In The Many Saints of Newark, Alessandro Nivola plays Dickie Moltisanti, the much talked about father of Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos. Much talked about, yes, but we never really knew much about Dickie. And when David Chase started casting for The Many Saints of Newark, no one really knew who the lead character would be. (There was some assumption it would be Tony Soprano’s father, Johnny Boy Soprano.) Also not knowing who the lead character would be was Alessandro Nivola, who didn’t figure it out until he got the full script sent to him while he was on a flight and realized he’s in almost every scene. Nivola has been around awhile and has done some great work (he is great in Disobedience), but he also realizes, now even in his 40s, playing the lead in a Sopranos movie is a big break.
In Alan Taylor’s The Many Saints of Newark, Dickie’s crew is challenged by a new crew, led by his former friend who used to be on Dickie’s payroll, Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.), which sets off a gang war in Newark between Italian and Black gangs. Caught in the middle of this is young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini), who looks up to his uncle Dickie, but Dickie slowly realizes the less influence he has on Tony, the better. The scenes between Dickie and Tony are key for understanding their relationship. And as Nivola explains, he and Gandolfini took it upon themselves to build some rapport before they shot. (And, hopefully, that rapport is still intact after the premiere party where Nivola’s toilet was leaking into Gandolfini’s room.)
How are you doing?
I’m alright. I had a late night last night…
Oh yeah, the premiere party?
It was great. I had lots of friends and family and everything, but then I got woken up at the crack of dawn by the hotel, telling me that my toilet was leaking down into Michael Gandolfini’s room underneath me.
Well, that’s not good.
I had to pack up and leave.
You look a lot less menacing after a night out, as opposed to the movie.
I’ll take that as a compliment.
I hope you had fun though, other than the toilet part.
No, it was great. I think all of Staten Island watched the movie. But actually, in terms of just watching the movie and trying to get a feel for how the audience is responding to different moments and to the evolution of the story and the characters, it’s not very representative. And, in some ways, I almost feel like things get missed in that atmosphere, in that raucous atmosphere.
Yeah, sometimes it’s like, “You missed an important line while you were applauding.”
It’s true. Well, last night, they were laughing at lines that they knew were coming, just because some of them were such big fans. There’s that line that everybody in The Sopranos always quotes about Junior saying that Tony didn’t have the makings of a varsity athlete. Junior’s about to say the line. He hasn’t even said it, and the whole audience started laughing.
Well, this had to be big for you, because you’re the star of this movie, and then you’ve had to wait so long for people to see it. What are you feeling? Is it relief? It’s been, “I’m the star of The Sopranos movie and no one can see it.”
I think relief was probably the perfect word to describe it. It actually is three years from the day that I was cast in this thing, to actually having it out in theaters. And it was a bit like those sort of dog races, where they dangle that little rabbit or whatever it is in front of the dogs, and they keep trying to take a bite out of it, and it keeps getting pulled out of their mouths. I just want to kind of move on now.
It’d be funny if after you said that, you ended the interview. “So I’m done with this. I’m done talking about this. Goodbye.”
Yeah. I decided to move on, just before you called me.
Right now, right this second.
No, look, the whole thing has already changed my life and my career and all that kind of thing. Even though I’ve made a couple of movies since this one, or three movies since this one, I haven’t been able to kind of just really look to the future and let it go, just because of this long wait. And so, I’m looking forward to that.
You’ve been doing this a long time. Was there ever a “holy shit, I just got cast in the lead role in The Sopranos movie” moment? How long did it take for that to sink in?
Not long. I mean, the funny thing was when I had auditioned for the role, I didn’t know. He’d only sent me five scenes from the movie. They were the five big, most climactic scenes of the film. Like a mime, I had to, in the privacy of my own bedroom, carry out ghoulish murders. But I didn’t have the whole script. And so I didn’t even realize that it was the lead of the movie when I first started taping these scenes. I thought the scenes were pretty good and that the character seemed pretty interesting, but I didn’t really understand the stakes of the whole thing until after I’d met David and Alan. And then I was on my way to the airport to go visit my wife (Emily Mortimer) in Australia, who was filming in Melbourne. And the script came through on my phone, and I got on the plane. And then I read it on the plane to Melbourne. And by the time I got there, the stakes had gone way up…
So you’re reading this going, “Well, I’m in every scene.”
It really suddenly became a thing at that point. And then, of course, I had to wait for six weeks or something before I was cast. But it was clear to me the minute the call came through that it was a role that I had been waiting for, for 25 years of a movie career.
Well, what’s interesting, too, you are one of the few actors in this that kind of can make this character their own. You and probably Ray and Leslie? Corey Stoll can’t be like, “I think Junior should speak in falsetto,” and see how that goes.
Yeah. And even in so far as that the character has a kind of mythological quality in the series and that he looms over the series, because everyone talks about him. David Chase told me when we were starting to film that I shouldn’t pay any attention to anything that anyone had said about him in the series, because they’re all liars…
Which we find out is very true.
Yeah. He cut me loose from the feeling that I had to honor some kind of description of him that the series had made, but it was also a little bit intimidating because I had to create the character from scratch. And luckily, I had six months to prepare for this one. I normally get cast a week before, because some guy dropped out. And this, I had a really long time. Yes, I have an Italian name, and half my family are Italian immigrants, but this was really a role that required transformation for me. And, certainly, my life experience was nothing like these guys. Although I did have things to draw on, just in terms of growing up in a household where, when I was younger, they were speaking Italian, and there was a physicality and rhythms of speech and things, but it was a character study for me.
So much of the movie hinges on your relationship with Michael Gandolfini’s character. Pre-toilet incident, what was your relationship like? I’m curious if you hung out with him before shooting, to get some sort of rapport down. Which happens to be one of the most famous characters in television history.
Well, we knew it was important that we have an easy rapport together, because David is so un-sentimental, that he doesn’t write these characters saying, “I love you, man,” or whatever. I mean, that’s just not in his lexicon.
He’s not known for that. No.
So the audience needed to feel, to sense that kind of affection between us and that history between us and that closeness without us having to say it. So we did. We would get together once a week at this diner in downtown Brooklyn called Junior’s Cafe.
Oh, their cakes are amazing.
Yeah!
That’s a good place to hang out.
We didn’t really talk about the movie that much. We would just talk about our lives. Both of our dads had died, and we talked about that. And I think we were both feeling quite a lot of pressure and expectation coming into the job, just because he was just starting his acting career and having this potentially career-defining role that his dad had made famous. And I, fairly late in the game, to be having a kind of breakthrough role was being offered the same opportunity. And so, I think we were able to kind of be open about that and joke about it. And it was something that drew us closer. And so, by the time we started filming, I really felt a kind of filial bond with him. So those scenes were really easy to play.
‘The Many Saints of Newark’ opens this weekend in theaters and streams via HBO Max. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
