Paul Giamatti talks about finding the heart in the protagonist of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.
He is rightly known for his versatility, but Paul Giamatti has a special knack for principled, witty curmudgeons. “It seems to come to me,” he says of the personality type, “and it is hard for me to know whether I manifest it for myself or it’s something people have seen me do. They are interesting characters to play for sure though.”
The latest in the US actor’s line of acerbic grumps is at the centre of The Holdovers, the awards-contending comedy-drama from Focus Features that reunites Giamatti with director Alexander Payne almost 20 years after the two first collaborated on the Oscar-winning Sideways. Set in the Vietnam War year of 1970, Paul Hunham is a teacher of ancient history at a New England boys’ boarding school, a duffle-coated, Latin-spouting loner, disliked by students and colleagues.
Forced to babysit a group of boarders who have nowhere to go for the Christmas break, he ends up forming unlikely bonds with a troubled pupil (played by newcomer Dominic Sessa) and the school’s grieving head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) in a holiday tale that is touching without being overly sentimental.
Giamatti’s performance — which puts him in the running for the best actor Oscar and Bafta — brings to mind his work playing failed author and wine expert Miles in Sideways (2004), real-life comic-book creator Harvey Pekar in American Splendor (2003) and a US founding father in the 2008 miniseries John Adams. In The Holdovers, however, there was personal experience to inform the acting.
“I went to a school like this, not too long after this movie is set,” explains the actor, who grew up in New Haven, Connecticut with his Yale professor father and English teacher mother. “I grew up around a lot of guys like this. Teachers at those places constructed a persona.”
With Hunham, “there is a certain shtick that the guy has taken on over the years; he is performing himself a little bit. There is some way in which the movie is about a guy letting go of his shtick. You start to see him take the mask off, not perform as much and be himself, whatever that means.”
The character’s evolution is key to the film’s emotional payoff, but to Giamatti it is not the only reason to like him. “Not only do I think it’s funny to watch him enjoy his nastiness, but there is a certain part of me that thinks he’s not wrong — he goes too far, he is unwilling to live fully in the present and embrace change and nuance, but I don’t think he’s wrong.”
Friends reunited
It is perhaps surprising that The Holdovers — which at press time had grossed $13.1m in North America for Focus after five weeks of gradually expanding play, and is set for a UK release in January via Universal — comes almost two decades after Sideways. After all, Giamatti and Payne have remained friends since that first film together and have occasionally discussed other possible projects including, intriguingly, a western and a private detective story.
“Alexander has a knack for finding actors that tonally fit what he does,” says Giamatti. “He likes to work with actors who are kind of baseline funny, people with a tendency to put humour in the sad or the dislikeable, or put drama into the funny. I think I’m like that as an actor.”
On set, Payne “knows how to talk to each actor the way they need to be talked to,” Giamatti adds. “He won’t give direction just because he’s there and thinks he’s supposed to, which a lot of directors do. And he doesn’t use a monitor, he sits by the camera, which creates a kind of intimate atmosphere.
“He and I are so much on the same page that he doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot to me,’ the actor continues. “It just feels like I’m having a nice time with a lovely erudite friend — and we happen to be making a movie.”
Besides Sideways (for which he won the best male lead Independent Spirit Award in 2005), American Splendor and John Adams (which resulted in a lead actor Emmy and the first of two Golden Globes), Giamatti’s 30-year screen career has taken in indie features (Barney’s Version, Private Life), studio blockbusters (The Amazing Spider-Man 2, San Andreas) and prestige dramas (Cinderella Man, for which he was nominated for supporting actor at the 2006 Oscars).
Most recently he has been seen on the small screen in Billions, Showtime’s snarky Wall Street melodrama, and in season two of 30 Coins, HBO Europe’s Spanish diabolical horror series. The former, which recently ended its run after seven seasons, pitted Giamatti’s New York state attorney against Damian Lewis’s hedge-fund kingpin, and was demanding on him.
“I had never played a single character for so long,” he says. “I don’t know that I’m looking to do that again. Not that it was unpleasant. It was great, and it ended in an interesting way.”
30 Coins gave its sole US cast member — who calls the series “fantastically insane” — a chance to indulge his taste for genre stories, also explored in his Chinwag weekly podcast, and for playing “juicy villains” with, in this case, no hair.
When he was offered the role by series writer/director Alex de la Iglesia, he thought: “This is the closest I will probably get to playing a Bond villain. I’ll shave my head so I’ll be a proper old-school Bond villain.”
Giamatti is set to film a third and final season of 30 Coins sometime next year. He has also been contemplating doing another stage play — in the 1990s he appeared in a string of classic and contemporary plays in New York, but his last stage venture was in the title role of a 2013 production of Hamlet at Yale University, his alma mater. A new film role — curmudgeonly or otherwise — is not yet on the cards, however, even though the conclusion of Billions and the end of the four-month-long US actors strike will probably mean plenty of offers for his wide-ranging talent.
“I don’t actually know, and I am kind of happy to not really know,” says the easygoing Giamatti of his future work plans. “I’m kind of fine not doing much. I have read a bunch of things and nothing has particularly grabbed me. I am lucky that I did well financially with Billions so I can sit still for a little bit.”
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