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Even the best actors can fall victim to typecasting. In some cases, it happens earlier than others. For Paul Giamatti, it began in the fourth grade, with a production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Giamatti remembers, "I was the corrupt mayor who says, 'I will give you a bag of gold if you get rid of the rats' -- and then says, 'Fuck you, you won't get your gold.' I loved doing it. And that's basically what I've done ever since."
In a thirteen-year career, Giamatti has established himself as the character-actor supreme specializing in blowhards and hapless schlubs: the program director Pig Vomit in Howard Stern's Private Parts, the clumsy Sgt. Hill in Saving Private Ryan, Andy Kaufman sidekick Bob Zmuda in Man on the Moon, even a slave-trading orangutan in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. In 2003's American Splendor, Giamatti shared the role of cynical comic-book writer Harvey Pekar with the real Pekar and drew critical raves. "I don't know what makes me any more interesting than anybody else," he says. "Crooked teeth?"
Cast opposite stars, Giamatti disappears into each part and leaves the spotlight to them. The downside of being "the character guy" was that even after making thirty-five movies, Giamatti was a familiar face that most moviegoers still couldn't put a name to.
Until now. Sideways, the Alexander Payne comedy-drama that tops more ten-best lists than any other 2004 movie, has turned Giamatti, 37, into something neither he nor anyone else could have imagined: a leading man. Giamatti would be the first to admit he's average-looking, not movie-star handsome. His hairline is receding, his paunch bulges slightly, he's five feet eleven when he stands up straight but usually slouches down to five feet ten. And yet here he is in Sideways, as failed novelist and amateur wine expert Miles Raymond, romancing indisputable babe Virginia Madsen as a waitress who sees past the schlub into his sweet, tormented soul. Some audiences have reacted as if an alien with green skin and antennae had magically transformed into competition for Jude Law. "It's interesting to realize that normality is almost shocking to people," Giamatti says wryly.
Giamatti's looks have made him into a sight gag in some movies -- which he says he's fine with. But something that cheered him about Sideways was that Payne never made his face a punch line, never made it seem impossible that the beautiful Madsen might fall for him. And Giamatti knows enough academic jargon to refer to Madsen's idealized character as a product of "the male gaze."
He also knows that the key to Miles isn't on the surface -- it's the self-loathing festering inside. "There's something interesting about that kind of pessimism," Giamatti says. "You just don't see it that much in the movies."
Consider this moment from Sideways: At a genteel winery, Miles finds out that the novel he has taken years to finish has been rejected by the last in a long line of publishers. He demands a glass of wine, and then another. When the wine server politely attempts to throw him out, he pours a spit bucket of wine over his own head, swallowing as much swilled vino as he can. "I still don't know if that's funny or not," says Giamatti. Director Payne had originally intended for the movie to be more of a straightforward comedy, but as he edited it, the characters' blundering pathos came to the forefront.
Now consider this moment: The day on the set when Giamatti dumped the spit bucket over his head, he had exactly four takes in which to nail it -- because that was how many clean shirts they had. Giamatti recalls, "The last take, Alexander said, 'That was really good because it wasn't funny, so now it will be funnier.' "
The humor and heartbreak that Giamatti invests in Miles has put him in line for a Best Actor Oscar this year. I mention that awards talk may accelerate his career into a bigger, starrier firmament. His gaze rotates from me to his thumbnails to his soft tacos. We're eating in a Mexican bistro, walking distance from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Giamatti is awkwardly hunched over his food. He looks worried. "I don't have any complaints about the jobs I am getting," he says. "It would be great to get an Oscar nomination, but it would be sadly ironic. My parents would have been thrilled -- especially my mom. Their absence colors any success."
Paul, brother Marcus and sister Elena grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. His mother, Toni, a former actress, taught in private schools, while his father, Bart, was a Yale professor specializing in Renaissance literature, then president of Yale and, ultimately, commissioner of Major League Baseball, famous for banning Pete Rose from the game. (Giamatti's father died in 1989; his mother, this past September.) "I was pretty close to my dad," Giamatti says. "He was an intimidating intellect, but he was also a very warm, down-to-earth guy. He had a definite thing for scatological humor." Giamatti's early memories of his father are set inside movie theaters: watching Italian films, Pink Panther flicks, Monty Python comedies.
When Dad was the ultimate baseball insider, Paul wasn't interested in collecting autographs from his beloved Red Sox -- he wanted to meet the umpires. "I was fascinated by them," he says, excitedly. "They're the great moral arbiters of the game, and they're these weird, chunky blue-collar guys, so separate from the game but so much a part of it. When I was a little kid, I wanted to get a chest protector like the home-plate umpires just because I thought they looked really cool. How fucking weird is that, that I was obsessed by the umpires?"
Giamatti himself attended Yale; he wrote his senior thesis on Herman Melville and spent lots of time acting in collegiate plays, including a production of The Coarse Acting Show, where he and future star Edward Norton moved furniture and did shtick between scenes. But what he really wanted was to be an animator. He did a comic book of a Gothic western and collaborated with a pal on a cartoon called Flip the Chimp: "It was about two monkeys fucking and bouncing all over -- as much crazy violence and drug-and-sex humor as possible for five minutes."
