Alessandro Nivola Talks Calvin Klein and Carolyn Bessette

[This story contains spoilers from Love Story, episode six, “The Wedding.”]

Portraying Calvin Klein — a name nearly everyone knows and a designer who defined minimalist fashion in the 1990s — is no small feat, but Alessandro Nivola was up for the challenge.

Klein is also largely responsible for launching the career of another fashion icon: Carolyn Bessette. And while FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette mainly focuses on the relationship — and tragedy — of JFK Jr. (played by Paul Anthony Kelly) and Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon), viewers also get a glimpse of Carolyn’s life before she met John, when she lived in New York’s East Village and worked for Calvin Klein. He also played a role in bringing the couple together.

The first six episodes depict Carolyn’s working relationship with Calvin, her rise through the ranks at the fashion company, and the two’s real friendship. “There was a platonically romantic element to it,” Nivola tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I think he really loves her.”

That’s what makes Thursday night’s episode especially painful: Carolyn tells him she’s quitting her job because the public attention surrounding her relationship with John could affect her work. During the same conversation, however, Calvin reveals he knows she asked another designer — Narciso Rodriguez — to create her wedding dress, putting the nail in the coffin.

Below, Nivola talks about that pivotal moment, which he calls a “breakup scene,” the preparation he put into embodying Calvin (including mastering that voice) and the time he coincidentally ran into the real Calvin while having lunch in New York City.

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Your family has had incredible TV success the last couple of years, with your son Sam Nivola, starring in HBO’s hit The White Lotus season three, and now with you in Love Story which is No. 1 on Hulu and Disney+ How are you taking it all in? What has the reception been like for you?

It’s kind of a phenomenon. I’m off in Geneva now filming a movie. So I feel far away from everything. I’m up in the Alps or something (laughs), but I gather that it’s really become a sensation. It’s very rare, especially now, when it’s so difficult to capture everyone’s attention at once — hardly anything does that anymore. So when there’s something that everybody talks about in the workplace, or whatever, that’s a great thing, because it’s a throwback to another time.

Watching old footage of Calvin, he had this confidence and aura, similar to Carolyn. How did you work to embody that presence and his voice?

It was his voice that made me want to play the role. They had offered me the job, and I didn’t know what he looked or sounded like. I didn’t really know anything about him. I just looked up an interview with him, when the offer first came in. The minute that I heard his voice, his whole personal history was there. The Bronx sound of having grown up there, the son of Jewish immigrants and gone to public school. On the other hand, the cosmopolitan, international, fashion society world was in there too, his complex sexuality — everything to me, I could hear immediately. That became my launch point for beginning the character work. I feel like characters’ voices are a window into their soul. Everybody has a particular way of talking that is influenced by where they’re from, what their education is, who they have kept company with, who they want to be. Calvin had worked to try and lose the Bronx sounds that were in his voice and it remained nonetheless. (Laughs.) As he got older, you start to hear it less and less, and now, hardly at all, in his 80s.

His physicality was very particular as well. He had a really particular way of moving, of using his hands, of walking through a room, of holding himself. They were all things that I could start to see from interviews that I’d watched and talk shows and behind-the-scenes stuff at some of his runway shows. There’s a great interview that I dug up of Jon Stewart with him backstage at one of his shows in the early ’90s, and Jon Stewart’s being snarky and funny. You can see Calvin being different in that kind of a setting than he is in the more formal settings of a sit-down talk show. What emerged was the portrait of a guy who was, on the one hand, incredibly media savvy, very in control of his own image and his own brand, a perfectionist and had a high standard of excellence. On the other hand, [he’s] flirtatious and funny and had a little bit of a devilish, wild streak underneath. I wanted to try and tease out all those elements in every scene.

Did you ever reach out to Calvin Klein throughout this process?

The day before I was going to start shooting, I was sitting in Bar Pitti, which is a restaurant in Manhattan on 6th Ave, and I was with a friend. He was asking me what I was doing next, and I told him I was about to start playing Calvin Klein the next morning in Ryan Murphy‘s show. As I said the name “Calvin Klein,” this big black SUV pulled up by the side of the curb and out he stepped with his boyfriend and walked in. I had lunch three tables from him for an hour and a half. Both my friend and I were just shitting ourselves. (Laughs.) We couldn’t believe it. I’ve lived in New York most my life, and I’ve never crossed paths with him. People keep telling me he goes to that restaurant all the time. I go to the restaurant all the time. I’ve never seen him there, and there he was. That’s my closest encounter.

I’d watched so much footage of him in the two months leading up to that day, that I just knew. I had such a powerful image of the way that he walked and his physicality that I couldn’t even see his face as he was getting out of the car, just as his foot landed on the sidewalk, I knew it was him. He almost brushed right by me.

You didn’t say hi or anything?

I didn’t want to bother him. It was just an amazing coincidence.

This show has taken over social media with so much about the fashion. Have you heard from him? Because it seems [the brand] Calvin Klein is having such a resurgence now.

I know, I’m curious to know what he makes of it all. I have not heard anything from him. Leila George, who plays my wife Kelly in the show, has told me that [the real] Kelly [Klein, Clavin’s ex-wife] has posted about it, saying how reminiscent it was and how our portrayals were really accurate. So that means a lot. People keep asking me, “How would you feel if somebody were playing you in show or a film?” And I always say, “It would piss me off!” (Laughs.) I can’t imagine it not being annoying, but maybe it’s fun.

But I think that the show certainly isn’t in the business of trying to slander anybody. It was important to me, when I was reading it to begin with, that I didn’t feel that these character portrayals were at anybody’s expense or trying to sort of dramatize things in a way that was going to damage reputations. I can’t imagine he would feel that way. I hope not.

