I played old men back in drama school. It’s just now that I’m drawing level with the age of the characters I play, but I’m fine with that, and I’ve certainly never envied people who became hugely famous when they were young. – Paul Giamatti
I find that the crazy narcissists, the selfish loons are often the most fun to be around, weirdly. – Paul Giamatti
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. – Paul Giamatti
I don’t mind talking about acting. I don’t have anything interesting to say about it, but it’s interesting talking about it. – Paul Giamatti
Well, you know, when people say stuff about you, it’s always really flattering. But does it mean anything to me? It’s not really real to me; there’s no reality to it. – Paul Giamatti
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. – Paul Giamatti
I definitely have a tendency to only see the blemishes of things, and see lots of things about my acting that I don’t like. – Paul Giamatti
Lead roles are fun, but I’m especially happy other, more colorful supporting stuff has come along. – Paul Giamatti
It’d be disingenuous to say I don’t like attention – I’m an actor for God’s sake – and it’s flattering and all, but attention was never my big goal. I just like to work and have a good time. – Paul Giamatti
Now, actors get so familiarized with Eastern Europe. I never imagined I’d get as familiar with Budapest and Prague and places like that in my life. – Paul Giamatti
I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I’m fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He’s learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there’s a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews. – Paul Giamatti
I would probably choose supporting roles if I had to make a choice. It’s actually a really hard thing to say. It’s all on a role-by-role basis, ultimately. I shouldn’t be so quick to say that. I feel like you’re given greater license to be colorful and eccentric in supporting roles, and that’s interesting to me. – Paul Giamatti
I remember when I was at the first showing of ‘John Dies at the End’ at Sundance, and I was talking to some of the people in the standby crowd who were outside and didn’t have tickets. They were just waiting in line to see if they could get in. It was this whole gang of die-hard sci-fi wacko people, and they were just fantastic. – Paul Giamatti
I don’t consider myself a very interesting person. I have the mentality of a supporting actor. – Paul Giamatti
With ‘Duplicity’, I was a little bit like, ‘This isn’t that hard of a movie.’ This isn’t like some huge brain trust of a movie. You gotta be a little bit awake to follow the plot, but it’s really just a kind of light entertainment. It’s like those Cary Grant movies, which are not meant to be anything other than diverting. In a nice way. – Paul Giamatti
Most conspiracies interest me because of the people who are into them, and the lengths they’ll go to expose it or the evidence they think they have. All that stuff. There’s just something so beautiful to me about people who sincerely believe we never went to the moon. It gives me so much joy. – Paul Giamatti
I wanted to play Zapruder, as he is a man you really don’t know much about: a faceless, anonymous figure. – Paul Giamatti
I was more used to acting onstage, for a long time. I don’t know, maybe I was temperamentally more suited to stage stuff. And there are things about the stage that I miss in a lot of ways. – Paul Giamatti
It is because my dad died suddenly that I became an actor. I thought, I’m going to make money doing this thing I enjoy. – Paul Giamatti
As an actor, to have achieved financial stability is amazing. But I always have this weird fear that I’m not going to get any more work; it’s about not having enough money. – Paul Giamatti
