“I’m really surprised this is going so well,” says Paul Giamatti early on in our conversation. It’s a typically sardonic remark from the American actor famed for his Oscar-nominated roles in the mordant movies Sideways and The Holdovers and the TV show Billions. Yet the cause of his concern today is not existential but technological. “I’m an extremely wary user of technology,” he says. “I always feel like I have some strange negative body charge or something, because nothing ever works for me.”
That we are speaking over Zoom seems fitting given the nature of the project we are here to discuss: an episode of the new season of Netflix’s dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror in which Giamatti plays a reclusive man asked to contribute to a memorial service for a person from his past. His guide on this Proustian journey is an AI played by Patsy Ferran who soon has him scouring his attic for old photographs.
It’s an analogue-first lifestyle to which Giamatti, 57, can relate. “I live in an apartment, so I don’t have an attic, but I do have boxes of photographs and some stacks of dusty CDs. And I have a lot of books. I like books a lot.”
This might be expected from the son of pedagogues. The Connecticut-born Giamatti’s mother was an English teacher and his father was a Yale professor of comparative literature who later became university president and, later still, the commissioner of Major League Baseball.
Much of the Black Mirror episode, “Eulogy”, involves Giamatti’s character, Philip, being transported back to 1989 and a milieu of Brooklyn bars and loft parties where the air is filled with bong smoke and The Stone Roses. Was this what 1989 looked like for the 22-year-old Paul?
“I lived in Seattle, but it was very similar,” he recalls. “I was trying to know if I wanted to be an actor, doing acting related stuff and not knowing quite what I was. In Seattle at that time grunge was starting, so it was very much everybody in their lentil shirts doing bong hits in the apartment I lived in and listening to that music.”
The other new craze in town was a certain coffee chain. “I had a friend who worked at literally the first Starbucks, and it was like: wow, exciting! Coffee culture! I remember walking in and saying to her: this is never going to fly, who the hell is going to go buy coffee?”
Inevitably, perhaps, the process of playing a man delving into his past prompted Giamatti to reflect on his own. “Sure, it made me think about mistakes made and misunderstandings and stupid things that you wish hadn’t happened.” But he is not one of those actors who use personal experiences to help them summon the required emotion for a scene. “I think I’m unconsciously drawing hugely on memories, but consciously I haven’t done a whole lot of that,” he says. “It tends to take me out of it if I start thinking about something that happened to me . . . And if something’s well written, like this was, it’ll affect me without my needing to draw on my own past.”
What Giamatti is inclined towards, irresistibly, is esoterica. A life-long passion for mysteries, conspiracies and hoaxes led him to create the podcast Chinwag, in which he and philosopher Stephen Asma pore over all manner of arcane subjects. He is also an avid reader of science fiction.
“I’ve always been drawn to stuff like this since I was a little kid,” Giamatti enthuses. “The Twilight Zone was a very big thing for me . . . And when Black Mirror started, I thought: somebody has actually really nailed the anthology weird fantastical thing. People have tried to reboot The Twilight Zone, and it’s hard to do.”
Despite Black Mirror’s technological leanings, however, use of CGI in “Eulogy” was kept to a minimum. A young version of Philip whom we see in interactive photographs is a lookalike actor, not a digital avatar conceived using Giamatti’s de-aged likeness.
“He just weirdly does look like me when I was that age,” Giamatti says. “He actually looks a lot like cousins of mine, like in an uncanny, strange way. His eyes particularly.”
Similarly, when Philip steps into the photographs, the people around him frozen in time are played by live performers. “We weren’t in front of a green screen, they were all there holding still for long takes, some of them in amazing, crazy positions . . . Most of them, I think, were dancers and mimes. It was so much weirder than I thought it was going be. It was eerie actually.”
However, for a self-confessed technophobe, Giamatti is surprisingly sanguine about the growing use of AI in the film and TV industry. “It’s creepy and it’s scary but, as much as I’m not a technophile, it’s inevitable. There’s no holding it back. It’s not like you can put the genie back in the bottle . . . Do I want to sell my image to somebody? I mean I’m not for that, but I don’t fault people who would do it.”
In fact, he has already appeared in a film that took on that very subject: 2013’s little-seen live-action/animation The Congress, in which Robin Wright plays a version of herself who sells her likeness to a Hollywood studio to raise money to treat her son’s illness. Giamatti is taken aback when I mention it. “You’re the only person in my life that has ever mentioned that movie. I think it had a little funny kind of renaissance recently. People sort of discovered it and were like: somebody was talking about this and made a very strange movie about it. I’m not sure it makes sense entirely, but it was an interesting experience making it.”
Giamatti enthuses about the source text written by Polish sci-fi author Stanisław Lem and soon we have returned to the subject of memory. “There’s another short story by Ted Chiang, a great science fiction writer. It’s all about an AI that enhances your memory to the point you can remember everything, every second of your life from the time you’re born to the time you’re dying. And it’s about the fact that maybe it’s a good thing to be able to forget. Maybe it’s important.”
The bittersweet tang that old memories can evoke is nicely captured in “Eulogy”. In one scene, Philip takes an old roll of film to be developed and is asked the quaint question: “Matt or gloss?” Giamatti delivers the reply with a quantity of sardonicism that only he could: “Matt.” I tell him that the moment made me think about his wider career and he immediately guffaws: “It’s matt!”
The self-deprecation is gleeful but there’s an element of truth here too. Giamatti in person (even over Zoom) is a genial, jovial presence, so why has he spent the past 30 years playing curmudgeons?
“I don’t know, it’s really interesting, and it gets into all kinds of questions about actors and personas and why people are perceived the way they are. A lot of it has just been what people have wanted me to do over the years. I think it’s a thing that can happen with character actors — whatever ‘character actor’ means, and I don’t really necessarily know. It’s the first thing people see you do, and so you’re asked to do it again.”
When I ask what the part was that triggered all this, the origin story of his onscreen grouchiness, he takes me back to 1997. “I did a movie a long time ago called Private Parts about Howard Stern in which I played an extremely unpleasant person, and it really stuck for a while. I don’t know why I’m good at it. Am I drawing on something unconsciously? Like, I’m not actually very much like this, so it’s fun to be like that in the parts? Or is it that there is some part of me that I try to repress that comes out in them? I don’t know.”
Some have been miserable, others plain nasty. Perhaps the nastiest of them all was fearsome attorney Chuck Rhoades, a pit bull in pinstripes, in the long-running TV series Billions. “He was fun to play but he was such an unpleasant person that seven years of that got hard,” Giamatti reveals. “After a while, you’re like, Jesus Christ, this guy is so unpleasant, he’s such a conniving human being and never did the right thing for the right reason ever.”
Maybe it says good things about him that he found it wearing to play such a monster. “There’s an interesting phenomenon,” Giamatti observes. “It’s not true all the time, it’s a generalisation, but so often the people who play bad guys and bastards in movies are the nicest people. And sometimes the opposite is true. The people who play the sweethearts are not.”
By that reckoning, Giamatti must be the sweetest of them all. “Oh, I’m not saying I’m the most pleasant person in the world,” he chuckles. “I can be unpleasant. Believe me.”
The new season of ‘Black Mirror’ is on Netflix from April 10
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
Read the full article here