Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cI\u2019m really surprised this is going so well,\u201d says Paul Giamatti early on in our conversation. It\u2019s a typically sardonic remark from the American actor famed for his Oscar-nominated roles in the mordant movies Sideways and The Holdovers and the TV show Billions. Yet the cause of his concern today is not existential but technological. \u201cI\u2019m an extremely wary user of technology,\u201d he says. \u201cI always feel like I have some strange negative body charge or something, because nothing ever works for me.\u201dThat we are speaking over Zoom seems fitting given the nature of the project we are here to discuss: an episode of the new season of Netflix\u2019s dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror in which Giamatti plays a reclusive man asked to contribute to a memorial service for a person from his past. His guide on this Proustian journey is an AI played by Patsy Ferran who soon has him scouring his attic for old photographs.\u00a0It\u2019s an analogue-first lifestyle to which Giamatti, 57, can relate. \u201cI live in an apartment, so I don\u2019t have an attic, but I do have boxes of photographs and some stacks of dusty CDs. And I have a lot of books. I like books a lot.\u201dThis might be expected from the son of pedagogues. The Connecticut-born Giamatti\u2019s mother was an English teacher and his father was a Yale professor of comparative literature who later became university president and, later still, the commissioner of Major League Baseball.Much of the Black Mirror episode, \u201cEulogy\u201d, involves Giamatti\u2019s character, Philip, being transported back to 1989 and a milieu of Brooklyn bars and loft parties where the air is filled with bong smoke and The Stone Roses. Was this what 1989 looked like for the 22-year-old Paul?\u201cI lived in Seattle, but it was very similar,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI was trying to know if I wanted to be an actor, doing acting related stuff and not knowing quite what I was. In Seattle at that time grunge was starting, so it was very much everybody in their lentil shirts doing bong hits in the apartment I lived in and listening to that music.\u201dThe other new craze in town was a certain coffee chain. \u201cI had a friend who worked at literally the first Starbucks, and it was like: wow, exciting! Coffee culture! I remember walking in and saying to her: this is never going to fly, who the hell is going to go buy coffee?\u201dInevitably, perhaps, the process of playing a man delving into his past prompted Giamatti to reflect on his own. \u201cSure, it made me think about mistakes made and misunderstandings and stupid things that you wish hadn\u2019t happened.\u201d But he is not one of those actors who use personal experiences to help them summon the required emotion for a scene. \u201cI think I\u2019m unconsciously drawing hugely on memories, but consciously I haven\u2019t done a whole lot of that,\u201d he says. \u201cIt tends to take me out of it if I start thinking about something that happened to me\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009And if something\u2019s well written, like this was, it\u2019ll affect me without my needing to draw on my own past.\u201dWhat Giamatti is inclined towards, irresistibly, is esoterica. A life-long passion for mysteries, conspiracies and hoaxes led him to create the podcast Chinwag, in which he and philosopher Stephen Asma pore over all manner of arcane subjects. He is also an avid reader of science fiction.\u201cI\u2019ve always been drawn to stuff like this since I was a little kid,\u201d Giamatti enthuses. \u201cThe Twilight Zone was a very big thing for me\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009And when Black Mirror started, I thought: somebody has actually really nailed the anthology weird fantastical thing. People have tried to reboot The Twilight Zone, and it\u2019s hard to do.\u201dDespite Black Mirror\u2019s technological leanings, however, use of CGI in \u201cEulogy\u201d was kept to a minimum. A young version of Philip whom we see in interactive photographs is a lookalike actor, not a digital avatar conceived using Giamatti\u2019s de-aged likeness.\u00a0\u201cHe just weirdly does look like me when I was that age,\u201d Giamatti says. \u201cHe actually looks a lot like cousins of mine, like in an uncanny, strange way. His eyes particularly.\u201dSimilarly, when Philip steps into the photographs, the people around him frozen in time are played by live performers. \u201cWe weren\u2019t in front of a green screen, they were all there holding still for long takes, some of them in amazing, crazy positions\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Most of them, I think, were dancers and mimes. It was so much weirder than I thought it was going be. It was eerie actually.