Paul Giamatti emerges from the fog near the waterfront in Brooklyn Heights, as local legend says he often does. Faded black polo, faded black demeanor—he has the wary, unsmiling affect every other person who lives in this city has. We walk to a diner. He’s consented to this conversation because he has a show to promote, Showtime’s swaggering Billions, in which he plays a crusading Spitzer-like New York district attorney with a bondage-influenced sex life, and more generally because he’s having one of those years. Straight Outta Compton, Love & Mercy, a cameo on the Amy Schumer show—each time Giamatti appeared on-screen in 2015, it was like a jolt of weird joy, a signal that whatever you were watching was worth watching. Which is pretty much what he’s been doing since Private Parts, or American Splendor, or Sideways, or Win Win, or whichever of the many essential parts he’s played that you count as his essential-est. At the diner, he gazes off into the middle distance mostly, laughing occasionally—one staccato ha! But you’ve got to earn the laugh.
GQ: The temptation with these interviews is to talk to the actor like he’s some mystic artist plumbing the unknown. But I get a distinct nine-to-five vibe from you.
Paul Giamatti: I started out doing bit parts in TV things. So I learned a somewhat practical attitude about it. You’re playing the third cop—you just have to go in and get it done. They don’t give a shit. So if I’m gonna be mystical, it has to happen fast.
You’ve played a villain in 12 Years a Slave and a villain in The Amazing Spider-Man 2; do you make a distinction between more prestige-oriented projects and blockbusters?
No, I see them all as the same thing. The Spider-Man thing was not easy, actually. It was actually harder than 12 Years a Slave, because it was all very technical, and there wasn’t much of a part there. But I’ve done little indie movies that felt like big-budget things, you know, in that they felt really impersonal, like, “What the hell are we doing here?” And I’ve done big-budget things that felt like little indie movies. I mean, I did this Planet of the Apes movie, and it was fantastic, doing it with Tim Burton. I don’t know if it’s a good movie or not, but we got to do all this weird work on monkeys and monkey movement. And that was actually very weirdly mystical.
In Billions, we first see your character in his underwear, tied up. Were you unsure if you wanted to feign sexual satisfaction at being burned with a cigarette?
I don’t care about being tied up. That’s what I’m supposed to do. But the only thing that ever makes me concerned is that it comes across as believable. Because they were writing it not to be goofy or stupid; they were writing it to be a part of the character. You do much more harrowing, embarrassing stuff as an actor than sex stuff. Seriously! I have to watch my kid get killed or something. That’s much harder than lying on the floor tied up. It’s not a documentary about my sex life.
Directors seem to like to put you in extreme situations. Does it bother you to be perceived as kind of a dark guy?
It’s funny, most people who recognize me on the subway and stuff—it’s much more they think of me as a funny guy. I get much more of people telling me how much I make them laugh, actually. Which is nice. I don’t feel like actually my persona is one of a psycho. People aren’t trying to challenge me to a fight, you know what I mean?
**This year you played two different evil music managers, in [the Brian Wilson biopic] Love & Mercy and [the N.W.A biopic] Straight Outta Compton—how did that happen?
That was a fluke. Love & Mercy was done way before the other one. The one guy actually was a shrink. So I never really thought of them as the same thing.
Were you an N.W.A fan growing up?
I mean, that stuff came out when I was in college. And white college kids were totally into that.
You went to Yale—N.W.A was big there?
Oh yeah! White middle-class college kids were totally into N.W.A.
Your other big moment last year was as a juror in Amy Schumer’s 12 Angry Men parody, in which you get maybe the best line—“Her ass makes me furious!”
Something like that. Something about her ass. She’s brutal on herself. It’s very funny.
You got nominated for an Emmy for that.
I did. Which seemed kind of silly to me.
Why?
Well, there were twelve people in that room, and they were all funny. And it seemed kind of arbitrary to me that they picked me.
I was talking to someone who was positive you’d won an Oscar for Sideways.
Yeah, people say that all the time. I didn’t. I wasn’t even nominated.
What do you make of that?
I make of that that there’s so much noise in the atmosphere that people can’t remember one thing from the next. I make of that that there’s so much data flowing in everybody’s head from the Internet that they can’t keep anything straight anymore.
I’m sure you saw that Jerry Heller, the manager you played in Straight Outta Compton, is now suing the production?
I did! I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. I guess he’d been saying he was gonna do it the whole way. I didn’t think he comes off looking that bad, actually. What’s-his-name looks much worse. Suge Knight. He should sue. He probably will, too.
Heller also made a point of saying he’d never had a lobster brunch in his life. Somehow that scene, between you and Eazy-E’s character, really upset him.
But the really funny thing is, I don’t remember eating lobster in the movie. Somebody says in the movie, “You guys are sitting around eating lobster.” But I can’t eat lobster! I’m allergic to shellfish. That’s very funny. “I’ve never had lobster!” I kind of hope I get called in to testify on this.
Zach Baron is GQ’s staff writer.