Alessandro Nivola plays Sir Robert Morton, London’s flashiest and most expensive lawyer, in The Winslow Boy, a revival of Terence Rattigan’s play, set in Downton Abbey–era 1912. An import from London, the production opens this week on Broadway with an all-new cast, including Roger Rees, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Cumpsty. VF Daily caught up with Nivola, who filled us in on what it was like playing a lawyer who’s a “neurotic mess”—plus, Bradley Cooper’s hair curlers in David O. Russell’s upcoming American Hustle, and the TV series he and his wife, Emily Mortimer, just sold to HBO. Highlights from our chat:

____What drew you to The Winslow Boy? Did you go after the role or did they come to you with it?

Alessandro Nivola: Lindsay Posner, the director, had asked me to do a couple of other productions of other plays that [he] directed in the past two years, and I wasn’t available. But we started a correspondence, and so when he asked me to do this, it was a no-brainer. Mainly just because I really wanted to work with him, but also because I had a preconception about what the role was, which turned out not really too true. [Laughs.] I thought that the role was this kind of classic-leading-man, old-movie-star kind of part, because I’d seen both the films. In both cases, they were just these sort of dashing, kind of dry, witty, very cool characters. I thought that would be fun to play. Of course, once we got into rehearsing the play, and I got to know the play, as opposed to the films, I realized that the role was, in fact, a kind of opposite. He’s really a total neurotic mess. [Laughs.] He is somebody who is just so emotionally crippled that he’s quite an extreme personality. And eccentric, in ways that I don’t think were really brought out in the films at all. Partly because in the theater you can allow for a broader spectrum of behavior, in a way, than you can in movies.

This play hasn’t been on Broadway since 1947. What is it like doing a play that people haven’t seen revived, even, say, 15 years ago? Is it like doing a new play?

There’s a big difference. On the one hand, we had a handicap as a cast, which was that the play had just been done in London in a highly successful production by the same director. So we all felt the burden of this ghost cast that had just triumphed in all of our roles. On the other hand, it’s a great thing that so few people have seen it. It’s rare that you do a revival of anything that isn’t something that everybody’s seen a million times. I haven’t had that many friends in yet to see the show, but the few I have had come in were all surprised by the play. And they all come into the theater and sit down and see this Edwardian living room and slightly roll their eyes, and then are surprised by how funny the play is, and how kind of subtly woven the story is, and how fully realized all the characters are. I think everybody comes in thinking, ‘Oh, some dusty old English play.’

The cast is great. Do you have a rapport?

I’ve done a lot of plays and a lot of films, and I don’t think I’ve ever done one where there hasn’t been one bad seed. There’s always one kind of egomaniac spoiling the fun. Miraculously, there isn’t one on this. It really starts with Roger [Rees]. Roger and I have known each other for a long time. He was doing a play called Indiscretions, with Jude Law, and I was doing a play with Helen Mirren, A Month in the Country, on Broadway at the same time. This was way back at the beginning of my career, in ’95 or ’96, and our casts used to all get together at Café Un Deux Trois after work every night. It became this kind of actors’ salon. I got to know him really well back then. But this is the first time that we have worked together. He is really one of these treasures who doesn’t take himself at all seriously. He’s doing what I think is an incredibly powerful performance and a very emotional one. Backstage, he’s just joking around and doesn’t have any kind of need to be left alone or sitting quietly in the dark, or trying to work himself up to whatever state you’ve got to be in. He has a totally lighthearted attitude toward the whole thing, and it just makes the experience so much more enjoyable, and it infects everybody as well.

I just read that HBO has picked up this TV series, Doll & Em, that you’re producing with your wife, Emily Mortimer.

The way that it came about is Emily and I started a production company about a year and a half ago, and this was the first project that we conceived. She and her best friend from childhood wrote it, and we got another old friend of ours, Azazel Jacobs, to direct it. We were initially going to make it as an independent film. We shot 20 minutes of it on a Canon 5D SLR camera that was a totally improvised piece of film. Not even a movie camera, no lights, and it cost zero. Nothing. We just shot it in our house. And it turned out so well that I decided to start trying to raise money for the film with it. I raised a big chunk of money to make an indie film, and then on a whim, we were in the U.K. and decided to show it to Sky, the television channel over there, and they immediately offered to finance the whole rest of it if we would do it as a six-part series. So we then just reconceived of it in six parts, and we shot the whole thing in Los Angeles. They’re going to air it in February over there. But then we sold it to HBO in the U.S., so it’ll air here after that, probably in the spring. It just played at the London Film Festival.

