"Best Reviews I've Ever Had For Anything": Kraven The Hunter's Rhino Actor Addresses Marvel Movie's Negative Reviews And What Role Sony Had In The 16% RT Disaster

Actor Alessandro Nivola discusses Kraven the Hunter's reception and explains his satisfaction with his role as the Marvel supervillain Rhino. Despite Kraven the Hunter's star-studded cast, the sixth installment in Sony's Spider-Man Universe was met with some of the worst reviews in the franchise, and even worse box office results. Besides the titular villain-turned-antihero, Kraven the Hunter introduced three more famous Spider-Man antagonists — Dmitri Smerdyakov a.k.a. Chameleon, Calypso, and Aleksei Sytsevich a.k.a. Rhino.

In an interview with THR, Rhino actor Alessandro Nivola looks back on his antagonist role in Kraven the Hunter. When asked about his opinion on the factors that may have played into Kraven the Hunter's poor performance despite director J.C. Chandor's otherwise remarkable career, Nivola mentions the possible changes the studio might have made to the director's original vision and praises his previous work with Chandor. Alessandro Nivola also explains how he designed his Rhino portrayal and highlights the villain's positive reception. Read Nivola's full comments below:

"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. J.C., Chris Abbott and I had worked together before on A Most Violent Year, and we all knew each other, so J.C. and [producer] Matt Tolmach trusted us to run wild.

I based my character on a Russian poet named Philip Nikolayev, who’s a good friend of mine and my wife, Emily [Mortimer]. He’s a wonderful writer who’d been visiting us a lot in conjunction with a movie that Emily is writing about an experience she had when she was living in Moscow around the time of glasnost and perestroika. He jogged her memory about that time because they knew each other then, and he is just a totally brilliant guy. He has a really particular-sounding voice, manner and look about him. So he was my initial inspiration for the role, and J.C. and Matt were encouraging of it. Kraven was as creatively playful and fulfilling a time for me as a lot of other movies have been, and 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. All I know is that I had a great time filming it.

I haven’t read much of the reviews, but my agents sent me all the trades’ reviews, which were some of the best reviews I’ve ever had for anything. In fact, IndieWire wrote three pages about my performance, and so that’s nice. But I don’t really pay too much attention to critical and fan response because it can be a black hole. I went through all of that before with Many Saints of Newark. It was another situation where my performance was praised, but the movie was not."