Paul Giamatti Is Great in Everything

In 2016, the alt-comic cable talk show The Chris Gethard Show engineered a strange form of call-in game show. A Dumpster was placed in the middle of the stage, and Gethard dared his viewing audience to guess what was inside, permitting them one question each. All kinds of anarchic guessing ensued, especially once Gethard’s guests on the show got a peek inside the Dumpster, but it took about 35 minutes to reach the answer: the actor Paul Giamatti, who had been cheerfully squatting inside. “People have never been this excited to maybe see me,” he said later in the show. “So I thought, I’m just going to draw it out.”

By that point in his career, Giamatti was an Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated actor already well known for films such as Sideways and his lead performance in HBO’s John Adams. “You’re a man of huge accomplishments, and I can’t believe you did this for us,” Gethard said after the reveal—to which Giamatti replied, “No, no, it was my pleasure.” This avuncular, down-for-anything attitude has been part of Giamatti’s charm for a long while. Nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Alexander Payne’s bittersweet comedy The Holdovers, Giamatti has seemingly nudged ahead to co-favorite territory—partly because he’s great in the film, but partly because he’s the kind of guy almost anyone would be happy to see pop out of a Dumpster.

Giamatti’s Oscar nomination for The Holdovers is, almost confusingly, only his second. His first came for the 2006 film Cinderella Man, a creaky Ron Howard boxing biopic set during the Great Depression, in which Giamatti played the ornery manager Joe Gould. He was bizarrely snubbed for Payne’s Sideways, a 2004 indie smash that was otherwise showered with awards attention, and would not have remotely resonated with audiences without Giamatti’s bruised, relatable buffoonery at its center. On TV, he’s been the blustery star of a well-liked cable hit—Showtime’s Billions—for seven years, and has gone largely unrewarded for it. But most audiences would recognize his face from something, and over the past 30 years he’s built up an apex career for a character actor: the middle-aged crank who can headline a film but just as easily fill in as one of Dwayne Johnson’s action-movie sidekicks (in fact, he’s done that twice).

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Perhaps that long, hearty run is why this Oscar season has ended up feeling like a long-delayed celebration of Giamatti himself, and his generational appeal. The Oscar juggernaut Oppenheimer is the front-runner in many categories, including Best Actor, where Cillian Murphy’s performance as the title character is the odds-on favorite to win. But Giamatti has become a dark horse—not just because of the strength of his performance but because of the collective realization that maybe we’ve been taking him for granted. Sure, he’s great as the crabby classics teacher Paul Hunham, snapping at his troublesome students before coming to love them, but here’s the thing: When isn’t Paul Giamatti great?

Giamatti pops up in the background of a couple of early ’90s indie comedies—Cameron Crowe’s Singles, Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite—but I first really noticed him a few years later, when he quickly became a common “cantankerous guy” in supporting roles. Giamatti himself cites playing the evil radio executive Pig Vomit in Howard Stern’s Private Parts film as his breakout; from there, he was a sergeant with crummy ankles in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Andy Kaufman’s rabble-rousing sidekick, Bob Zmuda, in Man on the Moon, and (my personal favorite) the iniquitous orangutan slave trader Limbo in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. A younger generation than mine venerates his villainy in the Frankie Muniz comedy Big Fat Liar; to many elder Millennials like myself, his work as the iconoclastic cartoonist Harvey Pekar in American Splendor helped introduce me to the history of indie comics.

American Splendor was a surprise hit at Sundance, and set the tone for Giamatti’s future as a leading man. He continued taking supporting roles in Hollywood nonsense; to this day, he can add a dash of mustard to the blandest concoction (see Jungle Cruise, or Gunpowder Milkshake, or San Andreas, or …). But that this balding, bearded eccentric could topline a movie felt notable. Usually they were indies, like Sideways, the amusingly self-involved Cold Souls, and the lovely sports dramedy Win Win. Sometimes they weren’t: M. Night Shyamalan made him the star of his bizarre big-budget fantasy fable Lady in the Water in 2006. But by the time Giamatti was cast as John Adams in 2008, the thought of Pig Vomit as a Founding Father did not seem so ludicrous.

Giamatti has played plenty more villains, desk jockeys, cranky sidekicks, and emotionally volatile indie heroes. He’s enjoyed a lot of his greatest success on TV, doing understated work as Ben Bernanke in Too Big to Fail and then screaming his head off with jolly aplomb on Billions. And though he’s never stopped working, The Holdovers does feel like the meatiest character he’s been handed in years. Paul Hunham is filled with the bluster that Giamatti is very good at channeling, barking insults with glee and often grimacing at the very thought of human interaction. But Giamatti lets his dormant wounds and curdled empathy come to the surface without a whiff of contrivance. A lesser actor would make the reveal of Paul’s heart of gold feel ill-earned; with Giamatti, the viewer recognizes from scene one that he’s been a secret sweetheart all along, even as he snaps at his truculent students and joyfully hands out detentions.

All of this adds up to why Giamatti will be in contention on Oscar night: his performance, first and foremost; his great body of work; voters’ guilt over the fact he was overlooked in the past; that he’s been so endearing throughout the months-long press tour that comes with an Oscar campaign, always shrugging and smiling and seeming authentically humbled that he’s still plugging along in an industry that is often quick to forget great actors. He’s a muse to artists like Alexander Payne, sure—but he’s also a guy who will sit in a Dumpster for a studio audience, or ask Burger King if he can have burgers for life after doing one of its ads. He is a consummate artist, yet still forever one of us.