Actor Alessandro Nivola has something he'd like people to know: He's not British. Nor French, Italian, Irish, or Australian. As he told me last week, he'd forgive you for thinking otherwise, but in real life, Nivola's just a regular old Boston native who speaks with an utterly neutral voice.
Of course, Nivola himself would be the first to admit he's made things difficult for people. In his biggest roles, he's employed some sort of odd voice or accent (typically a British one, as in Laurel Canyon or Mansfield Park) and he shows off two more in theaters now: In the new film Turning Green, he's an Irish thug, and in Coco Before Chanel, he plays a Brit who speaks in fluent French throughout the picture. Do people in the industry ever forget that he's an American? "American?" laughed the affable actor. "When have people ever thought that about me?"
It wasn't always supposed to be this way. "I didn't imagine I would be in foreign films," Nivola confessed. "It was completely by accident. I started off as an actor thinking that I would be this Romeo, this dashing leading man. It turns out that I'm a character actor."
After breaking out as Nicolas Cage's squirrelly brother in Face/Off, Nivola was offered the sort of part he'd been anticipating: a romantic lead role in Michael Winterbottom's next film. If he'd taken it, it's easy to imagine a different path for the actor, but when Harvey Weinstein pulled financing for the movie, Winterbottom regrouped and sent Nivola a very different script: Instead of playing an American heartthrob, Winterbottom wanted him to play a South Coast Londoner straight out of prison in I Want You.
"It was the most preposterous casting," said Nivola. "I was terrified that I would be made fun of by English actors who thought, 'I should have that role.'" It was the first job where Nivola devoted himself to learning an accent, and he moved to Hastings for two months to live the life of his character and learn the affectations of his speech and class. It took a physical toll he was unprepared for. "Since it was the first time I'd done it," he recalled, "I had these painful headaches from using my jaw in all sorts of uncomfortable ways."
Still, the role led to even more accented characters in other films, and Nivola found himself embracing the unexpected career turn. "I wasn't comfortable playing roles like myself -- for a long time, at least," he said. "I never had a strong sense of myself. Also, any time there's something obviously distinctive about a character, it's a good starting point. It's a gift. When you speak in another accent, it affects you. You can't help but be changed by it."
His career was similarly changed. Suddenly, after I Want You, Mansfield Park, and Laurel Canyon, Nivola was perceived by Hollywood as a British character actor. (His marriage to the English actress Emily Mortimer certainly hasn't cleared up matters). When Coco Before Chanel director Anne Fontaine wanted to cast the role of Boy, the one true love of Coco Chanel (Audrey Tautou), she was looking for an actor as close to Boy as possible: a Brit fluent in French. Thinking Nivola was English -- and hoping he knew the language -- she approached him for the part.
"I lied and said I could do it," he laughed. "I had high school French and that was it! I had to get a French tutor for two months to show up at my house in Brooklyn for two hours a day."
The result was impeccable. As Tautou herself told me, "He did an amazing job, because as a French person, when you listen to him talking, he speaks an amazing French. Really amazing." Nivola demurred, thanking Tautou for her support. "I was really fortunate that she'd had the mirror experience on movies like The Da Vinci Code," he said of the French actress. "She was really charitable in the beginning when I wanted to go home and quit acting."
Comparatively, Nivola's role as an Irish hood in Turning Green was no sweat, even though he confessed that he was much less familiar with that dialect. Still, he found inspiration in the most unlikely place. "One of the things I wanted for the voice of that character, this sleazy guy, was that he should have a soft, delicate, lyrical way of talking," he said. "I was listening to someone talk on NPR and he had these sibilant S's. It seemed like the perfect voice."
Though Nivola is happy with the fruits of his vocal mimicry -- "It's afforded me a huge range of roles that I'd never get to play" -- he cautions, "The thing with being able to do accents is that it's still completely separate from being an actor. My wife, for example, has the most beautiful speaking voice, but she can't keep a tune."
Mortimer may not be able to, but Nivola reluctantly concedes that, yeah, he can -- in fact, in the upcoming Janie Jones, he plays a past-his-peak rocker and sings ten songs written for the film by Clem Snide's Eef Barzelay. It's the first time in a while that he's played an American, but don't think that made things easy on him. "I'm so out of shape that I was winded after!" he laughed. "It's great to play a rock star. Maybe not so great to be one." ♦