(Credits: Dave Benett)
Sun 25 January 2026 21:15, UK
Thanks to his role in The Holdovers, Paul Giamatti is now firmly a part of Christmas at the movies. Through his role as grumpy private school teacher Paul Hunham, he is the driving force of this modern Yuletide classic, but all the cute and cuddly festive films in the world can’t erase the fact that he excels at playing the baddie.
Giamatti has played a wide range of villains throughout his career. He portrayed the abusive Dr Eugene Landy in the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy and appeared in major franchises like Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, although his role in the latter was brief. He is also set to play the main antagonist in the upcoming series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a role that has already sparked a lot of discussion.
Sometimes, though, there are lines that even Giamatti won’t cross. During an interview with Shortlist, the Oscar-nominated star admitted that his characters haven’t always been the nicest people, but that he does have his limits.
“I’ve done some strange things,” he said, “A lot of weird crap. I used to get offered bizarre serial-killer roles, and I don’t mind, but often the parts aren’t good. I got offered the role of a guy who ate cat shit, and he was always beating off. I was like, ‘Do you know what, man? This I cannot do’. It was sick.”
Let me tell you that it brought me absolutely zero pleasure to have to research what film he was talking about, especially as I was eating my lunch at the time. There was no way I was going to Google ‘movie where villain eats cat shit and masturbates’ on my home Wi-Fi, so I was somewhat restricted in what I could do.
Alas, through a combination of poor resources and willingness to fulfil my journalistic duty, I was unable to find a suitable answer. The closest I could find was an episode of The Sopranos in which Carlo talks about a kid who used to eat out of a litterbox, and that bit in The Office where Dwight talks about following his cat around begging for it to release more ‘chocolate’ from its backside.
With his unconventional looks and ability to turn on a threatening aura at the touch of a button, you can understand why casting directors would be keen to hire him for such a sickening role, but that’s never been Giamatti’s style.
The villains he plays are usually over-the-top or cartoonish in some way, such that he’s expressed a fondness for this ‘James Bond-style’ baddie. That being said, he is reportedly working on a TV series based on the Hostel series of horror films, which are incredibly gruesome. In the same Shortlist interview, he also refused to apologise for Big Momma’s House, so who’s the real monster?
We may never know which movie would have had Giamatti beating his meat with a mouthful of faeces, but I think we can all agree it’s for the best that he didn’t agree to do it.
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