‘Love Story’s Alessandro Nivola Responds to JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s Nephew’s Harsh Criticism [Exclusive]

Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Love Story, Episode 6

Summary

• In an interview with Collider for Love Story, Alessandro Nivola explains how studying Calvin Klein’s voice and interviews helped him unlock the designer’s contradictions and inner life.
• Nivola calls Calvin and Carolyn’s breakup an “absolute gut punch,” describing a scene driven by rejection and a lingering platonic love.
• He also addresses criticism from the Kennedy family, saying the show was never meant as a “hit job,” but a respectful attempt to tell a romantic story.

As FX’s Love Story heads toward its final episodes, the intimate and tragic story continues to draw attention for its tumultuous romance between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, whose real-life relationship dominated tabloids in the ‘90s and left a nation mourning their deaths. With only a few chapters left in the nine-episode anthology, the Ryan Murphy show is generating plenty of buzz online and within the Kennedy family itself. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning earlier this week, JFK Jr.’s nephew, Jack Schlossberg, continued his criticism of the show and urged viewers to treat it as a “capital F for fiction” piece.

That point of contention forms an interesting backdrop for Episode 6, “The Wedding,” which follows John (Paul Anthony Kelly) and Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) as they move toward their big day while the Battery Park fight continues to spread across the news. It also puts a spotlight on one of the show’s trickiest balancing acts: portraying real people with empathy while still building drama. Alessandro Nivola, who plays Calvin Klein, told Collider he understood why Schlossberg would feel protective.

“I can totally understand how I probably wouldn’t want somebody to play me. That would piss me off,” he told us in a call on Wednesday. Still, Nivola said that when he read the scripts, he didn’t see the series as a story out to embarrass anyone, explaining how he “got the impression that there was nothing slanderous or intended to be a hit job on any of the characters, including Calvin.”

And in “The Wedding,” that approach shows up most clearly in Calvin’s scenes with Carolyn, where Nivola plays the professional breakup between the pair not as a simple ego wound as she leaves her publicist role at the massive fashion brand, but as something messier and more human.

How Nivola Built a “Very Human” Calvin Klein for ‘Love Story’

Nivola lives in Klein’s voice, so he binged interviews, studied “vocal rhythms,” and let those details humanize the private scenes.

COLLIDER: Getting straight into this episode, “The Wedding,” Calvin Klein is a living, publicly known figure. How did you decide what to borrow from public Calvin, versus what you had to invent to make him feel human in those private scenes?

ALESSANDRO NIVOLA: I did as much research as I possibly could. I do know a few people who know him, and I know a lot of people who knew people who knew him or have known him, and so I did as much recon as I could, and then I read a lot. More than anything, it was just watching video interviews with him on talk shows and different kinds of on-camera things and just studying his behavior and his vocal rhythms and his accent and his way of describing things. When you start to watch things over and over and over again, every time you watch it, you start noticing more and more details. To me, his whole life and character are in his voice. There are elements of all the different kinds of acts of his life that I hear in his voice. Vocal stuff is probably my biggest fixation as an actor. It’s usually the sort of thing that I start with when I’m starting to try to find a way into a character, and he had such a unique and particular sound to his voice that was influenced both by his Bronx childhood and by his cosmopolitan adulthood, and his sexuality. It’s all kind of in there in a beautiful way and a rich way. So, that was a big part of it.

Then I read a biography of his that chronicled his whole life, which is just totally fascinating. He’s such an extraordinary person. He has lived so many lives, and he’s still living another one now. From being a child of Hungarian Jewish immigrants in the Bronx and then coming up through the rough and tumble years of working in the garment district, which is just so brutal, and clawing his way through that. Then, being discovered as a designer, and his ambition, his early hunger to succeed, and this business partnership that he had with his best childhood friend became the kind of defining partnership in his life. Then his two marriages to women, one being his high school sweetheart, with whom we had a daughter, and his daughter was kidnapped for ransom at one point. Then these wild days that he had at Studio 54 for a decade of drugs and partying, and then rehab and reinventing himself as a landed gentry Hamptonite, with his second marriage to Kelly. And then finally coming out, after that, and living with another man.

So, yeah, just a totally fascinating personal history. I tried to have as much of that in me somewhere, or an awareness of it, in every scene, and to have it impact him. He had this fascinating combination of precision, control, and power with his flirtatious charm and creativity, and those two things are constantly not at war with each other, but coexisting, and you see them sort of flicker back and forth through him throughout.

I want to see that show now with you as Calvin Klein, the entire trajectory.

NIVOLA: [Laughs] I know! He needs a spin-off.

The ‘Love Story’ Scene That Was an “Absolute Gut Punch” for Calvin Klein

The breakup plays as romance and rejection at once.

That scene with you and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn — you have great chemistry and a great rapport in the show. But there’s that moment when they break up, and she admits that with the paparazzi hounding her and her becoming a distraction to the brand, she needs to step back. Did you see that as Calvin being protective or territorial, or was it just something more complicated?

