Actors often go to great lengths to become their characters, and one way to lend authenticity to a role is through an accent. When done well it can carry the day. Think: Hugh Laurie’s American accent on House and Renée Zellweger’s deftly delivered British in the Bridget Jones movies. When done poorly, it can be a total distraction. Think: John Malkovich’s gluey Russian in Rounders and who even knows what Keanu Reeves was trying to do in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Bottom line: Nailing the accent is key, which makes it understandable that Alessandro Nivola would fret over his (far beyond adequate, it turns out) rendition in the gorgeous Coco Chanel origin story, Coco avant Chanel. The Brooklyn-based actor is fluent in Italian and played a louche British rocker in 2002’s Laurel Canyon, but as Arthur “Boy” Capel, Gabrielle Chanel’s lover and patron, Nivola faced a linguistic challenge: Capel was an English aristocrat and the fi lm is entirely in French.
“In America, if you have a foreign accent, we find that incredibly attractive. The same is not true in France,” he laughs. “Even though my character was supposed to be English and speaking French as a second language, the director [Anne Fontaine] was obsessed with my pronunciation more than anything else in the performance.” This resulted in take after take after take, until Fontaine was satisfied that he’d gotten it right. “It was completely maddening,” he recalls. “Look, I’ve always tried to find ways to make myself as uncomfortable as possible as an actor, because it’s a challenge to see how far I can go from what I do well. But this was by far the farthest I’d gone, ever.”
On top of that, Nivola was the only foreigner on the Normandy set, where he also had to learn how to play polo—his previous on-screen riding experience for 1999’s Mansfield Park apparently not up to par. But he found an ally in Audrey Tautou, who plays the young Chanel. “Audrey has this birdlike, gamine beauty, and seems like someone you want to protect,” he says. “And of course, she’s a power house, which made her so right for the role.” The two bonded (en Français) over the shared experience of doing a fi lm entirely in a nonnative language (her first being 2002’s Dirty Pretty Things, directed by Stephen Frears). “She was really sympathetic…. She said, ‘Listen, it’s only going to get better.’ My rapport with her got easier as the filming went on,” says Nivola.
Up next, look for Nivola back on familiar territory in the road-trip comedy $5 a Day, in which he plays Christopher Walken’s estranged son. As far as whether the newly minted polyglot plans to tackle any more languages: “Maybe I’ll do it again sometime, but not for a while,” he laughs. “Believe me.”
NEW YORK FAVORITES
Bridge: The Verrazano-Narrows
Neighborhood: Chinatown
Film: King of New York
