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NEW YORK, Dec. 29 (UPI) -- Billions and John Adams actor Paul Giamatti says he didn't quite know how to feel when he was told that unpopular classics teacher character Paul Hunham in The Holdovers was written specifically for him. Premiering Friday on Peacock, the film was directed by Alexander Payne from a story he originated and set in 1970 at a New England boarding school.
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David Hemingson wrote the dramedy, which chronicles what happens when Hunham is stuck on campus for Christmas vacation with Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a teen student whose mother is on her honeymoon with his stepfather, and Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), a cafeteria cook whose son was killed in the Vietnam War a few weeks earlier.
"It's a mixed blessing. Yes, it is. That's the title of my memoir: Mixed Blessing," Giamatti joked during a recent virtual press conference, referring to how most of the people in the movie dislike Hunham, a by-the-books know-it-all with a lazy eye and medical condition that makes him smell like fish.
"The character was fantastic. I would do anything [Payne] wanted me to do, but I thought the story was great, the setting was great, the characters were great. All the characters were great."
Giamatti found things to like about Hunham that most people in the character's life didn't appreciate.
"I thought he takes a certain delicious pleasure in coming up with the most elaborate insults. It was kind of a certain sort of free song for him that he could put somebody down in such an elaborate way," the actor said.
"He's pleased with his own intelligence and playing around with his own intelligence," he said with a laugh. "So, that was very fun."
Going into the project, Giamatti understood firsthand the culture of elite education.
"There was something so familiar about this stuff. I was excited to do it because I had gone to a prep school," he said.
"I didn't board there, so I didn't have that full experience, but I grew up around a lot of people like this. So, it was kind of like, 'Ooh, this'll be fun.' I can just pull on this deep well of all these memories and stuff."
Giamatti said he also was happy to reunite with Payne, with whom he collaborated on the classic wine country comedy, Sideways, nearly 20 years ago.
"We became friends after Sideways, so it's not like we never saw each other," Giamatti said.
"We had ideas for things that never came to fruition. We talked briefly about doing a private investigator thing, which I still want to do," he added.
Payne wanted the film to have the sepia-soaked aesthetic of a bygone era and showed numerous old movies like The Graduate, The Landlord, Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Paper Moon, Klute and All The President's Men to his cast, crew and costume, hair, makeup, production department heads for inspiration.
"So my behind-the-camera collaborators and I could, without trying to imitate any single one of them, just remind ourselves of the world we would have been splashing around in, had we been working back then," Payne said.
The director has always been obsessed with this time period.
"I've been trying to make '70s movies, or a modern extension of '70s movies, my whole career," said Payne whose credits also include About Schmidt, The Descendants and Nebraska.
"For some reason, once the script was finished, and, of course, we had set it in 1970-71, and I was preparing to direct it, I just thought, 'Well, wouldn't it be cool to kind of pull off a parlor trick of making it, to some degree, look and sound like a movie made back then?'"
The fact that neither Randolph, 37, nor Sessa, 21, was alive in the 1970s became a bit surreal for Giamatti, 56.
"It was freaky to be alive and go, 'I'm making a period movie, and I was alive in this period.' So, I'm like, 'Period movie's supposed to be a horse and buggy!' But I was like, 'Not this, which I remember vividly.'"
Sessa was appearing in his high school production of Neil Simon's stage comedy, Rumors, when he auditioned to play Angus in The Holdovers.
"My theater teacher said, 'Well, these casting people are gonna come, and maybe look for some background people or something,'" Sessa said.
"I just thought, 'Maybe if it goes well, I can sit at a desk or something,'" he laughed. "It went, obviously, a little bit better than that. And, yeah, I found myself working with these pretty cool people."
Randolph, who is known for her roles in High Fidelity and Only Murders in the Building, is generating Oscar buzz for her portrayal of a grieving mother spending her first Christmas without her son.
In one of the film's most poignant scenes, Angus and Hunhum drive Mary to see her pregnant sister and pass on some cherished baby clothes.
"It's just beautiful because you see she's trying. She's trying to move forward. She's trying to accept it," Randolph said.
"A lot of times in a family unit when someone passes, if not at the same exact time or shortly before or after, a new baby is brought into their family," she added. "So, you're seeing her trying to get OK with this. And this is a huge deal for her to make this gesture and her sister gets it."
Randolph said she believes the tragic-comic, holiday-tinged film -- which at times resembles It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol -- inspires empathy and generosity, reaching audiences at exactly the right time.
"What's going on in the world, I think [it] is perfect timing. Being 'giving' time," she said.
"We have a lot of holiday movies that are wrapped in a really nice shiny red bow. Or maybe there's like a third act, 'dun, dun, dun' that perfectly ends."
Randolph said she sees the project as an "anthem" for people going through tough times during the holiday season.
"Can you imagine being depressed and sad and you have to watch, like, Jingle All the Way?" she said. "It's more insult to injury."
