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In The Many Saints of Newark, Alessandro Nivola plays a character from The Sopranos talked about but never seen: Dickie Moltisanti, a legendary 1960s Newark gangster who was murdered in the early 1970s. Series creator David Chase focused on Dickie in the previous film because the character was a blank slate – the main character’s long-dead uncle, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), and Christopher Moltisanti’s father (Michael Imperioli), Tony’s protege and surrogate son.
The filmmakers had to play the part with an actor who could give a subtle performance as a believable human being while still being mysterious, terrifying and ultimately unknowable. The Dickie depicted in the series – a hero from an epic or a great story – doesn’t really exist here. This Dickie is easily distracted, lewd, impulsive, and prone to explosions of deadly rage. It was a tricky role and Chase wanted to play it with an actor who hadn’t appeared in The Sopranos but would be convincing enough to stand up to the performers he had chosen as younger versions of the show’s lead roles.
When Nivola’s name came up, Chase was puzzled. Nivola had made an impression with his performances as characters who could have been on The Sopranos – the shady prosecutor in the years 2013 american unrest and a Brooklyn gangster in 2014 One of the most violent years. Nivola also has close ties to the old country: his paternal grandfather was the Italian sculptor Costantino Nivola, whose work the actor affectionately promotes on twitter.
We spoke to Nivola by phone last month about Dickie, Tony, Christopher, Chase and the psychology and morality of the drama. [Warning: Spoilers ahead for both The Sopranos and The Many Saints of Newark.]
Who is Dickie for you? How did you build it?
I feel like he’s someone who wouldn’t necessarily have been a criminal or even been violent if he hadn’t been born into this life. She is a person whose character and fate was determined by her early childhood, who was abusive. He has these reckless voices in his head that guide him, sometimes seriously and sometimes comically, to some kind of noble act of kindness. But he is too simplistic and he does not have the language of modern psychology to understand what these voices represent. All he knows is that this is the world his father beat him in.
Dickie has two defining qualities that I could understand. One is that he loves Tony. The other is that he cannot control his violent impulses in these blackout moments when he is emotionally provoked. All the crimes he commits in the film are crimes of passion, whether it’s killing his own father and taking his young Italian wife, Giuseppina, as his girlfriend or drowning Giuseppina in the ocean after finding out. that she was cheating on him. And all of these crimes are totally doomed to failure. Like Jake LaMotta in Angry bull, he is the architect of his own destruction, and he realizes it too late. If there is something redemptive about him at the end of the film, what I believe is that he wants to die as much or more than the audience wants.
Dickie is forced to accept that the best way to help Tony is to never see him again or talk to him again, but at this point in the story Tony is the only person in the world who has left Dickie to whom he is. is concerned. He puts that advice in Uncle Sally’s voice, which may or may not be real.
It’s interesting. Do you think Uncle Sally, the character Dickie visits in prison, is real?
Either way, he’s the voice of Dickie’s conscience – Dickie grappling with himself. And at the end of the movie, Dickie breaks down and makes the decision to see Tony and tell him to run away. But he gets killed before he gets a chance to get this message across to Tony. I think he wanted to tell her all his life and never knew how to say it.
The humor and heartache of Dickie’s character is that he’s willing to be a surrogate father for the character, but he’s completely incapable of it except in a comedic and awkward way. The scene with the child Tony, where Dickie comes to talk to him in his room, is a paradigm for the whole movie. It’s like a sad little parody of a scene in an old sitcom where a father advises his son.
Did David Chase give you marching orders as to who Dickie was or how to play him?
No, nothing like that. The fact that Dickie was never seen on The Sopranos gave me complete freedom to invent the character. The only thing David really told me about Dickie was “Don’t believe anything anyone said about him on the show because they’re all liars” which gave me even more of freedom to feel that I didn’t have to shape myself. into something that already existed or had already been defined.
It’s true. Whenever a Soprano the character tells you a story about himself or someone else, he always leaves things out, lies or shapes things to make people in the story look better or worse than they are were actually.
All of David’s characters are untrustworthy storytellers. That’s part of the fun of the show.