There’s a powerful moment in episode six when Carolyn tells him that she went with a different designer to design her wedding dress and then when she leaves the camera pans to a sketch that Calvin drew of a wedding dress, insinuating that Calvin thought she’d ask him to design her wedding dress. How do you think Calvin was feeling at that moment? Do you feel that marked the end of their friendship?

It’s a beautiful scene. Emotionally, there’s so many things running through it at the same time. The relationship between Calvin and Carolyn in the show certainly, and I think to some extent in real life, there was a platonically romantic element to it and this is kind of a breakup scene between them. (Laughs.) There’s something tragic and heartbreaking about it for both of them. Just before the scene begins, he finds out that she’s asked one of his protégés, Narciso Rodriguez, who was a younger designer at Calvin Klein, that he had brought up and hired, she was asking him to design the dress. It’s really like a knife in his heart just before she comes in to talk to him. He’s carrying that into that scene. This is a man who’s unused to being in a position of vulnerability like that — he’s the king of his domain. The feeling of being broadsided by something like this, he’s unaccustomed to and ill-equipped to deal with. I think his natural response is rage, resentment and anger. There’s this kind of barely disguised seething feeling of resentment towards her that’s coursing through it. But, at the same time, I think he really loves her and cares about her and wants the best for her. He can’t bear to send her away without her knowing that, even though it costs him in that moment when he’s so hurt to tell her that he thinks she’s going to look great and she made the right choice. Also, he issues a warning that he hopes she never loses the thing that she had when he first met her. Those are all genuine expressions of a profound affection for her. And to have those things playing at the same time is what creates the tension of the scene and the emotional complexity of it. It was a lot of fun to play. I think that was the last scene that Sarah and I shot together, so we’d been through the whole story of our relationship in the show up to that point.

The series really immerses viewers in ’90s New York — the fashion, the energy, the Calvin Klein campaigns with Marky Mark (aka Mark Wahlberg) and Kate Moss. Was the experience as nostalgic for you as an actor? Did you feel on set like you were transported back to that time? 

For sure, 100 percent. I arrived in New York in 1994 when I was right out of Yale and that was the beginning of my adult life. Within a year from graduating, I was starring in this play on Broadway with Helen Mirren called A Month in the Country, and there were all these other young guys who are now movie stars who were making their Broadway debuts at the same time. There was Jude Law, Damian Lewis, Rufus Sewell, Billy Crudup and Robert Sean Leonard. We all got to know each other because of being in shows on the same street. We would all meet up after the show every night at this place called Cafe Un Deux Trois in Times Square — and just go all night, every night, for nine months. We’d end up in one of our apartments when the sun came up, then sleep all day, and go and do the shows again. That was from the start of the runs of our plays until they finally closed. It dispersed as we went off to do our other projects. But that period of around ’95 was the most supercharged moment of my early adulthood. My career was just starting off, and doors were opening right and left. The city still was before cell phones, and there was just such a vibe there. You could still live in Manhattan and be making no money. I was living on Christopher Street in the West Village in a $500 a month studio. It was a very different New York at that time than it is now — and one I can’t help but think back on as a little golden era. So, it definitely reminds me of a moment in my life that was meaningful and exciting.

Did Carolyn really pitch Kate Moss to Calvin?

I have no idea. They did so much research. I did a ton of research myself on Calvin, and I read a biography of his. There’s a book that they based a lot of the research on [Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy]. Maybe that was a detail that they extrapolated from that book or from somebody they spoke to. Calvin, at that moment, was definitely starting to be interested in a new aesthetic that Kate Moss came to be a paradigm for. It wouldn’t have been a crazy surprise that she was chosen because he was starting to design for that aesthetic. But I don’t know the details of how she, in particular, was was chosen.

[Note: In Love Story, Calvin introduces John and Carolyn at a party. But it’s been reported that the pair met at a fitting at Calvin Klein’s studio.] I’m aware Carolyn and John met at the office for a fitting, so he is responsible for them being together.

Before that Annette Bening fitting scene was the first day of my shoot. Annette’s a friend of mine, we did a movie together a few years ago. The first thing I did when I read that scene was call her up because I come into the scene and it was going to inform how I greeted her. I said, “Hey, how well did you know Calvin Klein? Were you guys buddies?” She was like, “No, I didn’t know him at all. I think I met him once at a gala or something.” So that was funny. But I think that generally, they tried to be as accurate as possible. [Editor’s note: Annette Bening told Good Morning America earlier this week that the scene where Carolyn dresses her for a premiere “didn’t happen in real life.”]

I did read somewhere that [Klein] had some hand in introducing them, maybe at some party, but I don’t know.

The whole speech that I give in the lead up to introducing them, where I take her from that backstage area through the party and everything, there was empty space there. Max [Winkler] the director, had said, “I need you to fill this. It’s going to be about a minute long.” I had been listening to him tell these anecdotes over and over and over again, because I had them recorded and was listening to them in my ear obsessively as I was going through my day, just to keep listening to his voice, and so I had about 10 different anecdotes of his and little expressions that he was always saying, like, “You’re really kind of terrific” and “I’m a bad boy,” these are all things that he really said (laughs) in a bunch of different interviews. That whole story that I tell as I’m taking her to meet him and about how, “even after 40, you can still have fun,” that was all I just lifted word for word from an interview that I heard and just improvised it. So, I know that was true.

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Love Story releases new episodes Thursdays at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET on FX/Hulu, streaming on Hulu. Check out all of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Love Story coverage here, including our premiere launch piece and interviews with Sarah Pidgeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Dree Hemingway, showrunner Connor Hines and production designer Alex DiGerlando.