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[Thisstorycontainsspoilersfrom[Thisstorycontainsspoilersfromlove story, Episode 6, “The Wedding.”]
Photographing Calvin Klein – a name that almost everyone knows and the designer who defined minimalist fashion in the ’90s – is no easy feat, but Alessandro Nivola was up to the challenge.
Klein is also largely responsible for launching the career of another fashion icon: Caroline Bisset. And while FX Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Bissette Mainly focusing on the relationship – and tragedy – between JFK Jr. (played by Paul Anthony Kelly) and Caroline (Sarah Pidgeon), viewers also get a glimpse into Caroline’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 Caroline and Calvin’s working relationship, her rise through the ranks at the fashion company, and their true friendship. “There was a platonic, romantic element to it,” Nivola says. Hollywood Reporter. “I think he really likes her.”
And that’s what makes Thursday night’s episode especially poignant: Caroline told him she was quitting her job because the public attention surrounding her relationship with John might affect her work. However, during the same conversation, Calvin revealed that he knew she had asked another designer – Narciso Rodriguez – to design her wedding dress, which puts the nail in the coffin.
Below, Nivola talks about that pivotal moment, which he calls the “breakup scene,” the preparation he put into embodying Calvin (including perfecting that voice) and the time he met the real Calvin by chance over lunch in New York City.
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Your family has had amazing TV success in the last couple of years, with your son Sam Nivola starring in the hit HBO series White lotus Season 3, now with youlove story And it’s No. 1 on Hulu and Disney+ How do you deal with all of that? How was the reception for you?
It’s kind of a phenomenon. I’m in Geneva now to shoot a movie. So I feel far away from everything. I’m in the Alps or something (He laughs), but I think it became a really big sensation. It’s a very rare thing, especially now, when it’s so difficult to grab everyone’s attention at once – and almost nothing does that anymore. So when there’s something that everyone is talking about in the workplace, or whatever, it’s great, because it’s like a throwback to another time.
Watching old footage of Calvin, he had this confidence and aura, similar to Caroline. How did you work to embody that presence and his voice?
It was his voice that made me want to play this role. They offered me the job, and I didn’t know what he looked or sounded like. I didn’t really know anything about him. I was just looking for an interview with him, when the offer first came up. The moment I heard his voice, his entire personal history was there. Bronx appears to have grown up there, the son of Jewish immigrants and went to public school. On the other hand, there was also the world of the global and international fashion community, and its complex sexuality – everything that, to me, I could hear immediately. That became the starting point to start doing the character work. I feel like the characters’ voices are a window into their soul. Everyone has a certain way of speaking that is influenced by where they are from, what their education is, who they go with, and who they want to be. Calvin worked on trying to lose the Bronx sound that was in his voice and it stayed in spite of it. (He laughs.) As he gets older, you start hearing it less and less, and now, barely at all, in his eighties.
His physique was also very special. He had a really special way of moving, using his hands, walking across the room, and holding himself. It was all things that I could start to see through the interviews I watched, talk shows, and behind-the-scenes stuff at some of his fashion shows. There’s a great interview I did with Jon Stewart with him backstage at one of his shows in the early ’90s, and Jon Stewart was so brash and funny. You can see that Calvin is different in this type of environment than he is in the more formal environments of a talk show. What emerged was a picture of a man who was, on the one hand, incredibly media savvy, very in control of his own image and brand, a perfectionist and a high level of excellence. On the other hand, [he’s] Flirtatious, funny, and had a bit of a wild, devilish streak underneath. I wanted to try to extract all of these elements in each scene.
Did you ever communicate with Calvin Klein during this process?
The day before we started shooting, I was sitting at Betty’s Bar, which is a restaurant in Manhattan on Sixth Avenue, and I was with a friend. He was asking me what I was going to do next, and I told him I was about to start playing Calvin Klein the next morning on the Ryan Murphy show. When I said the name “Calvin Klein,” the big black SUV pulled up to the curb and he got out with his friend and went inside. I had lunch from him at three tables for an hour and a half. My friend and I were just shitting ourselves. (He laughs.) We couldn’t believe it. I’ve lived most of my life in New York, and I’ve never met him. People keep telling me he goes to this restaurant all the time. I go to the restaurant all the time. I never saw him there, and he was there. This is my closest encounter.
I had watched a lot of footage of him in the two months leading up to that day, and I just knew it. I had such a strong image of the way he walked and his body that I couldn’t even see his face as he got out of the car, just when his foot landed on the pavement, I knew it was him. He almost touched me.
You didn’t say hello or anything?
I didn’t want to upset him. It was just an amazing coincidence.
This show has taken over social media with a lot about the fashion. Have you heard from him? Because it seems [the brand] Calvin Klein is experiencing such a resurgence now.
I know, I’m curious what he does with all this. I didn’t hear anything from him. Laila George, who plays my wife Kelly in the series, told me this [the real] Kelly [Klein, Clavin’s ex-wife] He posted about it saying how much he remembered us and how really accurate our photos were. This means a lot. People keep asking me, “How would you feel if someone played you in a show or movie?” And I always say, “That’ll piss me off!” (He laughs.) I can’t imagine it not being annoying, but maybe it would be fun.
But I think the show is definitely not about trying to defame anyone. It was important to me, when I was initially reading it, that I didn’t feel like the portrayal of these characters was at anyone’s expense or trying to dramatize things in a way that would damage reputation. I can’t imagine he would feel that way. I hope not.
