Paul Giamatti talks ‘Black Mirror,' playing a ‘Star Trek' villain, and his go-to In-N-Out order
In his Black Mirror debut, Emmy-winning actor Paul Giamatti stars as a lonely man who confronts a past love by literally stepping into old photographs to recall his late girlfriend's face.
The Season 7 episode 'Eulogy' calls on Giamatti to convey a wide range of emotions — often all at once — whether that's anger, hurt, or self-loathing. How does an award-winning actor prepare for that?
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'I'm filled with defensiveness, anger and hurt,' Giamatti joked to Gold Derby on the red carpet of the show's FYC event at the Television Academy's Saban Media Center in North Hollywood, Calif. 'It's weirdly enjoyable in some really sick way for actors to do that.'
While he said he 'worried' most about the ending and the final scene 'landing naturally,' The Holdovers actor also credited the episode's writers, Ella Road and creator Charlie Brooker.
'It's in the script when someone tells me what to do,' he said, adding, 'it's my job to see if I can bring that stuff up.'
Tracee Ellis Ross and Rashida Jones, who star in the episode "Common People," agree that the script is key to balancing the series' darkly satirical tone.
'I think so much of it is in the writing,' says Ross.
"Common People," written by Brooker and Bisha K. Ali, explores what happens after a woman (Jones) experiences a medical emergency and her husband (Chris O'Dowd) signs her up for a brain-altering subscription service that causes her to awkwardly spout ads for coffee, therapy shoes, and more.
'It does lay somewhere in between a darkness, like an underbelly, undercurrent, of hyper-reality — and also it's funny,' Jones said.
Black Mirror is known for delving into the dark side of tech — or at least what happens when humanity takes technological advances in a dystopian direction.
'Usually at the end of a Black Mirror [episode], the main characters are dead or despairing or disgraced — or all of the above,' Brooker said during the Q&A portion of the event, explaining why almost all episodes of the anthology series are one-off stories.
Netflix
However, reviving the 'USS Callister' storyline from the original 2017 episode was something Brooker wanted to do, saying he felt they could 'start a new chapter with them.'
Calling the original 'something we were immediately proud of,' the Season 7 follow-up, USS Callister: Into Infinity, is even larger in scope.
'[In the original], we're slightly riffing on Star Trek, but we weren't taking the piss out of Star Trek,' Brooker, a former video-game journalist, explained to Gold Derby. 'In this one, we're slightly riffing on Star Wars and video games — things like No Man's Sky, Fortnite, and Destiny — multiplayer, huge games like that.'
While the USS Callister sequel was heavy on visual effects, the world of Eulogy — which brought Giamatti's character, Phil, along with his avatar guide (Patsy Ferran) into those grainy pictures—presented an effects challenge that relied less on CGI and more on the talents of mimes and other actors.
'We shot with real people on real stages so that Paul and Patsy could move amongst them, touch them,' VFX supervisor James MacLachlan told Gold Derby.
Mixing metalwork with a movement choreographer, MacLachlan said the actors held 'very specific poses,' with some added help.
'We had some of these people holding these poses for upwards of 30, 40 minutes,' he explained. 'But they had certain supports — wedges under their legs, supports up through their arms—so in a weird way they could sort of slightly rest into a situation.'
The series reintroduces the small, round brain-chip device Nubbin in multiple episodes, including "Eulogy," to virtually transport characters inside pictures or movies.
There are different sounds that come through the Nubbins, including Phil's guide (Ferran), but supervising sound editor Tom Jenkins admitted that they 'had some fun with it.'
'My son was born during the post-process of Black Mirror, so every little opportunity, there's little snippets of my boy in all the sounds,' Jenkins told Gold Derby, 'so even the Nubbins, there's a little bit of his voice in there.'
Calling Season 7 'very reflective' and saying 'there's a little more hope' during the event Q&A, Brooker told Gold Derby that he's actually pro-technology in his everyday life.
'I think most technology can be used to bring us together,' he said. 'It's how we use these powerful tools that's the issue.'
As for sci-fi enthusiast Giamatti, the Oscar-nominated actor will appear as a villain in the upcoming series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.
'I love Star Trek,' says Giamatti. 'The villain part, I was like, 'I definitely want to do this.' Also, the Star Trek villains are so great. To be able to be a Star Trek bad guy, I was like, 'How can I not do that?''
He added that the character is 'funny, too, which is actually something I really liked about him. But it's a really … it's a big character so I got to have a good time with it.'
With awards season upon us, we might see Giamatti heading back to In-N-Out as he did after his 2024 Golden Globe win for The Holdovers and he knows exactly what he'll order.
'I just get it very standard,' he told Gold Derby. 'I just get a double-double raw onion. I don't do anything fancy.'
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