\u201d\u00a0However, for a self-confessed technophobe, Giamatti is surprisingly sanguine about the growing use of AI in the film and TV industry. \u201cIt\u2019s creepy and it\u2019s scary but, as much as I\u2019m not a technophile, it\u2019s inevitable. There\u2019s no holding it back. It\u2019s not like you can put the genie back in the bottle\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Do I want to sell my image to somebody? I mean I\u2019m not for that, but I don\u2019t fault people who would do it.\u201d\u00a0In fact, he has already appeared in a film that took on that very subject: 2013\u2019s little-seen live-action\/animation The Congress, in which Robin Wright plays a version of herself who sells her likeness to a Hollywood studio to raise money to treat her son\u2019s illness. Giamatti is taken aback when I mention it. \u201cYou\u2019re the only person in my life that has ever mentioned that movie. I think it had a little funny kind of renaissance recently. People sort of discovered it and were like: somebody was talking about this and made a very strange movie about it. I\u2019m not sure it makes sense entirely, but it was an interesting experience making it.\u201dGiamatti enthuses about the source text written by Polish sci-fi author Stanis\u0142aw Lem and soon we have returned to the subject of memory. \u201cThere\u2019s another short story by Ted Chiang, a great science fiction writer. It\u2019s all about an AI that enhances your memory to the point you can remember everything, every second of your life from the time you\u2019re born to the time you\u2019re dying. And it\u2019s about the fact that maybe it\u2019s a good thing to be able to forget. Maybe it\u2019s important.\u201dThe bittersweet tang that old memories can evoke is nicely captured in \u201cEulogy\u201d. In one scene, Philip takes an old roll of film to be developed and is asked the quaint question: \u201cMatt or gloss?\u201d Giamatti delivers the reply with a quantity of sardonicism that only he could: \u201cMatt.\u201d I tell him that the moment made me think about his wider career and he immediately guffaws: \u201cIt\u2019s matt!\u201dThe self-deprecation is gleeful but there\u2019s an element of truth here too. Giamatti in person (even over Zoom) is a genial, jovial presence, so why has he spent the past 30 years playing curmudgeons?\u201cI don\u2019t know, it\u2019s really interesting, and it gets into all kinds of questions about actors and personas and why people are perceived the way they are. A lot of it has just been what people have wanted me to do over the years. I think it\u2019s a thing that can happen with character actors \u2014 whatever \u2018character actor\u2019 means, and I don\u2019t really necessarily know. It\u2019s the first thing people see you do, and so you\u2019re asked to do it again.\u201dWhen I ask what the part was that triggered all this, the origin story of his onscreen grouchiness, he takes me back to 1997. \u201cI did a movie a long time ago called Private Parts about Howard Stern in which I played an extremely unpleasant person, and it really stuck for a while. I don\u2019t know why I\u2019m good at it. Am I drawing on something unconsciously? Like, I\u2019m not actually very much like this, so it\u2019s fun to be like that in the parts? Or is it that there is some part of me that I try to repress that comes out in them? I don\u2019t know.\u201d\u00a0Some have been miserable, others plain nasty. Perhaps the nastiest of them all was fearsome attorney Chuck Rhoades, a pit bull in pinstripes, in the long-running TV series Billions. \u201cHe was fun to play but he was such an unpleasant person that seven years of that got hard,\u201d Giamatti reveals. \u201cAfter a while, you\u2019re like, Jesus Christ, this guy is so unpleasant, he\u2019s such a conniving human being and never did the right thing for the right reason ever.\u201d\u00a0Maybe it says good things about him that he found it wearing to play such a monster. \u201cThere\u2019s an interesting phenomenon,\u201d Giamatti observes. \u201cIt\u2019s not true all the time, it\u2019s a generalisation, but so often the people who play bad guys and bastards in movies are the nicest people. And sometimes the opposite is true. The people who play the sweethearts are not.\u201dBy that reckoning, Giamatti must be the sweetest of them all. \u201cOh, I\u2019m not saying I\u2019m the most pleasant person in the world,\u201d he chuckles. \u201cI can be unpleasant. Believe me.\u201dThe new season of \u2018Black Mirror\u2019 is on Netflix from April 10Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cI\u2019m really surprised this is going so well,\u201d says Paul Giamatti early on in our conversation. It\u2019s a typically sardonic remark from the American actor famed for his Oscar-nominated roles in the mordant movies Sideways and The Holdovers and the TV show Billions. Yet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":264483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-264482","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264482"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264484,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264482\/revisions\/264484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}