I saw a review of it from that festival, which was quite complimentary.

The Hollywood Reporter gave it a great review. And it’s been kind of just a great thing all around. Partly because we managed to do it just with friends and family, and it’s launched our company in just the right way. We have a bunch of other things now that we’re putting together as well. So it’s been a nice other hat to wear. I definitely didn’t know what I was getting into when I agreed to get involved as the main producer of a series, because I somehow assumed that I would be able to allocate more responsibility to other people. [Laughs.] It ended up being, like, hundreds of hours of poring over legalese and commissioning agreements that were just mind-numbing.

If it goes well, are you thinking of doing more seasons?

Sky has already given us a budget to develop a second season. Now we’re just starting to write that. So we’ll see how quickly we can get it done. When we shoot it will depend on whether The Newsroom gets picked up for another season. HBO wants to do that, but they’re waiting on Aaron Sorkin to tell them that he’s game.

You just shot the new David O. Russell film, American Hustle. What was it like working with him?

Oh my god. Well, it was like no other experience I’ve ever had. It was definitely one of the most rewarding. I had done the Elephant Man, the play, with Bradley Cooper just the summer before, so he had been telling me about what shooting Silver Linings Playbook had been like. I couldn’t believe it, the way he was describing it. He was telling me that David O. Russell would have the camera rolling and just be sort of shouting out lines for you to say while the camera was rolling, and then you would just repeat them. I got in there, and sure enough, that’s exactly how we shot it. He lights a whole room, so there’s no traditional coverage—normally the way you shoot a movie is you do one side of the room, you’d light, and you’d shoot the character who’s on that one side. He doesn’t do it. He just lights the whole room, gets everybody in there, and has these incredible cameramen. Everything is shot on steadycam. He just stands right behind the camera operator and tells them what to film at any given moment. He talks while you’re filming the scene. He’ll say, ‘Go to Alessandro, go to Bradley, go over here, go to the picture of the cat that’s on the wall!’

He’d written a totally brilliant script, some of which is making it into the movie, but a lot of the dialogue that’s spoken in the movie is dialogue that he’s invented on the spur of the moment. It’s got such a kind of energized, free form that it’s just incredibly spontaneous, and also terrifying because there’s no way to prepare for it. It’s just like bungee jumping. He became a sort of extension of all the different characters and would be feeding you, and you would give it back to him, and then he would give it to you again, and you’d give it back. It just had this kind of wild, reckless, and inspired feeling about it. And obviously, I haven’t seen the film, I don’t know how this one will turn out, but I know that from his other movies, they all have a feeling of being very alive. And that’s clearly to do with the way that he shoots, because it’s so distinctive.

I looked at a trailer, and there’s a scene where Bradley Cooper is wearing curlers in his hair. Did you see that?

I don’t know if you know what the movie is about, but it’s about a famous F.B.I. sting operation on a bunch of congressmen that was back in the late 70s. There were all these extravagant characters who were involved, and the story itself seems almost farcical, too absurd to be true. But it really was. And the F.B.I. had gotten some agent to dress up as an Arab sheik and pretend that he was looking to invest money in Atlantic City casinos, and all of these public officials just completely, no-questions-asked, took him for who he was. Bradley plays this F.B.I. agent. He was a real Bronx Italian guy, and he was a kind of impotent guy, powerless, and wants to take control over this operation and keeps making a mess of it. But he’s incredibly vain, so he had that outrageous hair. [Laughs.] He looks amazing! Everybody has got the most incredible hair and makeup, myself included. I play a Brooklyn Italian guy who is the chief prosecutor. He kind of masterminded the whole sting. I have these massive sideburns. The top of my head is just a helmet of hair slicked back, and then I’ve got these enormous sideburns that looked almost Hasidic. David O. Russell kept telling me I looked like a vampire.