Widely hailed as one of the greatest character actors of our time, Paul Giamatti was a steadily working theatre actor who spent much of the nineties slowly working his way up the Hollywood ladder. But it was his wonderfully complex roles in 2003’s American Splendour and Sideways that led him to being crowned as one of indie cinema’s true stars. He has recently played high-profile supporting roles in films such as George Clooney’s The Ides of March, The Hangover II, and this month’s delightfully cheesy musical Rock Of Ages, where he plays the sleazy manager to Tom Cruise’s outrageous rock star. He’s also become a leading man, giving critically lauded performances in last year’s Win Win and Barney’s Version. But despite this success, the friendly but intense actor reveals that he doesn’t really understand his Hollywood-given USP.

“This whole ‘character actor’ label - I don’t really know. It seems like a weird distinction - isn’t every actor a character actor? What’s the opposite – a non-entity actor? At one time, it really meant something a lot clearer to me. It meant the guy who always played the fussy boss, or the angry cop or whatever, it was a speciality. But it doesn’t seems to mean the same thing anymore. It just means ‘the bald guy’ or something! I don’t think of myself as anything in particular – I’m just an actor.”
Having played complex, and often quite nasty characters in – well, nearly everything to be honest – I ask the actor what the appeal is of playing these deeply flawed, often unlikeable characters. Is it exploration, an exercise in examining his own flaws and neuroses, or is it escapism, allowing him to forget himself by delving into the very foreign world of someone else’s messed-up mindset.
“It’s a mix of both. I don’t feel like I’m particularly like any of these guys, but know I probably am in more ways than I realise. But those roles aren’t really the most fun things to escape into. Whether I’m like them or not, they often force me to deal with some pretty difficult emotional material. I find that playing the really strict bad guy can be fun – if I get to have a gun and get to pistol-whip somebody that’s always fun! That’s more escapist than dealing with characters’ insecurity or narcissism or neuroses. I never feel like ‘Oh this character is just like me’, but obviously I draw on a lot of things about myself, things I normally try not to tap into.”
Obviously very self-aware and, by his own admission, extremely self-critical, Giamatti admits that he has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding about the human condition, which causes him to analyse the people he meets.
“I do spend a lot of time thinking about people’s behaviour, x-raying them a bit. It’s a bit of a chicken or egg thing; I don’t know if I was always predisposed to understanding people and through that was drawn to be an actor, or if I became an actor and then became more intrigued by the way people behaved. But trying to figure out people’s actions and motivations is always fascinating, but – or maybe because, actually – most people behave completely irrationally! And it’s odd, Americans don’t have a great reputation for being sympathetic to flawed human beings, we are portrayed as revering the clean-cut, gung-ho, All-American hero. But I find flawed people innately more interesting, and more human.”
Giamatti is very enthusiastic about his oft-described “breakout” film Sideways, though admits that the fame it brought him has made the job “a little less fun.”
“Fame obviously goes along with doing well, but it does take away a certain appeal. And an amount of anonymity weirdly necessary to being a good actor I think, it allows you to convincingly change. I think this celebrity culture where everyone thinks they know everything about an actor’s personal life detracts from that – audiences start going to films to see the actor, not to feel their character. It can be disappointing. I think I would have preferred to remain as relatively unrecognisable or anonymous as I was before Sideways. I mean, I’m not hugely well-known, but it’s enough that I feel like I’ve lost something.”
The actor even admits that he had some preconceptions about co-star Tom Cruise, who plays the eccentric, flailing rock star Stacee Jaxx.
“I knew he’d be interesting in this, whatever he did, but he’s a lot more playful than I thought he was going to be. He was really up for fucking around and having a good time, I thought he was going to be a lot more serious. But he’s a pretty accessible dude considering the kind of crazy level of celebrity he has. And I think it’s great he does something this weird – he makes my character look relatively normal, and I don’t often get to say that!”