When it comes to the world of The Sopranos, I assumed when I was chosen that David was going to be a news source and that he was going to have a million people to introduce me to from that period of his life that was going to be my entry into authenticity . But David said he didn’t know anyone! And whenever I asked detailed questions about, say, the hierarchies within the crowd and the structure of the DiMeo family, he didn’t really want to be bothered by any of that. David was more interested in the interactions between characters in the present tense and in finding humor.
What else did you discuss with David?
David was really fascinated by my Italian origins and what it meant to me and what my experience had been with it. On the one hand, I come from an Italian family: my grandfather was an immigrant from Sardinia. My father and my grandfather spoke Italian at home when I was little. But on the other hand, my grandfather was a sculptor and was part of a sort of community of artists and bohemians who lived in the West Village in the 40s and 50s, much more in the vein of the family of Robert De Niro. In fact, my grandfather was friends with Robert De Niro’s father. So my dad grew up in that kind of bohemian Greenwich Village life, which couldn’t be further from the lives of the characters in this movie.
Then my father became an intellectual, went to Harvard, and taught at the Brookings Institution for years. And I ended up going to Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. My whole experience has moved away from the Italian-American immigrant experience of someone like Dickie Moltisanti. But I was able to relate more directly in terms of physics and rhythms of speech and certain expressions – just behavioral things.
There has always been a tragic element in gangster stories, especially on The Sopranos. There is always the question of the impact of invisible, perhaps supernatural, forces on events and what is real versus what is imagined or distorted by people’s perceptions.
A lot. I also think of Shakespeare. Think about all those scenes with Uncle Sally. It’s so powerful that Dickie finds himself facing him and staring into the face of his own father, the man he killed. When Sally first arrives in the prison visitation area, my character hasn’t seen her since she was 5 years old, and her first reaction is amazement and terror. It is as if Hamlet sees his father’s ghost.
Sally is fascinating. The way he wrote and the way Ray Liotta plays him, it’s like he has omniscient and omniscient knowledge. Just like Dr. Melfi had done. He is there to be my confessor. But like Tony in Melfi’s presence, I’m just lying to him.
And like Dr. Melfi with Tony, Sally never grants absolution.
No! In fact, it makes me feel worse about myself.
Are you worried that Dickie is too bestial to be likable?
I don’t really think of it that way. There are so many tragic Greek characters that you don’t like – you just understand and feel them. Like Jason or Medea. Or Jake LaMotta. I always come back to Angry bull. When you get to that scene in the jail where Jake hits the wall over and over and says, “You’re so stupid, you’re so stupid, you’re so stupid,” you’re not supposed to think, Oh my God, I love this guy! I would like to be married to him! It’s about understanding the pain of realizing what it is to hate yourself and knowing that you’ve ruined your own life.
This is obviously an important film for you, Angry bull. What other parallels do you see between Dickie and Jake?
I think about Angry bull compared to this moment at the end of Many saints where Tony comes knocking on the warehouse door and I won’t let him in but I just sit there and cry. I had this idea, after watching Angry bull, that at that point, Dickie wanted to die like Jake wanted to die. We had a first cut of this scene where I take my tie and try to strangle myself with it. But then I have a scene with Silvio where I agree to meet Tony, and there’s something so existentially broken about me about that that it felt like overkill to have the tie scene right before that. .
What do you think happens to Dickie in this part of the story?
It is about his awareness of himself as a monster. It is a desperate realization. This is what I hope will give the audience permission to feel for themselves even if Dickie has to die, basically.
How do you play a guy like that without making excuses for him but at the same time without making him so disgusting that it turns everyone off?
I do not know. Hope I got that, but a lot of the challenge here has to do with the difference between film and TV as formats. When you have an antihero in a TV series, a character that you sit with in your home for years, he’s part of the fabric of your family. Your relationship with all of their weaknesses is different than it is in a two hour format, where the actor has more of a burden to provide some kind of balance to all the horrible and violent acts so that you don’t lose your audience. for this character. The scales are tilted against a character in this two-hour format.
People I’ve spoken to and seen him don’t seem to hate Dickie, although there’s plenty of good reason to think of him as a freak. I’ve played so many characters that made people say, “Oh, that person is a terrible person,” but I didn’t really have that reaction to that character. I wonder if I will.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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