“I seemed like a viable person who could be more than just a stupid customer service guy”: Giamatti plays anti — master of social classics in the film “The Leftovers” Photo: Maarten De Boer
The bitter, hot-tempered classics teacher won Best Actor at the Golden Globes last night for Paul Giamatti. “He's not wrong,” says Giamatti, reflecting on why audiences consistently warm to the curmudgeon he plays in The Leftovers, set in 1970 and directed by Alexander Payne. Paul Hanham is a partisan, abrasive to the point of vindictiveness, who disparages the entitled boys in his class at Barton Academy, an elite New England boarding school, as «lazy, vulgar, rancid little Philistines.»
Despite pressure from his principal to let these sons of wealthy donors pass on their way to Ivy League universities, Hanham insists on not letting down anyone who does substandard work—and is punished by being forced to babysit students who have nowhere else to go. go for Christmas: leftovers. An alcoholic who no one likes, he has painful eyes, sweaty palms and a problem with body odor. Giamatti chuckles when I ask how he felt when Payne offered him the role. “I can’t imagine him not coming to me thinking, ‘He’s going to love this…’,” he says. “I'm not vain about these things.”
Hunham's obvious shortcomings attracted him, he adds, “because these are the things that marginalize a person and take him outside the circle of acceptance. Why I'm interested in this, I don't know. But it is so. And it has always been like this.”
The Leftovers reunites Giamatti with Payne, who directed Reese Witherspoon in Election (1999), Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt (2002) and gave Giamatti his breakthrough role in Sideways (2004). the role of Miles, an unsuccessful writer and amateur oenologist who is about to begin his career. future buddy on a trip to California wine country. Miles' furious reaction to the possibility that a double date might compromise his discerning taste: “If anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I don’t drink any merlot,” has become part of the culture. For years, wherever Giamatti went, strangers quoted this phrase to him. “I got it a lot,” he says. “I asked people to send me wine. And I didn’t really drink wine. I still don't. That's why I always feel a little uneasy when sommeliers send me a wine list. I always say, “Sorry man, I don’t know what to tell you.” I don't know anything about it.”
Professionally, the film changed everything for Giamatti. «I've never had to audition again in the last 20 years, and that's a huge shift,» he says. “And the supporting roles that were offered to me suddenly turned out to be much more interesting. I think people's attitude towards me has changed. I seemed like a viable person who could be more than just a dumb help desk guy.»
< p>Giamatti studied at the Yale School of Drama, alma mater of Paul Newman, Meryl Streep and Frances McDormand. His range and willingness to experiment make him one of the most talented character actors of his generation. He made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in 1995, played underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar in the 2003 film American Splendor, second U.S. President John Adams in the 2008 HBO miniseries, and slave trader Theophilus Freeman in 12 Years a Slave ( 2013).
He was nominated for an Oscar for his role as boxing manager Joe Gould in Cinderella Man (2005) and then achieved wider fame playing ruthless lawyer Chuck Rhoades in Billions, which ended last year. After seven seasons, he said, this final goodbye was “mentally liberating” because playing Chuck “wasn’t much fun. He was kind of an asshole. It was a challenging role – great job, but I wouldn’t be sorry if I didn’t play it.”
Personally, Giamatti is nothing like Rhodes. “I’m not very persistent,” he says. «I play people like that.» On a December afternoon, over tea in a London hotel, he is rather warm, cheerful and polite, with a relaxed demeanor that may simply reflect his own education at an elite New England boarding school. Giamatti went to Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, which, along with nearby Massachusetts rival Deerfield Academy, where parts of the movie «The Leftovers» was filmed, is considered one of the best boarding schools in America. the schools are as posh as Eton. I mean, this whole imitation of Eton and places like that… is kind of fake.»
Paul Giamatti with a Golden Globe for Best Actor. Photo: Getty
However, Giamatti says, “there is still a class aspect to these schools that gives you a big advantage. And it's not necessarily education, it's the cultural currency of these places, which is important in a society that should be democratic, not class-based… These are strange institutions, these places, and they are also very distinctly American. «
Education in general, he notes, «seems to be becoming less and less important. You look around and think, “Well, all I really want to do is create a startup and try to become some kind of internet entrepreneur.” Why the hell do I need to go to school?
In his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, Giamatti dedicated his award to teachers: “My whole family is teachers; all of them, going back several generations,” he said. “Teachers are good people. We must respect them. They are doing a good job. It's hard work.»
His father, Bart Giamatti, who was president of Yale University in the 1970s and 1980s, «would be filled with despair,» he says, at the death of the humanities at universities on both sides of the Atlantic, where the current imperative is to focus on » market occupations,” fueled by a growing precarious middle class and rising tuition rates that make an arts degree seem more like an extravagant luxury than a ticket to a lucrative career. “I recently went to Yale,” Giamatti says, “and they’re expanding the engineering school to take over this huge part of the campus.” The museum of musical instruments and the “eccentric” department of anthropology will be sacrificed. “It’s tiring.”
'I've never had to audition again in 20 years' : Giamatti had his breakthrough with Sideways. Photo: Film Stills
Bart Giamatti died suddenly of a heart attack in 1989, never seeing his son's acting success. “I’ve always been sad,” Giamatti tells me, noting how strange it feels now, “I’m older than he was when he died. He didn't see my son. He hasn't seen much.”
