Paul Giamatti has played everyone from Santa to Satan – it's all work. And having a Golden Globe tucked under his arm for his turn as 'a dick' in the sprawling Barney's Version isn't going to change his outlook on the 'low profession', he tells
TARA BRADY
LAST SUNDAY, when Paul Giamatti broke turf accountants' hearts by taking home the Golden Globe for best actor, longtime Giamatti watchers faced a semantic crisis. Just what exactly is the actor's official job title now? We are, of course, accustomed to seeing the 43-year-old on shortlists and nod sheets. A freakishly gifted performer, he has previously amassed any number of plaudits for turns in Cinderella Man, Sideways, American Splendorand the TV mini-series John Adams.
This latest gong does, however, rather upset our notion of where the crumpled- looking thespian belongs in the movieverse. Handed down a mere two days after film writer David Thompson noted that Giamatti was defined by "the haunted look and paranoia of a life-long supporting actor who knows he's never going to get a big lead role," it was a good call for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who have, in effect, confirmed what we've all suspected for some time. Sidewayswas no fluke: the US's most highly regarded character actor is now a leading man to be reckoned with.
Giamatti, for his part, is not bothered. "What makes guys like Ian McKellen great is that it's all good work. He doesn't make distinctions. He's happy doing The Da Vinci Code. He's happy doing TV. I'm not comparing myself to him but my attitude is the same. It's not about what part or what media or how many scenes."
Okay. So there are no small parts. But the Globe win, awarded for work on the audacious micro-release Barney's Version, was entirely unexpected on an evening when Johnny Depp went home empty-handed.
“What are you going to do about these things?” he shrugs. “You win. You don’t win. Whatever. It’s nice anyway. If it helps get this movie or any other movie out there then great. The first rule is getting the fucking movie seen.”
He ought to know. A veteran of the independent sector, he first came to prominence in a sequence of little movies that could. Of these, Sideways, a boozy travelogue about a discontented Napa Valley critic, is still the one that inspires complete strangers to approach him on the street.
“I think I used to be grouchy about it. It was happening a lot. But then I’d be somewhere like Japan and people would walk up to say ‘fuck Merlot’. And then somebody said to me ‘Hey man, you’ve got a catchphrase that people use all over the world’. And that’s right. It’s an amazing thing.
"What's funny is that I didn't expect Sidewaysto make it. I was happy the thing got made at all. If it's the sort of movie I'm in, that's always a victory. I was astonished it took on a whole other life of its own."
One couldn't exactly say that Giamatti bears no resemblance to the downtrodden, moody malcontents he frequently essays on screen. He did, after all, play a downtrodden moody actor called Paul Giamatti in the meta-comedy Cold Souls.
In person, though, he is a good deal livelier and jollier than his famous hangdog features might suggest. He is a dark humourist who cites Dr Strangeloveand Brewster McCloudas his favourite films, but he has never shied away from even the broadest comedies. To date, he has shaken his fist at Malcolm in the Middle'sFrankie Muniz in Big Fat Liar, Vince Vaughn in Fred Clausand Martin Lawrence in Big Momma's House. Next year he's scheduled to appear alongside Bill Clinton, Liam Neeson and Mike Tyson in The Hangover 2.
“It just all seems like the same thing to me. Seriously, I look on acting as a completely low-rent, undignified thing to do. There’s nothing highbrow about it. I don’t give a shit what anyone says to the contrary. It’s a low profession. And that’s what I love about it.”
In this promiscuous spirit, he has, over two decades, played pretty much everyone from Santa to Satan.
“Satan? When did I do that?”
Didn't you play the Dark Lord in The Haunted World of El Superbeastowith Rob Zombie and various Spongebob Squarepantsalumni?
"Oh my God. I had forgotten that was out there in the world. You know what's funny? People often ask me what part I would really love to play. But I've never had any big aspiration to play Hamlet or anything like that. I've pretty much done everything I expected to and more than I ever expected to. Everything from here is a surprise. I've nowhere left to go. Where can you go after El Superbeasto?"
A compact collision of Irish and Italian stock, Giamatti sees himself as an unlikely screen hero, and has long viewed his calling as a default setting. A Yale graduate, he had toyed (vaguely) with the idea of following his father, the Yale professor and Major League Baseball commissioner Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, into academia.
“I just don’t think I would have been any good as a teacher,” says Giamatti. “Dad got out of it quite quickly. I think he found it deadening. And I had always liked acting. I always had it around as an extracurricular activity. It was comfortable. I took to it. I went to get training because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. I did need to learn some physical stuff because I didn’t have a great voice for the stage.
“But I probably would be pretty much the same actor if I hadn’t gone. You can be lazier about all the technical stuff in film. Most of the time you’re standing around watching the guy with the clapperboard getting bored.”
It doesn’t sound like he’s much of a method actor.
“Ha, no. I’m never the guy who stays in character all the time. I try to stay focused like anybody else doing a job, but who wants to be somebody else all day long?”
He describes his early career as a run of dumb luck. After college, he moved to Seattle, sold juice machines for a couple of months, and quickly found work in theatre and on the faux-grunge picture Singles.
Within five years, he had worked with Steven Spielberg on Saving Private Ryan, with Peter Weir on The Truman Showand with Woody Allen on Mighty Aphroditeand Deconstructing Harry.
“I’d still love to work with David Lynch,” says Giamatti. “But he doesn’t seem to make movies any more. I really love Kiarostami’s movies but I can’t see where he’d cast me. Man, I love that guy’s work.”
Despite the impressive diversity of his CV, Barney's Versionfeels like a familiar Giamatti archetype. Based on a much-admired novel of the same name by Mordecai Richler, the film was a labour of love for Canadian producer Robert Lantos who spent some 12 years translating the material for the big screen.
We can see where the time was spent. A pointedly unreliable account of the title character's television career, three marriages and an unsolved disappearance, Barney's Version– a sort of Benjamin Buttonfor grown-ups – condenses an entire life into 130 minutes.
“That’s what I liked about it. The script was even looser to start out with. They’ve tightened it up over the years. It was sprawling. It didn’t follow all that blah, blah, blah about clearly defined acts. And I had fun with the vitality of the guy. He’s a total dick. He’s selfish. He’s horrible. He’s not a mensch exactly, but there’s something twisted and dark about him. I recognised that. It was fun to be a dick. I don’t know if I’d like him as a guy, but I liked playing him.”
Giamatti’s Barney may be an outstanding achievement, but this latest Golden Globe win is unlikely to change how the actor does things. He has lived with his wife Elizabeth and son Saul at the same Brooklyn address for more than a decade. “Not in one of the cool parts of Brooklyn,” he notes, “but in the staid, suburban bit.”
The award does, however, give Barney's Versiona fighting chance in a crowded marketplace.
“It’s a lot harder out there,” he says. “In some ways the market needed to be tightened up. There were a lot of crap independent movies over the last few years. Maybe people will make better stuff. But if it was hard getting a distributor in the past it’s definitely tougher now that most of them are gone. The ones still standing don’t throw themselves behind movies because it’s going to cost them too much.
"I can think of movies that I've been in that wouldn't get made now. Would American Splendorget made? I don't think so. Even something like Sidewayswouldn't get off the ground now."
He thinks for a moment. “Well maybe it would. But not with me and some other guy.”
- Barney's Version opens January 28
