Alessandro Nivola is somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, holding his phone vertically.
He is heading from New Jersey to New York for the 2026 Gotham TV Awards, where his “Love Story: John F. Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette” co-star Sarah Pidgeon is nominated, and the 25 minutes he has carved out for this conversation are the only ones he could find in a schedule that has, by his own admission, finally caught up to him. The Manhattan-bound trip is sandwiched between multiple obligations.
“It was certainly a surprise to me,” Nivola says of the response to the Ryan Murphy-produced limited series, in which he plays Calvin Klein. “The impact that the show had, I did not expect that.”
For an actor who has spent nearly three decades being among the most respected names in the room without often being the most discussed one, he’s been content with just getting to make art.
Nivola, 53, has accumulated the career that working actors recognize as enviable and that the wider awards apparatus has historically overlooked. From the Hasidic Jewish rabbi in “Disobedience,” to the power-hungry prosecutor overseeing the FBI’s Abscam operation in “American Hustle,” to real-life civil rights lawyer John Doar in “Selma,” he’s acquired plenty of “that guy” roles, but he’s also made his mark in them. And then there are the fan-favorites such as his turns in “The Many Saints of Newark” and “The Brutalist.” A run of performances stitched into films that almost all earned recognition without ever quite carrying him with them.
