‘Kraven the Hunter’ Star Alessandro Nivola Reveals More Backstory Details About Rhino and Explains THAT Scream
Alessandro Nivola has been praised for his role in The Brutalist but faced a very different response for his performance in Kraven the Hunter. Sony’s latest (and probably final) film in its Spider-Man universe received harsh reviews and bombed at the box office.
Nivola, who plays the villain Aleksei Sytsevich (Rhino), addressed the movie’s reception during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, as well as some other details from the filming process.
He said he didn’t know much about the issues behind the scenes, only that things on set were enjoyable:
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. 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.
Source: THR
He also revealed that he was unsure of how Rhino’s movie origins were actually related to the comic books (spoiler, they’re not):
Do you know what inspired that specific character detail?
I am not really sure where that came from or if there was something in one of the comics. I loved the device because Aleksei had gone to the ends of the earth to undergo some kind of physical biochemical change in order to address the humiliation that he’d felt all his life at being sickly and wheezing and weak.
That was mirrored when he’s never shown any respect. And to whatever degree that biochemical transformation was successful, that invincibility ended up being so physically painful that he spends his day to day medicating himself in order to keep himself in a weakened natural state. It’s such a great metaphor that he’s now having to treat himself in order to prevent himself from taking on that strength and power that he always wanted. It has that much of a cost.
One of the film’s most talked-about moments is a bizarre screech from Nivola’s character near the end, after his underling delivers bad news. Nivola explained that it was originally supposed to be a ‘silent scream,’ with no sound at all:
When Rhino’s right hand lets him know that a hit fails, you made this incredible choice in the form of a bird-like cry. It was kind of on the level of Pollux Troy’s pinkie wave in Face/Off.
(Laughs.) Actually, 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. Everybody thought that it was a bird-like reference, but the silent scream was just an idea that popped into my head as we were in the middle of the scene. I then tried it and it worked.
The crew on set loved it, but when Nivola saw the final cut, he found that a strange bird-like sound had been added during post-production. While he wasn’t sure it worked better than the original, he couldn’t help but laugh at how weird it was. At that point in the movie, it didn’t really matter much anyway.
The whole thing became a meme and, whether it was intended or not, gave people something to talk about.
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