'I'm clearly not Brad Pitt, and I'm never going to be Brad Pitt," says Paul Giamatti, closely inspecting his coffee cup in a Polish restaurant in a leafy neighbourhood of Brooklyn. "But I don't think I'd want to be Brad Pitt, you know? So that's OK."
This is partly just a reference to Giamatti's "character-actor" looks, but also to something deeper: a sense of composure, of being comfortable in one's own skin, that the archetypal Hollywood star exudes but both Giamatti and his characters tend to lack. "You know that thing where you can just fuckin' stand there and people can't take their eyes off the person? I don't have that weight of charisma," he explains. "That's not me. If I just stand there, it's going to be boring. You're going to want it to be over with."
The men Giamatti plays tend to express their discomfort as hostility: they are moody defeatists such as the alcoholic writer Miles in 2004's Sideways, or rageful misanthropes like the comic-book writer Harvey Pekar in American Splendor; they stalk the screen like resentful boxer dogs, convinced the world is a conspiracy to frustrate them. Perhaps because he shares some of their awkwardness, people tend to assume the 42-year-old Giamatti is like this too, when in fact he is affable and largely upbeat.
One of his neighbours once wrote an essay in the New York Times about living near him in Brooklyn, "and he basically described me as Travis Bickle: this terrifyingly angry, scary guy who'd sit brooding in the park, looking like if somebody came up to me I'd bite their face off. People make you fit their thesis. But I also felt, well, maybe sometimes I do look like that, because I know there's people looking at me. It's a funny bind. It's, like, stay away from that guy, because he's probably got a gun, and he's going to shoot up the post office . . . It's a very weird thing, this being identified with your character."
This fiction-versus-reality confusion isn't likely to be helped by Giamatti's new movie, Cold Souls, in which he plays an actor named Paul Giamatti, who lives in Brooklyn, and who is – can you guess? – brooding, defeated, and resentful. When he hears about Soul Storage, a local firm offering to extract and store New Yorkers' souls, he quickly makes an appointment, in hopes of existential relief. Soon the company's medical director, Dr Flintstein (a poker-faced David Strathairn), has removed Giamatti's soul, which turns out to resemble a chickpea.
But soullessness plays havoc with the actor's career: he's playing the lead in a production of Uncle Vanya, and the soulless Vanya is a disaster: cocky, flirtatious, and fatally lacking in Chekhovian angst. So Giamatti tries to recover his soul, only to find that it has fallen into the possession of Russian gangsters – the masterminds behind a black-market soul-smuggling operation – necessitating a journey to St Petersburg to find it.
If this sounds like a combination of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that is understandable: Cold Souls seems to go out of its way to risk unfavourable comparisons with the oeuvre of Charlie Kaufman, who ought perhaps to be consulting his lawyers. But in the end the movie, directed by Sophie Barthes, succeeds on its own terms because it steers far away from madcap comedy: the characters don't act as if the idea of soul extraction is even slightly funny, and a deadpan joke soon grows into an exploration of the idea of soullessness, and of the depths of the Russian soul.
It probably helped that Giamatti had no familiarity with the movie's predecessors. "Amazingly, I haven't seen those movies, so it didn't strike me [as too similar], because I'm ignorant. As it went along, I started hearing producers say, 'Oh my God, everybody's going to compare this to those movies,' and I kept blithely going, 'Oh, fuck it! No they won't. Who cares?' It never really occurred to me. I felt more like it was a pastiche on Woody Allen movies – it looks a bit like Sleeper, and the Russian thing reminded me of Love and Death."
The concept for the movie, Giamatti says, came to Barthes in a dream, which did indeed feature Allen. "But she ended up writing it for me, because I think she figured she wasn't going to get Woody Allen to do it." And so Cold Souls continues a theme of Giamatti's career: he plays a character who is in crucial respects quintessentially Jewish, though he is not Jewish himself, he is Italian, but never gets asked to play quintessentially Italian parts. He has also just finished filming Barney's Version, based on Mordecai Richler's powerful novel of Canadian Jewish life, in which he plays the title character, Barney Panofsky.
