Paul Giamatti would just like to say that maybe he doesn’t always have to play a motorcycle like that.
It might have been nice, just to shake things up a bit, if he could portray someone more likely to express himself non-verbally – a taciturn horse breeder with a troubled past, say, or a world-famous firecracker with shrapnel-related vocal cord injuries .
“Please don’t make me talk so much,” he said recently, low-key, his hangman’s eyes imploring the universe.
Giamatti watchers may have trouble imagining the tongue-tied actor. He is one of the great speakers of cinema, often quoted for his dazzling flights of rhetoric. Consider Miles’ profane rebuke of merlot “Sideways” (2004), or the founder who whipped up the virtues of independence “John Adams” (2008) or the intrepid boxing manager Joe Gould in “The Cinderella Man” (2005). Giamatti yearning for fewer lines of dialogue can sound like a Formula 1 car pushing for a bus route.
His latest role, as Paul Hanham in “The Holdovers” – a lonely and awkward New England boarding school teacher with babysitting duties 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 melancholy and thinly veiled tenderness, traits that tend to reveal themselves in silent, physical gestures: a crinkle of the chin, a narrowing of one eye.
“There are close-ups where you can see not only his transition from one thought to another, 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 “Sideways”. “You could hire him to play the Hunchback of Notre Dame and he’d do a great job with it.”
The real Giamatti, as met last month during an interview in Beverly Hills, is soft-spoken, kind and thoughtful, with a habit of looking away when he needs to collect a thought. If you haven’t been keeping up with “Billions,” Giamatti’s Showtime drama that ended in the fall after seven seasons, his hair is whiter than you remember, as if Santa had a brother with a humanities degree.
Giamatti is often mistakenly assumed to resemble his characters, which is both a compliment and an annoyance. Payne is convinced that the actor did not receive an Oscar nomination for “Sideways” (his co-stars Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen were nominated in supporting categories) for making it look too easy. In real life, let it be known, Giamatti isn’t terribly interested in wine and knows very little about it, much to the chagrin of fans who approach him at restaurants.
Aside from his shared interest in the mystique of the Roman Empire, he has little in common with his character in “The Holdovers” — an antiquities teacher and campus bully with eye problems and a skin condition that makes him smell like fish .
However, Giamatti found himself strangely invested in the role. Both his parents were teachers (his father, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was the president of Yale and later commissioner of Major League Baseball) and he graduated from a prep school similar to the one depicted in the film. More than any role he can remember, he got lost in the character, allowing his own memories and experiences to color his performance.
“It was more numb than normal, which was a little worrying because I almost felt at times like I wasn’t working hard enough, like I was being lazy,” Giamatti said. “Even when I watched it, it was weird. I kept looking and thinking, Is that what I did?’
Giamatti was born and raised in Connecticut and attended Yale for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine arts, English literature and drama. Although he quickly abandoned the idea of following his parents into academia, he was always a voracious reader with a deep interest in science fiction, history, philosophy, and mysticism. On “Chinwag”, Giamatti’s podcast, launched earlier this year with Stephen Asmaa philosophy professor and author, the actor peppers friends and experts with questions about dark historical figures and the paranormal: ghosts, UFOs, Hollow Earth Theory, ancient Egypt.
Asma befriended Giamatti during the pandemic (the actor emailed him, unusually, to praise him for an online lecture he had given on science fiction) and said they spent two hours during the first them in conversation discussing the little-known Swedish theologian of the 18th century Emanuel Swedenborg.
“Every wall of every room in his apartment has shelves full of books, many levels deep,” Asma said. “He reads more than most English teachers I know, but he wears it lightly.”
Both in life and in his work, Giamatti has always been drawn to characters on the fringes. He is the rare baseball fan who cares more about the umpires than the players. (“You’re a very important part of the game, and yet you’re out of it – how’s that?”)
Even in supporting roles — a cold-blooded slave trader in “12 Years a Slave,” a duplicitous music director in “Straight Outta Compton” — his presence elevates the volume of humanity on screen.
When preparing for a part, Giamatti reads and re-reads the script several times (he’s generally not a fan of improvisation), drawing conclusions about how the character might be presented in three dimensions. He often looks for ways to physically transform himself, a task for which his normal facade has proven useful.
“You can dress me up as a small-class cook, or a butler, or an 18th-century president of the United States, and I kind of look like I have to wear the clothes,” he said.
For “The Holdovers,” in which his character gradually bonds with a bright but troubled student (newcomer Dominic Sessa) and the head of the school’s cafeteria (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Giamatti grew a handlebar mustache and wear a barrette. jacket inspired by a similar one of his father’s.
But the person he found himself channeling the most, the man he sees when he watches the film now, is a biology teacher from his own prep school, Choate Rosemary Hall: a sarcastic, “mushy, combed man” who seemed lonely and smelled like ashtrays and martinis.
As a student, Giamatti didn’t think much of the man, and the two hardly ever exchanged words. But one day, late in the school year, after a test on which he had performed unusually poorly, the teacher stopped by Giamatti’s desk.
“He gave me back the test and said, ‘You usually do really well on these, what happened?’ Giamatti recalls. “I was about 15 and I just shrugged, ‘I don’t know, man.’ But the guy stood there and looked me in the eye and asked, “Is everything okay?”
Giamatti, feeling uncomfortable, said he was and they never discussed it again. But the fact that the teacher—someone he had essentially considered a stranger, or worse—not only knew him well enough to suspect something was wrong, but cared enough to ask, had always been with him.
“It surprised me,” Giamatti said. “He really gave one [expletive] About us.”