Giamatti Jr. studied English at Yale University before pursuing playwriting. He flirted with a future in academia for a while, but, he says, «when it came to actually deciding, I said, 'Absolutely not.' I can not do it». The idea of “spending the rest of my life studying some narrow field, medieval literature or something else” seemed impossible. “I think I constantly need newness. I get bored and anxious very quickly.”
The Holdovers included another new feature. Giamatti's character has one eye that is not straight, a condition known as exotropia or «pike perch.» The effect is achieved on screen using a custom-made prosthetic, and as Giamatti admits, “I was a little wary about it. I don't disdain many things, but the things in my eyes… they scare me. But everything went very well, you know. There's a woman who does it — that's an incredible job in itself — and there's a guy who takes it and films it. They won't trust you to carry these things in and out on your own, they are quite large and you are blinded by them.»
The consequences of race in America are evident in The Leftovers, from the presence of a black cook and a black janitor among the predominantly white school staff to the death of a beloved son in Vietnam. How much does Giamatti think things have changed in the US since the film is set? «I don't think the situation has changed as much as it needs to,» he says. «It's still a huge problem.»
As someone who has directed more than a hundred films, Giamatti has worked with a huge number of actors. He starred in Woody Allen's films, performed on stage with Kevin Spacey, and shared the «forget it about it» scene in Donnie Brasco with Johnny Depp. I wonder what it's like when someone he worked with suddenly gets «canceled»?
“Oh my god, Johnny Depp got cancelled?” He says. “I don't know a lot of things. I mean, it's crazy and intense. And a lot of these guys have done things that I think are reprehensible.» These aren't always people he knows well and hangs out with, he adds, so «I don't feel any resentment that my friend is being treated unfairly right now.»
What about Russell Brand — the subject of revelations last year that led to a Metropolitan Police investigation — with whom he worked on the 2012 film Rock of Ages: was his behavior ever an issue on set? “Not that I've ever seen. I wasn't around him often and he actually seemed to be in a sort of «I'm working on myself» phase.
Over the years, Giamatti has brilliantly played Jewish characters, from music mogul Jerry Heller in Straight Outta Compton (2015) to Abraham Zapruder, who shot the famous 8mm footage of President Kennedy's assassination in Parkland (2013). Does he have an opinion on the “Jewish face” controversy, which gained notoriety when American comedian Sarah Silverman criticized the casting of non-Jewish actors in Jewish roles?
'The logical end of it all becomes so limiting': Giamatti played John Adams, 2nd President USA Photo: Channel 4
“I’m interested in this,” he says. “For a long time people thought I was Jewish and that all the characters I played were Jewish. I'm like, «No, I've only purposely played Jews a few times. In my life, you know, my ex-wife is Jewish.» He was married for many years to film producer Elizabeth Cohen, with whom he has a relationship. 22-year-old son Sam — “and my son is Jewish. So to some extent I don't feel completely culturally adjusted if I have to play these things. This is a complex topic. I see both sides of this. But it seems like the logical end of it all is becoming so limiting.
After the divorce, Giamatti had «a girlfriend who I was with for about five years,» and despite turning away from academia, he remains a voracious reader. When I remind him that he once called himself a “recovering bookaholic,” he protests. “I'm not getting better. I get out of the car again. I just spent the day in bookstores and bought too many books.”
I mention another literary reference that came up in a previous interview and tell him that I can't tell if he's joking or not. “This is a common thing with me,” he admits. This happened when an interviewer asked him to finish a sentence that began with “I believe…” and he replied, “I believe there is no way Shakespeare could have written those damn plays, no way.” He chuckles. “Do I really think so? No. It was in the movie «Lady in the Water,» he says, referring to the 2006 fantasy film directed by M. Night Shyamalan. “One journalist was writing a book about the process of making a film, so he went around to everyone. And I knew they would all say, “I believe in people,” or something like that. So I thought, I'll just say something really sarcastic and weird.»
'I'm not vain about things like this': Giamatti as Paul Hanham with Dominic Sessa in “The Leftovers” Photo: Sicia Pavao
At this point, however, Giamatti admits that he would happily dedicate an entire episode of Chinwaga—the podcast series he started last year with friend and philosopher Steven Asma—to what they call a deep dive “into the desert of the mind.” — to the authorship of plays. He is laughing. “Do you really want me to get involved in this? I find this phenomenon interesting and why people believe such things. Shakespeare is a strange, shadowy figure. It's strange that he is the greatest master of the English language and the greatest playwright of all time, and we know practically nothing about him.”
Giamatti is fascinated by the strange. “I’ve met ghosts,” he tells me proudly. “I have never seen a UFO, but I fully believe in their possibility.” He also attracts weirdness. I can't help but wonder how he feels about the Wax Paul Now campaign, which is calling for a wax figure of him to be installed in Madame Tussauds museums around the world.
“I was really excited about it,” he says, and I think he means it. “I don't think that will ever happen. But the idea of having a wax statue is really quite nice.”
The Leftovers is in UK cinemas from 19 January.
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