Paul Giamatti Blows Us All Sideways with a Peek at Himself

Paul Giamatti is an actor who disappears so seamlessly into the characters he plays — from My Best Friend’s Wedding to Saving Private Ryan, The Ides of March, Saving Mr. Banks, John Adams, and so many more — that it’s easy to forget that there’s another person entirely pulling the strings behind those memorable roles. We got a glimpse of that man, the real Giamatti, last night at Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Cinema Vanguard Awards. 

Having already earned both Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Awards, as well as SAG, BAFTA, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actor for his outstanding performance as a curmudgeonly prep school teacher in Alexander Payne’s 2023 film The Holdovers, Giamatti is clearly on a roll after a decades-long career that began at the Yale School of Drama, and has taken him to an interesting variety of Broadway, television, and film roles. 

Giamatti spoke a bit about his background. He grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father was a professor at Yale — which Giamatti also attended as an undergrad — and though he’d always loved to act, it was only when his father died young, at age 51, that he said, “that impelled me toward doing what I really loved to do.” 

Moderator Scott Feinberg called Giamatti “one of the great actors of our time” and “a true character actor who can play drama, comedy, or romance.” His early roles on screen were mostly small ones, about which Giamatti said, “I think those are the hardest. All acting is hard; it’s brutal; it’s very hard.” But, he described those early small roles in films such as She’ll Take Romance, Past Midnight, Singles, Mighty Aphrodite, and Sabrina as being a “remarkable training ground. You really get good, because you have to be.”

His breakout movie role was in the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts, where he played Kenny “Pig Vomit” Rushton, a composite character based on two of Stern’s radio cohorts — Kevin Metheny and John Hayes — which Giamatti described as “a fantastic role.” The scene with Stern from Private Parts, which they showed a clip from last night, alongside a clip from Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, was indeed a great showcase for the wide variety of roles Giamatti has played. 

No typecasting here; other films and clips that were spotlighted at the tribute were American Splendor (a splash at Sundance about which Giamatti said, “I remember at the time thinking this is probably the first and last time I get a lead role”); Lady in the Water (a supernatural thriller directed by  M. Night Shyamalan, about whom Giamatti said, “He is the best host on a set that I’ve had”); Cinderella Man (opposite Russell Crowe, at the height of his fame); The Illusionist with fellow Yale Theater grad Edward Norton; and Barney’s Version, a complicated fiction biography that won him a Golden Globe, about a thrice-married Canadian soap opera producer suspected of murdering his best friend.

SBIFF also showcased clips from Win Win, from actor-writer-director Tom McCarthy, who went on to do the Academy Award–nominated (and Oscar-winning screenplay) for Spotlight; as well as Private Life (directed by Tamara Jenkins and co-starring Kathryn Hahn); and 12 Years a Slave, which Giamatti said is “still one of the best scripts I’ve ever read,” but that “it was a very intense movie to make.” He added, “I’ve seen that movie once and I don’t know that I can see it again.” 

Forced to watch the clip, in which he plays a sadistic slave trader, Giamatti responded, “Good lord, I’ve played a lot of snakes, haven’t I.”

That may be true, but the roles with the soft-hearted centers, particularly those created by Alexander Payne, who in addition to The Holdovers, also directed Giamatti in his pivotal lead role in the Santa Barbara Wine Country–set film Sideways, are among his most memorable. Of that film, Giamatti said, “I went in and it was just a standard sort of audition. I got sides [pieces rather than the entire script] and I was excited to meet him because I loved Election.”

But finally reading the Sideways script, Giamatti said, “I thought, ‘Who the fuck cares about wine’” — a comment that not surprisingly drew a big laugh from Santa Barbara’s wine country crowd. “I expected nothing to come of it.” 

Of course, his entire career  — not to mention the international profile of the local wine scene — changed because of Sideways. “It changed everything,” said Giamatti. “The parts I got were different. And people’s reactions to me were different…. I never had to audition anymore after that. In a weird way, sometimes I miss it.”

His praise was effusive for both Payne’s skills as a writer-director and those of his co-star Virginia Madsen. They discussed her work in this pivotal scene where her character memorably describes how wine evolves as an extension of her own desires: “I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now.”

Giamatti and ‘Sideways’ costar Virginia Madsen | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

“The writing was beautiful. She’s amazing in that scene,” said Giamatti. 

Madsen returned the favor when she came on stage to present the Cinema Vanguard Award to Giamatti, saying, “What is a vanguard? A vanguard is someone who stands at the forefront and inspires us by remarkable deeds. And you are known as the actor’s actor because there’s a mastery in what you do, and you honor the writers, directors, and filmmakers, because you illuminate what they’ve done, and you bring it to life. And as for me, I will always drown in your eyes.”

Giamatti accepted the award with the same thoughtful reflection he exhibited all night, saying of his accolades, “It’s hard to know what to feel a lot of the time. I feel like maybe I did the right thing with my life.”