He returned to Broadway acting in the revivals of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy (2012), and Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man earning a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play nomination for the later.

His mother, Virginia (née Davis), is an artist, and his father, Pietro Salvatore Nivola, was a professor of political science and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

[citation needed] Nivola graduated from Yale University with a BA in English in 1994 and a year later made his Broadway debut opposite Helen Mirren in A Month in the Country earning a Drama Desk Award nomination.

1 & 2 (2005, 2007), Coco Before Chanel (2009), Ginger & Rosa (2012), American Hustle (2013), A Most Violent Year (2014), Selma (2014), The Neon Demon (2016), One Percent More Humid (2017),[13] You Were Never Really Here (2017), Disobedience (2017),[14] The Art of Self Defense (2019), and The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019).

He played Dickie Moltisanti, the lead role in The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase's feature film prequel to his television series The Sopranos.

Onstage, in addition to A Month in the Country, he starred on Broadway in 2013 in The Winslow Boy and in 2014 in The Elephant Man opposite Bradley Cooper (Tony Award nomination), and off-Broadway in the Ethan Hawke-directed Sam Shepard play A Lie of the Mind (2010) with Laurie Metcalf.