"If for some reason I'm suddenly a big movie star, I think it'd be great," he says. "If things get hectic \{because of stardom\} -and I hope they do -I can handle it." This fall Nivola can be seen in three major film releases. The first is "Best Laid Plans," which opens Friday.

Nivola also soon will be seen as the star of "Mansfield Park," based on the Jane Austen novel, and in Kenneth Branagh's (and William Shakespeare's) "Love's Labour's Lost." Nivola, 27, dark blond, slim, of medium height, says he took the role of Nick in "Best Laid Plans" because "the story is old-fashioned noir \{and achieves\} suspense in its plot rather than with guns and explosions. Plus the two big plot twists are incredible." And, he says, his character was challenging. "That moral ambiguity he has, it's hard to pin him down, that attracted me." But he concedes signing for the part also was a career move.

Nivola, whose friends call him "Sandro," comes from a family of artists. His grandfather, Sardinian-born Costantino Nivola, who died in 1988, was a noted sculptor; one of his pieces is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, others are at Harvard University and Yale, and another is at a Manhattan playground on West 91st Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues.