‘Love Story:’ Alessandro Nivola On His Nuanced Portrayal Of Icon Calvin Klein [VIDEO]

In episode six of Love Story: John F. Kennedy & Carolyn Bessette, Calvin Klein, as embodied by the wonderful Alessandro Nivola, has a poignant scene with Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon), a valued employee and friend, who has selected Narciso Rodriguez, a former Klein assistant, to design her wedding dress instead of Klein. She arrives to inform Klein she’s leaving the company, so he feels doubly betrayed. Throughout the series, a deep affection, a “platonic love,” has been established between the two and now it’s over, as if someone pulled the designer carpet from under him. Nivola does a masterful job of masking both his bruised ego and terrible hurt, letting just the right drops of vulnerability spill through.

For anyone familiar with the thesp’s work on stage or screen, it’s no surprise. The actor has been giving us subtle and multifaceted characters for over 30 years.

Nivola comes from a family of artists and is married to actress Emily Mortimer, and his son Sam Nivola (The White Lotus) is also an actor.

As a young student, he dreamed of moving to New York City to have a career in the theater and within a year he was starring in A Month in the Country on Broadway, opposite Helen Mirren in 1995. His subsequent theater work included the revival of A Lie of the Mind off-Broadway in 2010 and the Broadway revivals of The Winslow Boy (2013) and The Elephant Man (2014), the latter transferring to the West End in 2015.

His screen debut was in John Woo’s Face/Off (1997) and he made a few films in the UK right after like Michael Winterbottom’s I Want You (1998), Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999) and Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), before playing major lead roles in two American indie films, Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon (2002) and Phil Morrison’s Junebug (2005). Subsequent movie credits include James C. Strouse’s Grace is Gone (2007), Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl (2010), David O. Russell’s American Hustle (2013, SAG Ensemble Award), Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year (2014), Lynne Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here (2017), Sebastián Lelio’s extraordinary Disobedience (2017) and David Chase’s The Many Saints of Newark (2021). In 2024 both Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Pedro Almodóvar’s highly underrated, The Room Next Door premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The former went on to win three Oscars, and the latter took home the Golden Lion at Venice. In 2025 he appeared in Simon Curtis’s Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and this year he co-starred in Matthew Shear’s indie, Fantasy Life.

Upcoming, he is set to star in Nicole Kassell’s drama The 99’ers for Netflix.

Currently streaming on FX and Hulu, Love Story marks one of his few forays into TV and his awesome work has placed him in the Emmy conversation.

The Contending had the pleasure of a chat with the actor and cinephile about Love Story and his career.