Paul Giamatti On Being In Oscar Hunt With ‘The Holdovers’, Why People Think He Won For ‘Sideways’, His Dream Orangutan Role & How The ‘Billions’ Finale Shocked Him – The Actor’s Side

Paul Giamatti is back in the thick of awards season and Oscar buzz this year for his wonderfully rich, funny and human turn in Alexander Payne’s dramedy, The Holdovers. Already he has won the National Board of Review and Boston Film Critics Best Actor prize and is nominated for Golden Globe and Critics Choice awards for his role as the curmudgeonly adjunct professor left behind at a Massachusetts boarding school with a student and school employee over the snowy holidays.

RELATED: ‘The Holdovers’: Alexander Payne Goes Back To School With Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph And Newcomer Dominic Sessa

Giamatti certainly is no stranger to awards, having won an Emmy for John Adams among numerous other nominations as well as two Golden Globes, an Indie Spirit Award and an Oscar Nomination and SAG Award (one of three overall he has on his mantle) for his supporting role in 2002’s Cinderella Man. Many thought his seminal performance 20 years ago in his first and only previous collaboration with Payne for Sideways should have won him an Oscar (he tells me some people still thought he did), but alas, shockingly he wasn’t even nominated. Hopefully this year will make up for it as it has taken all this time for Giamatti and Payne to finally let the stars align and team again for another much acclaimed movie collaboration.

RELATED: ‘The Holdovers’: Read The Screenplay That Helped Get Alexander Payne Back Behind The Camera

Giamatti joins me for this week’s episode of my Deadline video series The Actor’s Side not just to talk about The Holdovers but also so many of his remarkable performances in the past including the just-concluded Showtime series Billions and the twist of an ending he never saw coming, the 1997 Howard Stern movie Private Parts that represented a big breakthrough for him, his dream role as an orangutan in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes that was a childhood obsession, playing real-life people in movies like Straight Outta Compton, Love & Mercy, Too Big to Fail , Man on the Moon and the aforementioned John Adams, and so much more.

RELATED: Alexander Payne On Going Back To The ’70s For ‘The Holdovers’, The Movies That Inspire Him, And The Genre He Hopes To Ride Into Soon – Behind The Lens

To watch our conversation and to get the “actor’s side” of things from Paul Giamatti, just click on the link above.

Join me every week during Oscar season for a new edition of The Actor’s Side.