NIVOLA: The beauty of that scene is that there are many things going on at once, and the best scenes always have that. He’s just incredibly stung. He finds out just before she comes to see him that she’s asked his protégé, Narciso Rodriguez, who he raised as a designer in his company, to do the dress, and so it’s just an absolute gut punch. I think he’s just reeling from it when the scene begins. He’s somebody who’s so not used to being in that position of vulnerability and to feeling that kind of rejection by somebody that he really loves. Because I think that, in its platonic way, there is a kind of romance between them that’s developed. So, that feeling of betrayal is just enraging, I think. His instinctive way of handling the feeling of pain or rejection or humiliation is just rage, and that’s just seething right under the surface.

But then at the same time, he really loves her. He can’t help, despite everything, but wants the best for her. And those conflicting emotions are just coursing through him all through the scene, back and forth and back and forth, and that’s what gives it its complexity and tension.

He is one of the only people in her world who knows her before that whole Kennedy mythology. He understands her to the core. What do you think he understands about Carolyn that others in the world don’t? Because I feel like even her exit, the way he’s kind of looking at her — and it’s a great performance from you, and I think Emmy season should definitely come knocking on your door, but the way you’re looking at her, there is that longing, like when you talk about that platonic romance. I think that because he was so enamored with her, it speaks so much louder now, especially when she’s gone.

NIVOLA: On the one hand, he’s somebody who’s lived in the public eye most of his life, and he’s so okay with it. He’s so used to it. In the earlier episodes, he’s very unforgiving about the whole idea that celebrity is somehow cruel or painful. I mean, when they talk about Kate Moss earlier, he’s like, “Oh, poor Kate. I feel so bad for her. She doesn’t want it? She doesn’t have to have it. She can go back to where she came from, and no one will care.” You know what I mean? He’s very ruthless about that.

But in this scene, he’s watched her come from obscurity and be sort of thrust into the public eye in such an extreme way, and he’s obviously aware of her vulnerability because of it. He does feel sort of protective of her, and there is real humanity in his feelings about her, even in the face of rejection. So, what he’s wanting to leave her with is that he really wants the best for her, and he really is scared for her in a way.

There’s almost something of a kind of sage to him in those final moments. It’s foreshadowing her demise and the way that she’s going to unravel under the glare. He sort of issues a warning, and the warning, I don’t think, is, “You deserve some sort of punishment.” I think it’s genuine. I was playing that it was genuine and that it came out of care and not out of something vindictive.

Nivola on the Heated Backlash From JFK Jr.’s Nephew

Nivola says true stories require “speculation,” but he felt the show wasn’t “a hit job,” just a “romantic story.”

With the show being out and creating a stir, everyone is a little territorial about the story because of what these two mean. The family has also made some comments, and [on Tuesday], Jack Schlossberg came out saying how the show is “capital F for fiction,” and saying the series itself has been painful for the family. As an actor, now that people are watching and reacting, how do you process that?

NIVOLA: Any time that you’re telling a story that’s based in some sort of reality, you’re faced with having to fill in elements of the relationships and the characters that are speculation. That’s been true of true stories throughout the ages, and certainly in the case of my portrayal of Calvin Klein. I was using my own imagination to try and hint at what I interpreted to be some kind of essential quality of his.

Reading the scripts when they were sent to me, I got the impression that there was nothing slanderous or intended to be a hit job on any of the characters, including Calvin. I wouldn’t really have been interested if it felt lurid that way. But I can totally understand how I probably wouldn’t want somebody to play me. That would piss me off, and so I understand that. I’m not really sure. I didn’t read what Jack said, so I don’t know specifically what the things are about the show that he found upsetting, but having read [the scripts], I didn’t get the impression that it was in the business of trying to do anything but tell this romantic story in a respectful way.

From talking to people, obviously, the show has taken on its own life now. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in something that has been so universally watched. I definitely haven’t had any feedback from anybody saying that they’re watching it because of some kind of hunger to see famous people dragged through the mud. I understand the feeling of being exposed. That must be difficult.

Before I let you go, I’m so curious: Where were you when you heard the news for the first time that JFK Jr. and Carolyn had died? I mean, I remember it as a teenager, vividly — where I was, and how I felt. I feel like everybody has a story because it was such a big part of our culture at the time.

NIVOLA: I was living in New York at this time, and I had just arrived in New York in 1994, so this was my heyday. I was in my 20s. I was just becoming an actor. I was starring on Broadway. Jude Law and Damian Lewis, Rufus Sewell, Billy Crudup, and I were all in shows at the same time. We were carousing around town, having this wild first taste of the limelight. I recall that time as one of the most exciting moments of my life. I was aware of, in the city, feeling so alive at that time, too. I was living down in the Village. I was living on Christopher Street, for like, 500 bucks a month, when young actors, writers, and artists could still live in Manhattan back then on very little money. So, the city really had that kind of buzzy vibe to it.

I remember John and Carolyn just being in that kind of public consciousness and being in the papers all the time. But I really never followed the ins and outs of their relationship. My whole scene was this sort of, whatever, Bohemian downtown, arty-farty crowd, so I wasn’t generally going to the same places they were. I wasn’t at a whole lot of black-tie events and stuff, so I never really crossed paths with them. I do remember this terrible tragedy that happened, but it just wasn’t a big part of my life, except that it was in the background of my world.

Love Story airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. EST on FX, and streams the next day on Hulu.