If you were ever considering dyeing yourself blue, you might want to hear about Paul Giamatti’s experience on the set of Big Fat Liar. The recent Golden Globe winner took a trip through his many credits for VF’s “Career Timeline” series, sharing stories about making Sideways, Cinderella Man, John Adams, and many more.

In the video, Giamatti tells tales from the sets of his early films, like Saving Private Ryan, The Truman Show, and Planet of the Apes. To the delight of millennials everywhere, he goes long on his role as the greedy Hollywood producer Marty Wolf in Big Fat Liar, a 2002 comedy starring Amanda Bynes and Frankie Muniz and directed by his college pal Shawn Levy. “It was just us trying to push the envelope with how much we could get away in a kids movie,” Giamatti says. “Like, how much an asshole could I actually be?”

But pushing the envelope had its consequences. In one classic scene, Marty emerges form his swimming pool fully blue after being pranked by Bynes and Muniz. While Giamatti calls the blue pool scene “iconic,” he also says that he never really considered how long his body would be blue after taking a dip in the pool. “It’s one of those things, when you read it in the script, you don’t really process how long you’re going to be blue,” Giamatti says. For weeks, he says, the dye remained on his skin.

The parts that stayed blue the longest? That would be Giamatti’s feet. “It didn’t come off my feet for, like, three months,” he says. “My feet were blue for months afterwards.” Nice work, Muniz and Bynes.

As for more serious fare: Giamatti opens up about Sideways, his first collaboration with The Holdovers director Alexander Payne. “He’s amazing. He’s incredibly at ease. He’s incredibly open,” Giamatti says of Payne. He also has complimentary things to say about his costar Thomas Haden Church. “Tom is amazing. He’s even more bizarre and funny when he’s off camera than he is on,” Giamatti says. “I mean, he’s hilarious, but when he’s off camera, he has no guardrails.”

Giamatti also opens up about his only Oscar-nominated performance (so far), in Ron Howard’s period boxing flick Cinderella Man. “There were these humongous sets that were really complete—the boxing stuff was especially that way,” Giamatti says. There were hundreds—sometimes thousands—of extras on set for some of those scenes. “The sense that you were always in that world was insane. Sweaty, screaming, and all these people around you. You were in that world completely. We had to improvise all that stuff too, so it weirdly felt like we were in a time machine.” 

Watch the video above for more tales from Giamatti’s storied career, from having no choice but to go method for the HBO miniseries John Adams to initially thinking Quentin Tarantino had a fake name.