There’s a powerful moment in episode six when Caroline tells him she went with a different designer to design her wedding dress and then when she lets the camera pan to a sketch Calvin made of the wedding dress, hinting that Calvin thought she was going to ask him to design her wedding dress. How do you think Calvin was feeling at that moment? Do you feel this marks the end of their friendship?
It’s a beautiful sight. Emotionally, there are many things going on at the same time. Certainly the relationship between Calvin and Caroline on the show, and I think to some extent in real life, there was a platonic romantic element to it and that’s kind of their breakup scene. ( He laughs.) There is something tragic and heartbreaking about it for both of them. Just before the scene began, he discovered that she had asked one of his students, Narciso Rodriguez, who was a younger designer at Calvin Klein that he had raised and hired, and was asking him to design the dress. It’s really like a knife in his heart before you come to talk to him. He carries that into this scene. This is a man who is not used to being in such a vulnerable position, he is the king of his domain. Feeling exposed to something like this, he is not used to it and is not equipped to deal with it. I think his natural reaction is anger, resentment, and rage. There’s this kind of angry, barely disguised feeling of resentment toward her that flows through him. But at the same time, I think he truly loves her and cares for her and wants what’s best for her. He can’t bear to send her away without her knowing, even though it costs him in that moment when he’s in so much pain to tell her that he thinks she’ll look great and that she made the right decision. He also issued a warning that he hopes she never loses the item Which she had when he first met her. These are all genuine expressions of deep affection for her. And having these things running at the same time is what creates the tension and emotional complexity of the scene. It was a lot of fun to play. I think that was the last scene that Sarah and I shot together, so we had gone through our entire relationship story on the show up to that point.
The series truly immerses viewers in 1990s New York – the fashion, energy, and Calvin Klein campaigns with Marky Mark (aka Mark Wahlberg) and Kate Moss. Was the experience nostalgic for you as an actor? Did you feel on set as if you had returned to that time?
Absolutely, 100 percent. I arrived in New York in 1994 when I was just out of Yale, which was the beginning of my adult life. Within a year of graduating, I was doing this play on Broadway with Helen Mirrenmonth in the country, And there were all these other young people who were now movie stars and were making their Broadway debut 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 from being at 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 go all night, every night, for nine months. We’ll end up in one of our apartments when the sun comes up, then sleep all day and go and do shows again. That was from when our plays started running until they finally closed. It dispersed when we went to do our other projects. But that period around 1995 was my most active moment in early adulthood. My career was just starting, and doors were opening left and right. It was still a city before the advent of cell phones, and there was a lively atmosphere there. You can still live in Manhattan without making any money. I was living on Christopher Street in the West Village in a $500 a month studio. New York was very different then than it is now – I can’t help but think back on it as a little golden era. So, it definitely reminds me of a moment in my life that was meaningful and exciting.
Did Caroline really promote Kate Moss to Calvin?
I have no idea. They did a lot of research. I did a lot of research myself on Calvin, and read a biography of him. There is a book that they relied on for a lot of research[[Once Upon a Time: The Enthralling Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy]. Maybe those were details they gleaned from that book or from someone they talked to. Calvin, at that point, was definitely beginning to be interested in the new aesthetic for which Kate Moss had become a model. It wasn’t a crazy surprise that she was chosen because he started out designing for that aesthetic. But I don’t know the details of how to choose it, in particular.
[Note:In[Note:Inlove story, Calvin introduces John and Caroline at a party. But it was reported that the duo met at Calvin Klein’s studio.] I know that Carolyn and John met in the office for the fitting, so he is responsible for them being together.
Before that, the scene for Annette Bening was the first day of filming. Annette is 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 because I had come to the scene and he was going to tell me how she was received. I said, “Hey, how well do you know Calvin Klein? Were you friends?” She was like, “No, I didn’t know him at all. I think I met him once at a party or something.” So that was funny. But I think overall they tried to be as accurate as possible.[Editor’snote:AnnetteBeningsaid[Editor’snote:AnnetteBeningtoldGood morning America earlier this week that the scene in which Caroline dresses her up for the premiere “didn’t happen in real life.”]
I’ve read that somewhere [Klein] He had a role in introducing them, perhaps at some party, but I don’t know.
The whole speech that I gave in the lead up to their introduction, where I took it from that backstage area through the concert and everything, there was an empty space there. Top [Winkler] The manager said, “I want you to fill out this letter. It will be about one minute long.” I would listen to him tell these stories over and over again, because I recorded them and I would listen to them obsessively in my ear as I went about my day, just to keep listening to his voice, and so I had about 10 different stories about him and the little expressions he would always say, like, “You’re really kind of cool,” and “I’m a bad boy,” those are all things he really said ( He laughs) in a group of different interviews. That whole story I tell as I take him to interview him and about how “even after 40, you can still have fun,” that’s all I just lifted word for word from an interview I heard and just improvised. So, I know it was true.
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love storyNew episodes release every Thursday at 6pm PT/9pm ET on FX/Hulu, and stream on Hulu. CFuck everyone Hollywood Reporter ‘s love story Coverage here, Included Our first launch piece and Interviews with Sarah Pidgeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Dre Hemingway,Showrunner Connor Haynes and production designer Alex DiGerlando.
