If you want to make Paul Giamatti squirm, just try complimenting him.
“Oh, please, no no,” he says, holding up his hands in protest when he hears praise being heaped on him for his eclectic performances. Tell him he’s clearly not aware of how cool he is, and his face lights up. “Am I really cool?” the 37-year-old actor asks sincerely. “You’re telling me I’m cool? Well, that’s good to hear.”
Of course audiences and critics already know: He’s the coolest. Ever since his breakout role in 1997’s “Private Parts,” in which he did the impossible -- stole scenes from Howard Stern by playing a boorish executive named “Pig Vomit” -- Giamatti has steadily been building up a dossier of quirky, offbeat, and just plain grouchy character roles that have earned the Yale-educated actor a devoted following. Giamatti has specialized in creating individuals you might not necessarily want to know in real life but can’t get enough of on the big screen.
Mainstream Hollywood is finally waking up, as well. Simply put, Giamatti should have won every award possible for his flawless work portraying grumpy comic writer Harvey Pekar in ”American Splendor,” yet he failed to even score an Oscar nomination.
This year it would be virtually impossible to overlook Giamatti, as he headlines one of the best-reviewed films of the year, “Sideways,” which leads the Golden Globe contenders with seven nominations, including best actor.
Director Alexander Payne’s bittersweet meditation on middle age, male bonding, and wine as a metaphor for life, “Sideways” showcases Giamatti at his best, as his failed novelist Miles careens from crippling depression to the joy of new love to facing his own failures as a human being. To this day, Giamatti isn’t quite sure how he landed the role.
‘I thought he was kidding’
“I didn’t see much of the script when I went in to meet Alexander, just a few of the sides,” recalls Giamatti. “I’m not a guy who has a lot of, ’I want to work with so-and-so.’ I’ll take whatever work I can get. But I really wanted to work with Alexander someday. So I went in and met with him, and then I went back to my agents, and they said, ’Oh, he’s interested in you.’ I said, ’Great, what’s the part?’ And they said, ’Well, it’s basically the lead in the movie.’ And I thought they were kidding, I really did. I thought that he had lost his mind.”
Even a dinner with Payne, during which the director asked Giamatti to star, did little to convince the actor. “I still thought he was kidding; I really thought he had to be joking,” says Giamatti. “Until I was actually there filming it, I didn’t believe him. It took me awhile to realize I had better sharpen up, because it was actually happening.”
Ask him why this was so hard to fathom, and Giamatti’s voice goes up an octave as he answers, “I don’t know; it’s an Alexander Payne movie.”
In addition to working with Payne, the script (adapted by Payne and Jim Taylor from a novel by Rex Pickett) appealed to Giamatti because of the friendship between Miles and his college roommate Jack (played by Thomas Haden Church), and that he couldn’t predict the story.
“You kind of don’t know where it’s going when you’re watching it,” Giamatti says.
Where it goes is some fairly dark places, as Miles continually faces humiliation after humiliation on his week-long vacation in Santa Barbara wine country. Giamatti, the master of the slow burn and the quick explosion, breaks our hearts as he embarrasses himself by drunk-dialing his ex-wife, interrupting various romantic interludes, and continually fumbling his romantic intentions toward a sweet waitress, played by Virginia Madsen.
Humor and sadnessAccording to Giamatti, he had no trouble shaking such a sad sack character at the end of the day. “Well, it’s not my life, thank God,” he says. “And there’s something with a guy like that, that’s sort of fun to play somebody who’s so depressed. Because it’s so absurd. I mean, people get depressed like that, but to get to play it -- well, it’s not my life, and I’m able to just have fun doing it. I actually kind of enjoy it.”
One of the most memorable scenes occurs when Miles bumps into his ex-wife (played by Jessica Hecht) and learns some news that visibly destroys him. It’s a moment that is difficult to watch, as Miles struggles not to let his true feelings show.
“There’s so much on the page right there,” Giamatti says of shooting the climactic scene. “The thing that Alexander and I figured with that was to just to try to keep smiling through it. I was doing that, and he said, ’Just do even more. Never stop trying to be upbeat through that scene.’ Because it only made me sadder to try to be upbeat. It really worked, because the more I tried to smile and be happy about it, the worse I felt.”
It’s important to remember that “Sideways” is, at heart, a comedy, and these heavy moments are leavened by some of the funniest scenes of the year. A lot of this is due to the chemistry between Giamatti and Church, who often come off more like a bickering married couple than like old friends. Again, Giamatti says, “It’s right there in the script, really. It’s always an interesting thing; I think that kind of chemistry just kind of happens. You can’t make it happen; it just does or it doesn’t. And it did.”
Good friends, good wineAfter Church was cast, Payne put him in touch with Giamatti so the two could begin building the close rapport seen on-screen. “Alexander gave Tom my phone number, and Tom gave me a call,” Giamatti reveals. “Three-and-a-half hours later, I emerged a new man. It’s all out there with Tom. You become an intimate friend of Tom’s right away. We kind of had to go there, so we just did. It could not have worked; we’re very different guys and very different kind of actors, and it just worked.”
Giamatti also found himself taking a crash course in wine tasting, but the normally active researcher admits he didn’t take his studying terribly seriously.
“I feel like I shouldn’t say this; I should say I studied for months about wine,” he admits. “I didn’t research wine, per se, anything like that was written out in the script so I didn’t need to. What I did try to find out about or hang around and check out was more the behavior of those people and the paraphernalia -- that was the interesting stuff to study.”
In particular the actor studied a close friend who has long been into wine. “He’s a great guy, but, when he starts talking about it, I get embarrassed for him, the way he gets so obsessed about it,” he says. “There’s something really pompous about it, and it just comes with the territory. It’s just this weird pedantic thing, and these totally normal people just turn into the biggest a--holes when they start doing it.”
Giamatti’s Miles definitely verges into unlikeable territory at times, and it’s a testament to the actor that we come to care about this self-sabotaging mess of a man. The question remains: Are awards voters ready to finally embrace the deserving actor? And does it mean anything to him?
“Well, you know, when people say stuff about you, it’s always really flattering,” Giamatti allows. “But does it mean anything to me? It’s not really real to me; there’s no reality to it.”
Point out that it must be difficult to not get caught up in the hype, and that many people were sure he’d score a nomination for American Splendor, and he quickly replies, “I didn’t.” But, then again, Giamatti doesn’t think he’s cool. “You’re absolutely right,” he nods vigorously. “I don’t.”