A few months after Giamatti graduated from Yale, in 1989, his father died of a heart attack. Giamatti, depressed, moved to Seattle, where he started smoking large quantities of pot and reading a lot. Some of the books were pulled directly from his father's extensive library, as if that would maintain their relationship. "Reading was always a connection to him," he says.
Books became a lifetime habit, but after a few years Giamatti stopped smoking pot and lost his interest in animation. "It's just a hard life, hunched over the drawing board," he says. Instead, he did local theater and was cast in Cameron Crowe's Singles as Kissing Man, for which he made out on-camera with his then girlfriend, and even had a smidge of dialogue. Let history record that Giamatti's first line in a movie was the single word "What?"
Only then did he get serious about acting, returning to New Haven for a couple of years at the Yale School of Drama; while there, he met his future wife, Elizabeth, who was studying as a dramaturge. (They now have a three-year-old son, Sam.) The family moved to New York so Giamatti could pursue a career as a stage actor. He has appeared in dozens of plays, including The Iceman Cometh, with Kevin Spacey, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, with Al Pacino, in which Giamatti did the whole role of an Austrian midget president on his knees.
Pacino had previously appeared in one of Giamatti's dreams; in the dream, when Giamatti got him a sandwich, Pacino pointed at him and said, "Hey, you're doing a great job." That praise became a catchphrase with Giamatti's sister, Elena -- so it was a surreal day in rehearsal when Pacino offered Giamatti his sandwich.
"I'm amazed that I have now been in thirty-five movies," Giamatti says. "A lot of the time, I was doing it to subsidize doing plays. I didn't take the film thing seriously until not that long ago. You could look down my long and illustrious resume: There's a lot of stuff I did that I've never even seen."
As it happens, I have with me a printout of his Internet Movie Database listings. "Oh, let me see," Giamatti says eagerly. Grabbing the pages, he reviews some of the obscure points of his filmography: "Detective Wilson in Arresting Gena! I didn't even know I had a name in that movie. Thunderpants is a good movie, actually. It's British -- for some reason it never came over to America." He flips the page. "Breathing Room, I never read the script. I was told, 'They need you on Tuesday in a diner.' And I had a ridiculous sweater with a reindeer on it. That's all I remember."
Even on studio projects, Giamatti usually doesn't have much prep time. "That's the nature of being a supporting actor," he says. "Nobody really cares if you know how to throw a knife with your feet or not." He was cast in American Splendor with only a week to learn how to mimic the real-life Pekar, which seemed impossible but turned out fine. "You read about these guys who play cavemen," he says. "They live in a cave for a year and make their own arrowheads." He ponders this question: Is the second month of arrowheads that much more educational than the first one?
The wine expertise Giamatti acquired filming Sideways hasn't lingered with him; he has returned to drinking vodka. Basically, Giamatti enjoys staying at home with his family and reading -- lately it's been the novels of Samuel R. Delany and Kingsley Amis. But another movie he just finished filming, The Hawk Is Dying, has gotten him interested in falconry.
The movie, based on the Harry Crews novel, is about a bored auto upholsterer in Gainesville, Florida, who starts training a wild hawk. "I had the bird on my arm most of the movie," Giamatti says. "It was fascinating, because you'd rehearse a quasi-love scene, and then you'd put the bird in there, and it would completely change the scene." Although he was initially nervous around the hawks, he now wants to spend some time working with their trainer.
Upcoming for Giamatti: two animated films (Robots and Ant Bully), plus Cinderella Man, a boxing movie directed by Ron Howard, starring someone even more difficult to work with than a wild hawk: Russell Crowe. Giamatti says, "The first thing he said was, 'I can just be a horrible, irascible guy, and I apologize ahead of time if I get that way.' I had heard horror stories, but I loved working with him."
Despite all this productivity -- Giamatti made more movies in 2004 than he saw -- he has a confession: "I've gotten really lazy as an actor." By this, he means he hasn't done any theater in years. "You're dead from the neck down in movies. It's not about your whole physical being, it's about your eyes. And you get really hooked into intense whispering. That's lazy, lazy, lazy, man. My voice is probably really flabby. But theater is really daunting -- I think about all those horrible productions of stuff that I was in, and you just can't get out of it. You're locked up in prison for however long it goes on."
What's the most Hollywood thing about Giamatti? He ponders. "There's got to be something.... I don't know that I have enough self-awareness." Then the answer comes to him: "I have five nice suits in my closet now, which is five more than I've ever owned before." When he needs to attend a premiere or an awards show, the film company insists on buying him a new suit. "At a certain point, it becomes clear that they're going to give you a suit whether you want one or not," he says. "If they gave me free books, I'd take them. But nobody is giving me books."
We walk out of the restaurant and down Court Street. On his way home, Giamatti stops in Barnes & Noble -- he wants to see if they've got the new issue of Fortean Times, the paranormal/conspiracy-theory magazine. Asked if he owns a tuxedo, Giamatti says, "No, should I?" He might need to wear one to the Oscars, I tell him. With a pained expression, he considers yet another symbol of a success that slightly scares him. Then he brightens: "Maybe I'll rent one."