Interview: Paul Giamatti, actor

Published on Friday 13 November 2009 09:48

PAUL GIAMATTI has gone Awol. An hour after we're due to meet in a hotel bar in Cardiff, there is still no sign of him. All I know is that Giamatti is in Wales shooting Ironclad, a film with Brian Cox and Derek Jacobi in which he plays King John.

But he isn't on set or in his room. His publicists in New York and London are desperately trying to track him down. A dialect coach is waiting for him in the lobby. Even the hotel staff are on alert, eyes peeled for a squat, balding and bespectacled bespectacled American actor, "the stressed-out one in Sideways", as one barman refers to him. Meanwhile, I'm hoping someone will send over a bottle of merlot, which has apparently happened to Giamatti a lot since he spluttered in Sideways: "I am not drinking any f***ing merlot!"

Finally, the man we're all waiting for slopes in. He's wearing a stripy T-shirt stretched over his paunch, jeans, and an expression that's closer to sheepish than stressed. He's carrying a tatty Tesco's bag. It appears to be full of second-hand books. This is not your average Oscar-nominated actor's entrance.

"I'm really sorry," he mumbles to his shoes. "My time is all off because I just got here yesterday. I went for a walk and found some old bookstores, picked up a bunch of used books…" He trails off. "I'm embarrassed that I've been dicking around."

Giamatti isn't your average Oscar-nominated actor in many ways. There's the bag of books, the fact that we end up drinking Guinness and going outside for a smoke during the interview, and his insistence on paying the bill. It's also the way he looks, the hangdog expression that makes his rounded face the perfect vehicle for black comedy. Giamatti looks a bit like Eeyore would if he were a middle-aged, thinning-on-top man living in Brooklyn.

"Lots of people ask if it bothers me that people describe me as a character actor," he says. "I always said no until I caught on that it should be bothering me. At one time it meant the guy who is always playing the goofy cop or the prissy floor manager in the department store. Now it just means bald," he starts laughing. "Which is totally fine. It means I'm not Tom Cruise. Clearly most people aren't, so I can live with that. Tom Cruise doesn't get to play King John. I do."

Ah yes, his roles. Giamatti does a mean line in angst-ridden, mildly misanthropic losers, the kind you're surprised to find yourself liking quite so much. Even when he's playing successes, like the comic-book writer Harvey Pekar in American Splendour or American founding father John Adams in the HBO mini-series of the same time, Giamatti brings a barely contained neurosis and poor-me resentment to whatever he does. It makes him a worthy successor to Woody Allen and is probably why he ends up playing so many Jewish characters. Even his King John, he says, is "neurotic, terrible and weak".

"I don't think I could function if I was really that angsty," he continues. "I'm pretty relaxed about being an hour late." It's true, Giamatti is much more mellow than he is on screen, though he does share an awkwardness, an oblique sense of humour and a tendency to embarrass easily with his characters.

"It gets a little bit wearing after a while," he says of playing to type. "I did a movie called The Illusionist and I was so happy to be this relaxed detective guy with a pipe. I didn't have to be freaking out, I just watched everyone from the shadows. It would be nice to just be the funny guy. Or the calm guy." He would love to do a western, but knows he wouldn't get to play the cowboy. "I'd be the corrupt mayor or the guy who owns the mine."

The film we're here to discuss, Cold Souls, isn't a departure either. Giamatti plays another chronic self-doubter, this time an actor called Paul Giamatti who lives in Brooklyn with his wife (Emily Watson). Playing Uncle Vanya on stage, Giamatti (the screen version) is so troubled by his inability to nail the part that he decides to store his soul in a New York facility. It's a brilliantly surreal premise and Giamatti plays it totally deadpan as he becomes soulless and then, when his Vanya still doesn't improve, is implanted with the soul of a Russian poet. Meanwhile, his own soul, which looks like a chickpea, is trafficked to St Petersburg.

The comparisons to Charlie Kaufman films, such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, are obvious. Giamatti, though, hasn't seen either. "I'm sort of ashamed, but it's probably good because I worked out of ignorance," he says. "This struck me as being like a Woody Allen movie anyway. The way it was shot and the production design was a pastiche on early Woody Allen."

In fact, first-time feature director Sophie Barthes got the idea from a dream she had after watching Allen's film Sleeper. "Her first choice to play the lead was Woody Allen," says Giamatti. "She figured it wouldn't happen and changed it to me. She came up to me at a film festival, told me the idea, and I thought it sounded great.

"I have this production company, and this is our first movie."

How did he find playing himself? "It wasn't me particularly," he maintains, though he sounds like he's trying to convince himself. "At one point they changed my name and it wasn't as good. It lost something. At another stage Sophie did make it me, used actual biographical details. I didn't like that at all. It made me uncomfortable. I didn't want to actually play myself. I had no interest in being me. It was meant to be more of a persona."

Ever since Giamatti did Sideways, his 33rd film, the scripts have come thick and fast. He went on to be nominated for an Oscar for Cinderella Man, yet I sense that Giamatti preferred life when he was left alone more. He still favours supporting roles over leads. "I think they're more interesting," he shrugs. "They often seem more colourful. It's like the difference between being a sprinter and a long-distance runner. I feel I work better in shorter bursts. I get a little bored and thinned-out otherwise."

He found all the attention after Sideways a bit unnecessary, though he was delighted to be able to buy a bigger apartment in Brooklyn for his wife and son. "I was a bit like, what the hell is this?" he says of the response. "People got a little hysterical. It's funny because they wouldn't be able to make Sideways now. The economics of filmmaking are so dismal in America that no-one would take a risk on making a small movie unless it had George Clooney in it. We wouldn't be able to make Cold Souls either."

It has taken Giamatti, the son of a Yale professor and teacher who read history at university and originally wanted to be an animator, all these years to feel comfortable on screen. He still isn't quite there, but I think his awkwardness is what makes his characters so convincing. Embarrassment becomes him. "I feel a lot more relaxed," he says. "I've loosened up more. I found film very uncomfortable for a long time. It doesn't come naturally. I always felt much more at ease on stage. At first the camera was, like, here" (he holds his hand in front of his face) "and I was like, 'Get that thing away from me.' I felt like I had no space. Then I realised it wasn't just a piece of equipment; there was a person behind it."

His very first time on screen was – unsurprisingly – awkward. "It was in a stable with brushes and a horse and I was cleaning him down. I remember feeling like it was so literal that I had nothing to do. It seemed really boring in a strange way." The point, Giamatti goes on, is that he likes to feel as if he's acting, not just doing something for real or playing himself. "I would have preferred an imaginary horse," he laughs.

• Cold Souls is in cinemas from today. Read Alistair Harkness's review