Many cinemagoers probably first became consciously aware of Giamatti in Alexander Payne's surprise hit Sideways, in which his character, Miles, escorts his friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on a stag trip to California's wine country, enabling Jack to indulge his compulsive promiscuity and Miles his alcoholism, poorly disguised as wine connoisseurship. Occasionally, Giamatti will be dining in a restaurant and someone at another table will send over a bottle of merlot, the grape Miles detests ("I am not drinking any fuckin' merlot!" he famously spits). The actor seems genuinely confused by this: "What would make them think that that would be a delightful thing to do?" he wonders.
By the time of Sideways, though, Giamatti had already appeared in a supporting role in an intriguing variety of films. He is there in The Truman Show, Saving Private Ryan, Private Parts, Big Momma's House, The Negotiator, Big Fat Liar, Man on the Moon, Allen's movies Mighty Aphrodite and Deconstructing Harry, and the 2001 Tim Burton remake of Planet of the Apes — "such a cock-up," Giamatti says now. In 2005, he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for his role in Cinderella Man, and he says he still has the mentality of a supporting actor.
"The supporting thing can be harder to pop in and out of. The hardest thing is the people who have to come in and play, say, the bartender for a day – that's a lot harder than playing the lead role. You have to pop in and get it right. It's a lot of pressure to just pop in there and fit in and find your footing really fast."
When it comes to his lead roles, however, there is definitely a Giamatti type: even John Adams, the American founding father he plays in the HBO mini-series of the same name, is a wreck of a man, battling inner collapse as he helps give birth to the United States. Is Giamatti drawing on his own torment?
"Do I walk through my life feeling that way? Maybe, to some extent. This may be evading the question, but I'm definitely interested in that as a state of being, in people feeling that kind of discomfort . . . I said to HBO, for eight and a half hours, people are going to have to watch this guy be so uncomfortable? But that's really kind of great, the fact it'll be unpleasant for people to watch. I suppose there must be some way in which I'm compelled to show some side of myself – or of people – that's paranoid and fraught and beleaguered and downtrodden, just as Tom Cruise wants to show that he's terrifyingly upbeat and terrifyingly heroic all the time."
For some reason – the downtrodden aspect to his characters, or their defiant ordinariness – it is jarring to learn that Giamatti's background is, by most standards, exceedingly posh. He attended two elite American private schools, including the Connecticut prep school Choate Rosemary Hall, and then Yale University, where he was inducted into Skull and Bones, the influential secret society that counts both presidents Bush among its members. His father, Bart Giamatti, was the president of Yale, then went on to become the commissioner of Major League Baseball, essentially the sport's chief executive. "I definitely had a top-notch education," Giamatti says. "As wasted as it was on me."
His father died at around the time Giamatti was leaving Yale, where he obtained an undergraduate degree in English and a master's in drama. Feeling some imperative to make something of his life, he moved to Seattle and worked as a dishwasher and a seller of juice machines while he gradually built a stage career. "Really, I was at a loss as to what to do with myself, but I enjoyed doing this, and I was making money doing this, so I thought: I might as well keep doing this."
By the mid-1990s he was on Broadway, earning good reviews for roles in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. He never felt the need to move to Los Angeles for his film work, he says, and so still lives in Brooklyn Heights with his wife Elizabeth, their son Samuel, and neighbours who see him scowling in the park, then write about it for the New York Times.
His next project is a British film, Ironclad, in which he plays King John, and which he will be filming in Wales. It is a "pulpy, violent, medieval action movie," he says. "I've never played a king before. I'm playing a kind of awful, inept king, but it's a king, nonetheless. It'll be interesting."
As with most of his career to date, his decision to participate in the movie doesn't seem to be part of any overarching plan, a fact about which Giamatti appears amiably unbothered. "I met the director, Jonathan English, and it seems like he has good ideas. It seems like he's a good guy. But who the hell knows? You never really know. It could all go south."