Stifle it, Tully

For those not in the know, In The Holdovers, Paul Giamatti plays a pompous and lonely classics professor named Paul Hunham at a New England boarding school for boys in 1970. He’s almost universally disliked by other faculty members and by students because of his impossibly high academic standards and merciless grading.

The students also mock him behind his back because he has a lazy eye and bad body odor. The body odor is uncontrollable, the result of a rare disease commonly known as fish odor syndrome. But he doesn’t do himself any favors in the way he treats his students, as we soon find out in an early scene where he hands out his students’ graded final exams!

Chatting for a hot second with Paul Giamatti himself about this role, Alexander Payne has said that he wrote the role of Paul Hunham for you. So what was it about the character that interested you? - “Well, everything about it. I mean, first of all, it was the fact that he was going to direct it that interested me about it. You know, I would sort of do anything he wanted me to do.”

“I think I found the setting interesting. I found the time period interesting. I found the Christmas story aspect of it, the sort of Scrooge-like story of sort of kind of redemption, and change, and rebirth and selflessness interesting. The character was really wonderful. The language is wonderful. I think I found the character quite touching because I thought he’s a guy who, as far as he’s concerned, is doing absolutely the right thing.”

“He’s created this sort of persona for himself that feels very comfortable and safe to him at this place and conveying classical values in this way. And he’s created this kind of fantasy world for himself. And it comes apart a little bit as the story goes on. This guy sort of has to let go of a lot of his shtick in some ways.”

Is it tricky to play a role where, in the movie, the character is disliked by lots of people, but you have to play that person in a way that the audience can empathize with? - “Yeah. That’s always sort of difficult. I mean, I think, you know, he’s lived in this strange, rarefied world, in this world of intellect. And, you know, he’s hobbled by his own intellect. It’s, you know - the thing that makes him feel superior is the thing that keeps separating him, too, and, you know, he just doesn’t go about anything the right way. But he’s not wrong a lot of the time. So hopefully that comes across as somewhat appealing. But also, I thought, you know, he’s somewhat self-aware. He’s - he takes pleasure in his own nasty wit in a way that hopefully is funny to people and makes him somewhat appealing.”

So this movie takes place at a boarding school in 1970. You actually were a student at a boarding school in the ’80s, correct? - “Yes, I was a day student. So, I did go to a school like that 10 years on from when the movie’s set, and it wasn’t, I don’t think, very different. There were girls there, and that made a big, big difference. Yes, I’ll say that. But a lot of those men were still there. And for the most part, those - there were men like this and these old-school guys. Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t just the school. My whole life, I grew up around teachers and academia. My father was a professor. My mother was a teacher. My grandparents were all teachers and professors. So teaching - teachers and teaching were around me a lot.”

“But for sure, being a day student at one of those places is different than living there. I think in some ways, it could probably give me an anthropological perspective on it that maybe you don’t have if you lived there. So I had some distance on it to be able to observe it, in some ways. But absolutely. I mean, it was an interesting part to play, and it’s an interesting movie for me to watch because I think there was a ton of unconscious memories affecting my system, and I was ending up calling up all kinds of people I wasn’t even aware of.”

“I was watching it and thinking, oh, my God, I just reminded myself of this colleague of my father’s. I didn’t even realize I was doing that. I had a friend who wrote to me and said - I went to high school with him, and he said, oh, you were clearly doing the head librarian in this whole thing. And I thought, I didn’t even think about the head librarian. But he’s right. I do seem like the head librarian.”

“So, I mean, there was a ton - there was a deep well of people I was drawing on for this thing, even unconsciously. Some of it was conscious. I had a biology teacher who was very much like this guy. And I thought about him a lot. And I thought about these men a lot, you know? And they’re interesting characters. They’re complicated, interesting guys.”