent Dickie from the ground up, based on his own imagination.
The result is a brutally compelling character. Dickie, who glides around Newark in a Cadillac as if he owns the place (because, in a way, he does), is a mafioso worthy of a place in the pantheon of ice-cold mob killers, alongside Goodfellas’ Jimmy Conway and The Irishman’s Frank Sheeran. And the fact both these men were played by Robert De Niro is perhaps less of a coincidence than it seems, as the Nivola and De Niro families have a long history together. Nivola’s Sardinian-born grandfather, a sculptor, and De Niro’s father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr, knew one another as part of Long Island’s 1960s art scene. Later, Nivola would play De Niro’s character’s son in HBO’s The Wizard Of Lies. “De Niro’s experience was similar to my dad’s,” says Nivola.
The Many Saints Of Newark isn’t the only Italian job Nivola has in the pipeline. Cured meats notwithstanding, he’s really in Tuscany to shoot a comedy alongside Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza called Spin Me Round, which he describes as a satire of “those movies such as Under The Tuscan Sun and Eat Pray Love”. He can’t say any more, but one thing’s for certain: there will be more plates of prosciutto in between filming and more afternoons in the Luccan sunshine. “It’s appropriate that it’s a comedy,” Nivola agrees, “because it’s just laughably beautiful.”
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