The World's Best Character Actor

By Josh Tyrangiel/Prague

A few months ago, Paul Giamatti was on an airplane flipping through the in-flight entertainment options when he came across Tom Hanks in The Terminal. "I watched it without the sound," says Giamatti, "because it's amazing to see how much somebody like him communicates without words." Ideally, The Terminal should be viewed without the picture too, but at 35,000 ft., Giamatti found himself riveted. "I'm sitting there thinking, That m___________! All that movie is about is him! I mean, he's just carrying the thing. And it's incredible. I can't do that. It's like he's got different brain chemistry."

Since his film debut in 1990, Giamatti, 37, has appeared in plenty of Terminal-or-worse-type fare, usually stepping in from the edge of the frame to provide a memorable jolt of misanthropy or cluelessness that makes the star--be it Jim Carrey (Man on the Moon), Martin Lawrence (Big Momma's House) or Ben Affleck (Paycheck)--appear heroic by comparison. Giamatti finally got the chance to move to the middle of the screen in 2003's American Splendor and 2004's Sideways, and he infused comic-book-writing depressive Harvey Pekar and wine-loving, self-hating failed novelist Miles Raymond with such prickly, ordinary humanity that he was naturally overlooked when it came time for Academy Award nominations. Still, the performances were inspirational. "It's my hope that we're getting into an era where the value of a film is based on its proximity to real life rather than its distance from it," says Sideways director Alexander Payne. "To do that, you need actors--stars, basically--who don't necessarily look like Ben Affleck. So I disagree with Paul. Sideways proved he can carry a movie. He absolutely is a star."

Giamatti is flattered. "But I don't buy it," he says. In Hollywood face is fate, and with thinning hair, crooked teeth and no chin, Giamatti knows that his mug will almost always be cast in the service of actors with cheekbones. Unlike some of his rage-filled characters, he carries no visible resentment about that. Sitting in a cafe in Prague (where he is shooting The Illusionist, supporting Edward Norton and Jessica Biel), Giamatti announces, "You are absolutely free to describe me as a turtle or something. Seriously. When you profile someone, there has to be a narrative, and my narrative just happens to be 'Who is he?', 'Oh, he's that guy' and 'He looks like a squid!' Sideways doesn't change that," he adds, laughing. "Honestly, I never wanted to be more than a good supporting actor. Really, I enjoy it."

As proof, Giamatti offers up Cinderella Man, a boxing movie opening this week in which Russell Crowe plays James J. Braddock, the Seabiscuit in Everlast trunks who lifted America's spirits during the Great Depression; Giamatti is Braddock's loudmouthed, good-hearted trainer Joe Gould. "Gould was actually his manager, but they fudge it and make me his trainer-manager," Giamatti says. "It kind of puts me where the action is." Giamatti loved wearing 1930s clothes, being around fighters and working with Crowe ("It was about as much fun as I've ever had with another actor"), and director Ron Howard loved his supporting player no less. "Usually when you cast one of those roles, you meet a person and make sure they understand that my focus or the production's focus may not be on them," says Howard. "You know, just to make sure they don't have their head in their ass. Suffice it to say, Paul's head is nowhere near his ass."

Howard has a vested interest, but he thinks Joe Gould is the kind of role that could earn Giamatti an Oscar. At the very least, it's fine territory on which to build the next act of his career. As Gould, unlike such gigs as Limbo,the slave-trading orangutan in Planet of the Apes, or Kenny (Pig Vomit) Rushton in Private Parts, Giamatti gets to play more than just one exquisitely sweaty comic note. Howard thinks people are only now waking up to Giamatti's ability. "I so loved him as Pig Vomit, and that, balanced with the detail of Pekar, blew me away," he says. "He got Joe Gould without having to read for it."

Giamatti is not so self-abnegating that he denies his skills--"I've been pretty good in some stuff," he says in a satire of gruffness--but ever since his days at Yale (where his father Bart was president before becoming commissioner of baseball; he died in 1989), he has made team play a religion. "He was hands down the best actor at Yale," says Shawn Levy, who directed Giamatti in a school production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and painted him blue in the 2002 Frankie Muniz vehicle Big Fat Liar. "He could have dominated every play, but he served them and took nothing for granted."

Giamatti still prefers to audition rather than be handed a role, and his opinion of stars who monkey with scripts ("That's a really good way to f___ up a movie!") is usually in synch with those behind the camera. That partially explains why an unusual number of directors have remained close to him long after he has left their sets. But as a talented, literate, funny guy who spends a lot of time orbiting the Affleckian universe, he is also a tempting canvas on which to project their frustrations. "I can't tell you how hard it was to cast Paul in American Splendor," says Robert Pulcini, the film's co-director. "When you have to fight to get a hugely talented guy in a movie, it makes you question everything you're doing."

Giamatti appreciates the sympathy, and he is happy to play a lead when the fit is right (he's a bird-loving auto upholsterer in this fall's indie The Hawk Is Dying), but really, he'll do anything. "I love that up-at-2-a.m.-and-a-bizarre-movie-comes-on feeling," says Giamatti. "I enjoy being in those things." One of them, Duets, a 2000 karaoke-road-trip killing-spree film that the New York Times said "flops around like a carp on the kitchen floor," was actually not bad enough for his taste. "In the script there was bloodshed and incest and karaoke. I thought, This is great!" He sighs: "They ruined it in the edit."

The shock of Giamatti's good humor is ultimately a testament to his performances. Harvey Pekar and Miles Raymond ennobled themselves by overcoming their bitterness; Giamatti, who lives with his wife and 4-year-old son in Brooklyn, N.Y., has none to overcome. "We were out once," says Pulcini, "and he ordered a Chianti, and he was really surprised when it came. He thought it was going to be white. I mean, he knows nothing about wine. You forget it was just a performance." Great actors can do that to you. o