Paul Giamatti, the one who beats Oppenheimer

A Paul Giamatti He would like to make it clear that he doesn’t always have to play a charlatan. It would be nice, to change things up a bit, for him to play someone more prone to expressing himself non-verbally: a taciturn horse breeder with a harrowing past, for example, or a world-class safecracker with wounds on his ropes. vowels caused by shrapnel.

“Please don’t make me talk so much,” he said recently, quietly, his puppy eyes pleading to the universe.

Giamatti’s viewers have a hard time imagining the actor tongue-tied. He is one of cinema’s great talkers, often cited for his dazzling oratorical flights. Let’s think about Miles’ profane reproach to merlot in Between glasses (2004), in the Founding Father preaching the virtues of independence in the miniseries John Adams (2008) or in the cheeky boxing director Joe Gould in Cinderella Man (2005, for which he earned his first Oscar nomination, as a supporting actor). That Giamatti longs for fewer lines of dialogue might sound like a Formula One car pining for a bus route.

His last role – that of Paul Hunham in Those who stayo The Holdovers, a lonely and cantankerous teacher at a New England boarding school who takes care of students during the Christmas holidays, adds several memorable monologues to the actor’s work. But Giamatti (who is a strong leading actor Oscar contender for this role) also imbues the character with deep melancholy and barely concealed tenderness, traits that tend to reveal themselves in wordless physical gestures: a wrinkle on the chin, a half-closed eye. .

“There are close-ups where you can see not only his transition from one thought to the next, but all the little thoughts that occur in between,” he says. Alexander Paynedirector of Those who staywho returned to work with Giamatti almost 20 years after Between glasses. “You could hire him to play the Hunchback of Notre Dame and he would do a great job with him.”

The real Giamatti, as seen in a recent interview, is soft-spoken, gentle-mannered and contemplative, with the habit of looking into the distance when he needs to reflect. If you haven’t followed BillionsGiamatti’s Showtime drama that ended last year after seven seasons, his hair is whiter than he remembers, as if Santa Claus had a brother with a liberal arts degree.

Giamatti is often mistakenly presumed to resemble his characters, which is both a compliment and a bummer. Payne is convinced the actor did not receive an Oscar nomination for Between glasses (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 is not terribly interested in 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 Those Who Remain: an antiquities professor and university ogre with a failing eye and a skin condition that makes him smell like fish.

However, Giamatti felt strangely invested in the role. Both of his parents were teachers (his father, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was president of Yale University and later a commissioner of Major League Baseball), and he graduated from a prep school similar to the one featured in the movie. More than any other role I remember, he lost himself in the character, letting his own memories and experiences influence his performance.

“I was more unconscious than normal, which was a little alarming because sometimes I felt like I wasn’t working hard enough, that I was being lazy,” Giamatti says. “Even when he saw it, it was weird. He kept looking and thinking, ‘Is that what he was doing?'”

Giamatti was born and raised in Connecticut and studied Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Fine Arts in English Literature and Drama at Yale. Although he soon discarded 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. In ChinwagGiamatti’s podcast, which began last year with Stephen Asma, a philosophy professor and writer, the actor quizzes friends and experts about dark historical figures and the paranormal: ghosts, UFOs, the Hollow Earth theory and ancient Egypt .

Asma became friends with Giamatti during the pandemic (the actor emailed him to congratulate him on an online lecture he had given on the science of imagination), and said they had spent two hours in their first conversation talking about the Swedish theologian. 18th century, Emanuel Swedenborg.

“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 carries it lightly.”

Both in his life and in his work, Giamatti (56 years old) has always been attracted to marginal characters. He is the rare baseball fan who cares more about the umpires than the players. (“You’re a hugely important part of the game and yet you’re outside of it, what’s that like?”)

Even in supporting roles – a cold-blooded slave trader in 12 Years a Slave, a deceitful musical director in Straight Outta Compton – his presence turns up the volume of humanity on the screen.

When preparing for a role, Giamatti reads and rereads the script numerous times (he’s not usually a fan of improvisation), making deductions about how the character might present in 3D. He often looks for ways to transform himself physically, a task for which his normal-guy appearance has proven useful.

“You could dress like a 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 says.

For Those Who Stay, in which his character gradually forms a bond with a brilliant but problematic student (played by newcomer Dominic Sessa, an Oscar nominee for best supporting actor) and the school cafeteria manager (Da ‘Vine Joy Randolph, nominated for best supporting actress), Giamatti grew his mustache and wore a jacket inspired by a similar one of his father’s.

But the person he most resembled, the man he sees now when he watches the movie, is a biology teacher at his own high school, Choate Rosemary Hall: a sarcastic, “dough, squash-haired” man who seemed lonely and It smelled like an ashtray and a martini.

As a student, Giamatti did not think much of him and they rarely exchanged words. But one day, at the end of the school year, after an exam in which he had obtained unusually poor results, the professor passed by Giamatti’s desk.

“He gave me the test back and said, ‘You normally do very well, what happened?” I was 15 and I shrugged: ‘I don’t know.’ But the guy stood there, he looked me in the eyes and asked, ‘Is everything okay?'”

Giamatti, feeling uncomfortable, said yes, and they never spoke of it again. But the fact that the professor – someone he had considered a stranger, or worse – not only knew him well enough to suspect something was wrong, but that he cared enough to ask him, always stays with him.

“It took me by surprise,” Giamatti says. “He doesn’t give a damn about us.”

Fuente: The New York Times

Translation: Patricia Sar