Paul Giamatti would simply like to make it clear that he may not always have to act like a talker.
It would be nice, just to change things up a bit, if you could portray someone more likely to express themselves non-verbally: a taciturn horse breeder with a distressing past, for example, or a world-class safecracker with injuries. in the vocal cords related to shrapnel.
“Please don’t make me talk so much,” he said recently, quietly, his embarrassed eyes pleading with the universe.
Giamatti watchers may find it difficult to imagine the actor at a loss for words. He is one of cinema’s great talkers, often cited for his dazzling flights of oratory. Think of Miles’s profane rebuke of Merlot in “Sideways” (2004), or the Founding Father flogging the virtues of independence in “John Adams” (2008), or the impetuous boxing director Joe Gould in “Cinderella Man.” ” (2005). That Giamatti longs for fewer lines of dialogue might sound like a Formula 1 car longing for a bus route.
His latest role, as Paul Hunham in “The Holdovers,” a lonely, cantankerous New England boarding school teacher tasked with babysitting children during the Christmas holidays, adds a series of memorable monologues to the actor’s oeuvre. But Giamatti also imbues the character with a deep well of barely concealed melancholy and tenderness, traits that tend to reveal themselves in wordless physical gestures: wrinkling the chin, squinting one eye.
“There are close-ups where you can see not only his transition from one thought to the next, but all the little micro-thoughts that happen in between,” said Alexander Payne, the director of “The Holdovers,” who reteamed with Giamatti. almost 20 years after “On the side”. “You could hire him to play the Hunchback of Notre Dame and he would do a great job with him.”
The real Giamatti, as we found him last month during an interview in Beverly Hills, is soft-spoken, mild-mannered and contemplative, with a habit of looking into the distance when he needs to collect a thought. If you haven’t been keeping up with “Billions,” Giamatti’s Showtime workhorse that ended in the fall after seven seasons, his hair is whiter than you remember, as if Santa Claus had a brother with a title in humanities.
Giamatti is often mistakenly assumed to be similar to his characters, which is both a compliment and an annoyance. Payne is convinced the actor didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for “Sideways” (his co-stars Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen were nominated in the supporting categories) because he made it look too easy. In real life, as far as is known, Giamatti doesn’t care much for wine and knows little about it, much to the dismay of fans who approach him in restaurants.
Aside from a shared interest in the arcana of the Roman Empire, he has little in common with his character in “The Holdovers”: an antiquities professor and university ogre with eye problems and a skin condition that makes him smell like fish.
However, Giamatti found himself strangely invested in the role. His parents were teachers (his father, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was president of Yale and later commissioner of Major League Baseball) and he graduated from a high school similar to the one shown in the film. More than any role he can remember, he lost himself in the character, allowing his own memories and experiences to influence his performance.
“I was more unconscious than normal, which was a little alarming because sometimes I almost felt like I wasn’t working hard enough, that I was being lazy,” Giamatti said. “Even when I saw it, it was strange. I kept looking and thinking, Is that what you were doing?
Giamatti was born and raised in Connecticut and attended Yale for his undergraduate and master’s degrees in fine arts, English literature, and theater. Although he quickly dismissed the idea of following his parents into academia, he has always been a voracious reader with a deep interest in science fiction, history, philosophy, and mysticism. On “Chinwag,” Giamatti’s podcast, started earlier this year with Stephen Asma, a philosophy professor and author, the actor peppers friends and experts with questions about dark historical figures and the paranormal: ghosts, UFOs, theory of Hollow Earth, ancient Egypt.
Asma became friends with Giamatti during the pandemic (the actor emailed him, out of the blue, to congratulate him on an online lecture he had given on the science of imagination) and said two hours had passed during their first conversation. discussing the small… well-known Swedish theologian of the 18th century, Emanuel Swedishborg.
“Every wall of every room in her apartment has shelves full of books, several levels deep,” Asma said. “He reads more than most English teachers I know, but he wears it lightly.”
Both in his life and in his work, Giamatti has always been attracted to marginal characters. He is one of the rare baseball fans more interested in umpires than players. (“You are a very important part of the game and yet you are outside of it. How is that?”)
Even in supporting roles (a cold-blooded slave trader in “12 Years a Slave,” a deceitful music manager in “Straight Outta Compton”), his presence raises the volume of the humanity on screen.
When preparing for a role, Giamatti reads and rereads the script numerous times (he’s generally not a fan of improvisation), making inferences about how the character might present in three dimensions. He often seeks ways to transform himself physically, a task for which his everyman façade has proven useful.
“You can dress me like a short-order cook, or a butler, or the president of the United States in the 18th century, and I look like I should be wearing those clothes,” he said.
For “The Holdovers,” in which his character gradually forms a bond with a bright but troubled student (newcomer Dominic Sessa) and the school cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Giamatti grew a handlebar mustache and used a crowbar. Jacket inspired by a similar one from his father.
But the person he found himself channeling most, the man he sees when he watches the movie now, is a biology teacher at his own high school, Choate Rosemary Hall: a sarcastic, “dough, coiffed man” who looked lonely and smelled evil. like an ashtray and a martini.
As a student, Giamatti did not think much of the man and the two rarely exchanged words. But one day, at the end of the school year, after a test in which he had obtained unusually low scores, the teacher stopped by Giamatti’s desk.
“He gave me the test back and said, ‘You normally do very well with this, what happened?’” Giamatti recalled. “I was like 15 and I just shrugged: ‘I don’t know, man.’ But the guy stood there, he looked me in the eyes and asked, ‘Is everything okay?’”
Giamatti, feeling uncomfortable, said yes and they never talked about it again. But the fact that the teacher (someone whom he had effectively considered a stranger, or worse) not only knew him well enough to suspect something was wrong, but cared enough to ask, has always been with him. .
“It took me by surprise,” Giamatti said. “He actually gave a [expletive] About us.”
