ACTOR
In the Workshop Production of LM Feldman’s ‘hand foot hand’, directed by Jessi D. Hill. Playwrights Realm.
ACTING REEL 2025
Watch me speak Italian in my first Feature Film! With Cristin Milioti and Danny DeFerrari
A segment from my wacky webseries Pier Valentino’s: Show Without End!
AEA. SAG-AFTRA.
*2015 Equity Jeff Award Nominee for Outstanding Supporting Actor
*2017 New York Innovative Theatre Award Winner for Best Actor
Reviews for Betrayal at The Goodman, April-March 2025
“Pinter’s dialogue is spare but always to the point, with the pauses and moments of silence that the playwright is known for. The three actors each perform their roles thoughtfully, with passion or quiet angst. The fourth character, an Italian waiter (Nico Grelli), is a delightful cameo role and always an audience favorite. The waiter adds some welcome levity to the scene and we wish the plot had required more meals in that Italian café.”
— Third Coast Review
“Rounding out the cast is Nico Grelli as a waiter at a restaurant that Robert and Jerry frequent during workdays. Grelli finds levity and humor in a role that otherwise seems to only serve as jumping off point for Robert’s reflections on fathers, sons, and the question of posterity.
— Broadway World
“As the mostly two-person scenes…move backward in time, we see Jerry and Emma in 1975 break up and give up the flat they took together for their afternoon trysts, a crucial falling-out between Emma and Robert in Venice in 1973, the follow-up lunch between Robert and Jerry the same summer (with Nico Grelli providing comic relief as the waiter)…”
— Hyde Park Herald
Select Past Reviews
Commanding the stage like a muscled-up rooster in combat boots, J. Stephen Brantley stars in his own play as a forty-year-old gay punk rocker on an angry mission to stop the love of his life—a wounded charmer played with desperate ebullience by Nico Grelli—from wasting away on Stolichnaya and crystal meth.
-The New Yorker. Review for The Jamb at The Kraine
His lover, the adorably-named Ethan Sweet (Nico Grelli), is earnest and sincere, lacking a filter from their very first date. It's a love story destined for failure, yet Christopher carves out their tale so well that you want the two of them to find what they're yearning for.
-Stage Buddy. Review for Animals Commit Suicide
Grelli’s Mangiacavallo captures the essence of a man who is incapable of hiding his feelings, no matter how much they might embarrass him. When he apologizes for what he thinks are unmanly tears, Niccolai’s Serafina comforts him with the wise, if ungrammatical, “A man is not no different than no one else.” By ditching the burnt-to-ashes godlike image of her late husband and embracing Mangiacavallo’s flawed but loving heart, Serafina springs back to life.
— Chicago Tribune. Review for The Rose Tattoo at Shattered Globe.
Grelli’s edgy and amped-up performance as childish, adolescent, and adult Dragan, all rolled into one, perfectly exemplify the faces of this war.
-Word Press. Review for Honey Brown Eyes at SF Playhouse.
Enter Alvaro Mangiacavallo, banana truck driver, in the ebullient persona and lean form of Nico Grelli….They’re a delightful pair, Niccolai’s testy, reluctant Serafina and Grelli’s impulsive Mangiacavallo, circling and sparring and both wanting the same thing but only one of them quite understanding it. What has been virtually a one-woman tragicomedy with incidental support suddenly blossoms into a full-blown comedy for two, and Grelli leaps boldly into the picture bringing a truckload of charisma, comic finesse and sexual energy.
— Chicago On The Aisle. Review for The Rose Tattoo at Shattered Globe.
Damilano and her cast create gripping drama where it counts most, though, in the play's central interchanges. Jennifer Stuckert's preternaturally calm, murder-widowed Bosnian Muslim Alma faces off with Nico Grelli's jumpy, battle-wearied, immature Bosnian Serb Dragan in a richly loaded ethnic cleansing interrogation, eerily punctuated by a sitcom laugh track on her portable TV.
-SF Chronice. Review for Honey Brown Eyes at SF Playhouse