Alessandro Nivola currently finds himself in the rare position of garnering acclaim for his performance in one movie (The Brutalist), and being widely panned for his turn in another (Kraven the Hunter).
Sony's latest (likely final) SSU movie received dismal reviews, and was another box office bomb for the studio. Nivola, who plays the villainous Aleksei Sytsevich/Rhino, was asked about the negative reception during an interview with THR.
“I really don’t know what happened behind the scenes. On these kinds of movies, you hear about all the wranglings at the studio, and maybe there were too many chefs. I don’t know,” said the actor. “I don’t know enough about what the process was beyond just my experience of being on set, which was really joyful. So I didn’t have any sense of there being problems behind the scenes. But a lot of that probably starts to play out in the edit with all the different opinions about it, so I really couldn’t tell you.”
One of the movie's most meme-worthy moments occurs in the final act, with Sytsevich reacting to an underling delivering bad news by unleashing a bizarre, bird-like screech. Nivola reveals that this was originally supposed to be a "silent scream," before the noise was added in post.
“The way I performed it was totally silent. It was a silent scream. When I did it, everybody laughed on set. It was so weird, but they all loved it. We kept referring to it as the ‘silent scream moment. So I kept asking J.C. [Chandor] during the edit if the silent scream was still in the cut, and he said, ‘Yeah, of course. We would never lose the silent scream.’ But when I saw the movie, it had that guttural voice catch, which I don’t think was as effective as it would’ve been otherwise.”
Honestly, by that stage of the movie, we're not sure how much difference it would have made one way or the other. At least the bird-screech was funny - intentionally or otherwise.
“Kraven the Hunter is the visceral story about how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Set before his notorious vendetta with Spider-Man, Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as the titular character in the R-rated film.”
Kraven the Hunter is an upcoming American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, produced by Columbia Pictures in association with Marvel Entertainment. Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing, it is intended to be the sixth film in Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU). The film was directed by J. C. Chandor and written by Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, and Richard Wenk.
In addition to Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the title role, Ariana DeBose will play Calypso, a voodoo priestess and Kraven's on-off love interest (in the comics, at least); Fred Hechinger is Dmitri Smerdyakov, aka the Chameleon, who is Kraven's half-brother; Alessandro Nivola will play Aleksei Sytsevich, aka the Rhino, and Christopher Abbott will portray another villain known as the Foreigner.
The movie has been rated R for "Strong bloody violence, and language."