Giamatti went from Pig Vomit to an awards darling
Paul Giamatti has been landing movie and TV gigs for more than two decades, mostly in supporting roles. But it wasn’t until he played Pig Vomit, Howard Stern’s conniving, tantrum-prone boss in “Private Parts” (1997), that people started noticing the pudgy, far-from-handsome actor.
A few years later, he was moved up to leading man status in “American Splendor” (2003) and “Sideways” (2004). Soon after, he was earning Oscar nominations (“Cinderella Man”) and Emmy wins (“John Adams”).
He’s currently the lead character in the film adaptation of the much-loved Mordecai Richler book “Barney’s Version,” in which he gets to tackle a true original of a character. His performance in the role earned him a Golden Globe.
Barney Panofsky is a TV producer who has lived a full life, one that has provided him with opportunities to make plenty of decisions. Too bad most are wrong. He’s not quite despicable, yet he’s sure not someone you’d want to hang around with. But Giamatti is a fan of Barney.
“There was nothing I didn’t like about the character,” he said. “I guess the thing that was most fun for me to do was to live this kind of impulsive, romantic man’s life out. I’m not like that at all. I’m a wimp. The fact that he has this incredibly buried romantic nature that he’s struggling to let come out was wonderful. I like that he’s a bastard a lot of the time, and I like that he’s unpleasant. (The part) was a gift for me. I got to do everything in this movie. I even got to get older. It was great.”
But Giamatti, who has a reputation for reading scripts over and over, even while the film is being made, hadn’t read the popular Richler novel.
“I was familiar with it, and I was familiar with Richler,” he said. “But I read the script first, so that was what I felt I needed to stick to. I did eventually read the book sort of lightly, because I’m not all that smart, and I didn’t want to get it impressed too deeply in my head. But I did refer back to it a few times to refresh myself with that great voice – that constantly really bitter, angry voice that’s in the book.”
He laughed at that, and added, “But I didn’t want to get too caught up in feeling the burden of translating the book. Because it was gone. There’s a script now.”
It’s well-known that Richler’s characters often were his alter-egos, and although Richler died in 2001, Giamatti found a way to get the author to help him nail the part.
“One of the things that was more helpful than the book would have been was watching him talk in interviews, and looking at pictures of him. There are great pictures of him shuffling down the street, sitting in a bar, smoking a cigar. I thought, “Hey, this guy looks really cool. I can play this guy.’ He’s got a kind of grave demeanor, but he’s really funny and he’s really pointed and very ironic and sarcastic, and he’s got this very steady rhythm going on. He was very useful to look at and think about. It was a nice model to work with.”
But when it came time to rely on pure acting, Giamatti had terrific help right there on the set: Dustin Hoffman plays Izzy Panofsky, Barney’s father. They share a number of intimate and comic two-person scenes.
“He’s like a mad raconteur with a steady stream of really filthy jokes,” said Giamatti of Hoffman. “He’s very funny and he keeps the energy up amazingly.”
After casually mentioning that working with Hoffman can be interesting, Giamatti launched into an example.
“In some scenes, if he felt he wasn’t getting at it, or I wasn’t getting at it, or the two of you weren’t getting at it, he’d sort of go off-road. He’d take the thing out somewhere and pull the scene apart. He makes a sort of crazy casserole out of the scene and it goes all over the place. He repeats things and then throws other things at you to try to shake it up and give it the right kind of life. And then eventually he pulls it all back together again, which can be disconcerting for some people. But since he’s a far better actor than me, I thought I’ll just follow this crazy guy wherever he goes and see what the hell’s gonna happen. It was great. It was incredibly exciting. He kept you on your toes.”
