But stability was something of an illusion for kids like Nivola, who are of the generational pocket of young people whose high school years were pretty much wholly taken over by COVID-19. He remembers being studious in middle school and grabbing a Criterion Collection membership to impress a girl. Then the pandemic hit and made everything kind of blurry. The path before him suddenly wasn’t so clear, and he’d already been thinking about how to make a go of it in acting, despite his parents’ wishes.
“I feel like all students my age had a reckoning of, if all these institutions that we put so much faith in, whether it be college, high school, work, 9 to 5, whatever, if all of these things can just evaporate because of an act of god, like a virus, then are they so intrinsic to… This sounds silly, but, are they as intrinsic to humanity as we thought they were, or is it just a thing that we’re expected to do, that maybe needs to be looked into more about why we do it? You know what I mean?” he muses, making eye contact.
As a high school senior, Nivola nabbed his first big movie role as Adam Driver’s character’s son in the Noah Baumbach film White Noise and filmed that for seven months in Ohio. After graduation, he took a gap year to run around Italy “getting espressos and eating the best food you’ve ever had, drinking wine with my family, and chasing girls that were out of my league,” he laughs. If you’re picturing Timotheé Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name, he says that’s exactly the right vibe.
When he started running out of money, he tried out a few months in L.A., thinking he’d meet with casting directors and become a big Hollywood name. His agent told him everything was over Zoom now, the offices were all closed, and there was really no reason for him to be there. So, he went back to school and made it a single semester at Columbia University before dropping out with bad grades.
The college thing was tough for his parents. They ended up pulling a classic move: No college, no financial support. (Though he admits that if he’d “really gotten myself in trouble, they would’ve helped me, they’re my parents.”) But it did the trick, lighting a fire under him and forcing him to think at least a little practically as he followed his dreams. By that point, Nivola had already realized he didn’t want to live in fear of failure. “I’d much rather work in a café every day for the rest of my life and put on plays with my friends than I would be an accountant.”
While Columbia didn’t work out, he did love living up near campus in Harlem. “I feel like Harlem is one of the only places left in the city where you have a community that looks after each other, where you have the old men that sit on their stoop and watch everything that goes on, and if someone’s being picked on or harassed or whatever, they get involved,” he says. “It’s a real community. I wish I’d stayed up there, but [the East Village] is where it’s at.”
