Paul Giamatti Shares What's Next for Him Post-'Billions'
Hot on the heels of the finale of his hit Showtime series, Billions, Golden Globe- and Emmy-award-winning actor Paul Giamatti is certainly not resting on his laurels. His latest film role opens in theaters next week, with early viewers and critics unanimously whispering the “O” word about his performance as a beleaguered professor at a New England prep school. (That would be "Oscar," but we don't want to jinx it.)
Set in the early ‘70s, The Holdovers is a poignant yet very funny throwback to boarding school classics like The World According to Garp (1982) and Dead Poets Society (1989). It tells the story of three “holdovers” left behind at their prep school during Christmas break; a troubled student (played by newcomer Dominic Sessa) mourning his father’s death, the school cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) grieving the loss of her son killed in Vietnam and Paul Hunham (Giamatti), a strict—and universally loathed—ancient history teacher with a penchant for humiliating his entitled students with devastating humor.
Related: 'The Holdovers' Is a Heartwarming Holiday Tale: Everything to Know About the Upcoming Movie
COVER PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID NEEDLEMAN/AUGUST IMAGE
The idea for the film came from two sources: Merlusse, an obscure 1935 French film director Alexander Payne saw about a group of students left at school during a holiday break with a hated teacher, and a spec script for a TV series by screenwriter David Hemingson (Kitchen Confidential). “David had written a pilot script that took place in an all-boys prep school, and it was wonderful,” says Payne. He asked Hemingson to make the project into a feature. “Alexander put it this way: It’s the story of lonely people at Christmas and the way their relationship evolves and the adventures they go on,” says Hemingson. “Alexander is such a great writer because he’s a humanist. He wants to see people in all of their flawed glory on screen.”
Payne immediately knew that Giamatti, the star of his Oscar-winning film, Sideways (2004), was perfect for the flawed professor. “[Sideways] was perhaps the happiest collaboration I have ever had with an actor, and I’ve had a lot of good ones,” says Payne. “I think Paul is the greatest actor and respect him so much. This role was tailor-made for him.”
Born and raised in New Haven, CT, Giamatti, 56, grew up surrounded by academics. “My father was a professor and President of Yale University,” he says. “My mother was a teacher and my grandparents were all teachers. Everyone in my family is a teacher or academic so it’s a background I understand.” And like the posh students his character Hunham oversees, Giamatti attended elite private academies himself. “I didn’t board there, but I went to a prep school like the one in the movie. Part of my preparation for the role was thinking about my past and people that I knew in the past.”
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That background helped him channel Professor Hunham, he says. “My character is a disciplinarian, a hard-ass; he’s kind of a square guy. And he has lots of grotesque physical problems that put people off. He is not a beloved teacher.”
Giamatti could’ve followed his parents’ footsteps into education. He graduated from Yale University with an undergraduate degree in English and a master’s in drama. “I thought about going into an academic life,” he told The Guardian. “Though I don’t think I would’ve been suited for it. It’s because my dad died suddenly that I became an actor.”
His father, A. Bartlett (Bart) Giamatti, also the commissioner of Major League Baseball at the time, died unexpectedly at age 50 of a heart attack. “His death threw everybody for a loop,” his son recalls. “I had just graduated. He died before I knew what I was going to do with my life.”
What he ended up doing was dishwashing and selling juice machines in Seattle while developing his craft in local theater. “I definitely had a top-notch education,” he says, “as wasted as it was on me.” His talent, though, wasn’t wasted as he began to get bit parts. His role as “kissing man” in 1992’s Singles and “FBI technician“ in 1997’s Donnie Brasco got him some notice, and he emerged as a reliable and very recognizable character actor.
And then he landed the role of Kenny “Pig Vomit” Rushton in Private Parts (1997).“It was one of the first movies I had ever done,” he said about the film based on Howard Stern’s autobiography. That well-received movie should have opened doors to more substantial parts, but it was another five years of doing small roles in big movies like Saving Private Ryan (1998), Man on the Moon (1999) and Planet of the Apes (2001)—what Giamatti calls “a lot of good work”—before he was cast in the lead of 2003’s Oscar-nominated film American Splendor. Ironically, Giamatti, who played comic book creator Harvey Pekar in the movie, won the “Breakthrough Performance” award by the National Board of Review—13 years after his career began.
Fox Searchlight Pictures
He was nominated for his first Golden Globe for his groundbreaking performance as Miles, a wine connoisseur on a drunken “wine country” road trip in director Payne’s 2004 romantic dramedy, Sideways. The film introduced him to Payne, who had just won a Golden Globe for writing About Schmidt. “I had always idolized Alexander’s movies,” Giamatti says. “So being offered the lead part in Sideways was a dream come true.”
A year later, Giamatti earned his only Oscar nomination (so far) for his role as a boxing manager in Ron Howard’s pugilist drama, Cinderella Man (2005). He may have lost that race, but the Emmys came calling in 2009 for Giamatti’s magnificent performance in John Adams, about one of our founding fathers, and the second President of the United States. The seven-part HBO series, based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, was a project that Giamatti initially worried about. “Do you really want to make a nine-hour movie about this guy who’s a relentless pain in the ass?” he said in The Hollywood Interview. “I said I’d love to do it but that I wasn’t going to compromise about him being a pain in the ass, because I thought that would be really interesting.” Audiences did, indeed, love the series as John Adams was HBO’s most-watched program that year and went on to sweep the Emmys with 13 awards, followed by four Golden Globe wins a few months later.
The next eight years found Giamatti unofficially earning a reputation as the hardest- working man in Hollywood, as he appeared in over 50 film and television projects during that time. But his most enduring role might be Chuck Rhoades, the relentlessly driven district attorney in the political drama Billions, which concluded its seventh and final season in October.
Related: 8 TV Shows To Watch If You Like ‘Billions’
Showtime
Billions fans may be wondering where they’ll get their next Giamatti fix, but fear not, there’s still plenty of Giamatti to go around this fall. There’s his weekly podcast, Chinwag, co-hosted with author and philosopher Stephen Asma, where they talk about everything from Bigfoot to magic mushrooms. Last week he showed up in the second season of HBO’s Spanish fantasy drama 30 Coins playing, of all things, a tech billionaire.
And just in time for the holiday season, his feel-good film The Holdovers opens Nov. 10. “It’s such a good story,” says Giamatti. “It about three completely unlikely people forming a bond from common humanity. I hope it’s got laughs and emotional stuff and just feels comforting in some way.”
*Interview conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike
Next, Is There a ‘Billions’ Spinoff? A Complete Guide to All Four of Them
