Paul Giamatti on Billions and That Viral Photo of Him on the Subway

“How did all this shit hit the fan?” Paul Giamatti is trying to remember when the production of Billions season five was shut down due to the coronavirus outbreak. “Whenever Hanks was”—that would be Tom Hanks getting diagnosed with COVID-19—“that's how I date when all this stuff started happening.”

The show will go on, airing the first seven episodes of the season starting on Sunday, May 3rd and the rest, optimistically, later this year. Giamatti reprises his role as Chuck Rhoades, the ruthless New York Attorney General with a taste for BDSM and a boatload of daddy issues, opposite Damian Lewis as his nemesis, the hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod. As always, nefarious machinations, constant dick-swinging, and tenaciously extravagant speech patterns abound.

A few days before the season premiere, Giamatti speaks to me over the phone from Massachusetts, where he’s passed the time in self-isolation watching Tiger King (“which was depressing, actually”) and reading Len Deighton spy novels. Overall, he’s not doing too bad. “I'm constitutionally a bit of a hermit anyway. I think it's a bit of the triumph of the introverts,” Giamatti says. “I mean, it's a nightmare out there. I'm not happy about the fact of why we're forced to do this, but, if I have to be isolated, it's not the worst thing for me.”

We also discussed the particular flow of Billions dialogue, the campaign to get him a wax statue at Madame Tussauds, and what he was really thinking in that viral subway photo from last summer.

GQ: You’ve been portraying Chuck for five seasons now. What are some of your favorite aspects of playing him?

Paul Giamatti: He has a built-in impulsive nature and so he has sudden switchbacks and turnarounds which are always surprising. I never really know where he's gonna go. The language is fun. He has a kind of high-flown, oratorical way of speaking.

Yes, the Billions speech pattern and dialogue is so specific. Did it take you a minute to get used to it initially?

I suppose so. I sort of got the idea that it was a beefy, big show and there's not necessarily very heightened dialogue and stuff. It definitely fell into even more of a very distinct thing as time went on, and everybody grew with it. But I got the idea pretty clearly from the first episode where it was gonna live.

Are there any memorable lines of dialogue that you especially enjoyed delivering?

It’s really fun. They give me a lot of particularly arcane words and stuff like that. The references are just so weird. I can remember one episode having a reference—I can't remember who the guy was—but there was a pro bowler. I had to do a little speech from a pro bowler that was so fucking random. It was such a strange, long journey out to come back to something. It was very funny. You know, you just go with it.

I know Chuck is very loosely based on Preet Bharara. But, as his political aspirations grew over the course of the show and he ran for various offices, were there any politicians who you used to inform the character?

There was a guy that was interesting to me early on, and his name is John Durham. And he's actually the guy who William Barr tagged to do the investigation of the Russia investigation. He used to be the federal attorney for the state of Connecticut and he's a pretty intense guy. He's one of the guys who brought down Whitey Bulger, but he also took down the FBI guys who were colluding with Whitey Bulger. I thought there were a lot of things about him that were interesting. The way he looks, too, is interesting. If you look him up you can see.

Oh yeah.

You see him? He doesn't look like what you normally think these guys are gonna look like, and he's a tough guy, too. He's a hardass.

Has working on Billions either changed or affirmed any personal views you had on either the financial industry or the machinations of state politics?

It’s probably affirmed things that I felt anyway. I don't have much fondness for either side of the thing. I probably have less fondness for the billionaires. I think I'm more forgiving of the politicians, in some ways I probably shouldn’t be. The federal attorneys … a lot of those guys really work hard, and they don't make any money, and they're trying to do the right thing, a lot of those guys. The money guys, I don't know. I just don't have a whole lot of fondness for those guys.

Do you ever encounter anyone from either side out in the wild who tells you they're a fan of Billions?

Oh, sure. I encounter probably more money guys. I mean, the show is really focused on the money guys and on their machinations. It's more the money guys I run into. Yeah, they love it. They all love it.

I understand that there is a campaign called “Wax Paul Now” to get you a wax statue at Madame Tussauds. And they’ve made a short documentary film about their quest. How did you become aware of it and what are your thoughts about it?

I think people started telling me, “oh, there's these posters all over the place," and they were all up and down the Eastern seaboard. I thought it was hilarious. I thought it was very funny, and I think the whole idea of wax statutes is hilarious, and I always have. And then I, actually, through complete total coincidence, happened to run into one of these three young women who created the whole thing.

So have you seen the statue they created?

Yes, I have seen the statue. I've definitely seen the statue. It's not a great statue. It looks like somebody. It doesn't look like me, but it looks like someone, and I can never quite put my finger exactly on who it looks like.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but there is a photo of you that made the rounds last summer. You're riding the F train, and you're slumped over. And it resonated with people because it so encapsulated the experience of riding the subway in New York.

I'm aware of the shot.

Do you remember what was going on that day? Can you let us in on the story behind the photo?

Well, it was hot, but the funny thing to me about that photo is my demeanor is really because I knew the guy was taking my picture and it was pissing me off. That’s actually what's going on in that picture. I was like, "really dude?"

That's what I thought was funny about that picture. I was like, "did it not occur to anybody that actually I'm pissed off 'cause I know a guy is taking my picture?" What's funny when people do that is they think you don't see them doing it, and it's like, "I'm an actor, dude. I notice everything. That's what I do for a living. I see everything going on around me."

This interview has been edited and condensed.

No actor has conjured the id of the modern American male quite like this highbrow Brit who had expected to spend his life in the theater. Instead, Damian Lewis has become a stalwart of premium television, blurring the line between protagonist and antagonist—and emerging as one of the most thrilling actors of his generation.

Originally Appeared on GQ