‘Kraven the Hunter’s’ Alessandro Nivola Unpacks Rhino’s Backstory and THAT Scream

Alessandro Nivola, acclaimed for his role in The Brutalist, experienced a starkly different reception with Kraven the Hunter. Sony’s latest addition to its Spider-Man universe faced scathing reviews and flopped at the box office, possibly marking the end of the franchise.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Nivola, who portrays the villain Aleksei Sytsevich (Rhino), opened up about the film’s poor reception and shared insights into the production process.

Reflecting on his experience, Nivola admitted he wasn’t fully aware of the behind-the-scenes challenges but emphasized that his time on set was thoroughly 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 admitted he wasn’t certain how Rhino’s cinematic backstory aligned with the comics (spoiler: it doesn’t):

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 buzzworthy moments is a peculiar scream from Nivola’s character near the end, triggered by bad news from his underling. According to Nivola, the scene was initially intended to feature 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 the silent scream idea, but when Nivola saw the final cut, he was surprised to hear a strange bird-like sound added in post-production. He wasn’t sure if it worked better than the original idea, but he couldn’t help laughing at how weird it was. By that point in the movie, it didn’t really make much of a difference.

The moment quickly turned into a meme and, intentional or not, gave people something to talk about.

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