Latest news with #Giamatti
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Paul Giamatti Says He Finally Got on the Phone With Cher After Years of Missed Calls – Here's What She Wanted to Talk About
Paul Giamatti and Cher finally connected and spoke last year after years of phone tag. While appearing on 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' Thursday, the actor reminisced about the host being on his podcast and mentioning that his number one dream guest was Cher. Colbert admitted to putting some of his weight behind the proposal and asked on Giamatti's most recent visit to his show if he managed to track the singer down. Apparently the two finally connected after years of missed calls at the end of 2024. 'Cut to me working in Toronto, I'm in a hotel room and the phone rings,' Giamatti said. 'I'm watching 'Rockford Files' or something on the television and the phone rings, it's an unknown number, it's from California. I pick it up and a voice says, 'Hey, it's me.'' Colbert asked if Giamatti knew who it was and the actor exclaimed, 'Immediately!' 'I was like, 'Cher?!'' he added. 'It was Cher. She called and I talked to her for about half an hour. Lovely woman. She had been wanting to call me, I wasn't trying to call her. For years, I'd heard she'd been trying to call me.' Pressed by Colbert what they talked about for 30 minutes, Giamatti reveealed, 'She wanted to tell me how much she liked me in 'John Adams.'' He then quipped: 'Only about 15 years after I was actually on it.' 'Cher's a busy woman,' Colbert replied. 'And evidently you're hard to find.' Giamatti and Cher's legendary game of phone tag had been going on for years before Colbert helped finally connect the two. While promoting 'The Holdovers' in 2023, the actor explained the situation on 'The Howard Stern Show.' 'Every now and then I get a message from somebody that says Cher — she really needs to talk to me, like it's important, like it's crucial that she talks to me,' Giamatti said on the show. 'And I'm like, 'What the f–k? Why does Cher want to talk to me?' Nobody will tell me, and then I never hear anything. And then a year will go by and it happens again.' Thankfully, now we know it is because Cher is one of the biggest 'John Adams' fans around. The post Paul Giamatti Says He Finally Got on the Phone With Cher After Years of Missed Calls – Here's What She Wanted to Talk About | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
RTÉ News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
When Tommy Tiernan when Paul Giamatti - their epic chat revisited
Now that the ninth (!) season of The Tommy Tiernan Show on RTÉ One is done and dusted, let's revisit one of last season's highlights - Tommy's chat with actor Paul Giamatti. Watch the interview in full above. For the unitiated, Giamatti is an Academy Award-nominated actor known for his acclaimed performances in films such as Sideways, Cinderella Man, and The Leftovers, as well as his starring roles in the hit TV series Billions and the Black Mirror episode Eulogy. Once Tommy gets over his shock at Giamatti's arrival, the duo settle into a fascinating and utterly frank chat about the art of acting and negotiating life's ups and downs. It's classic Tommy Tiernan Show. It's a buddy movie comedy waiting to happen...
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
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? More from GoldDerby Natasha Rothwell says goodbye to 'How to Die Alone' (for now), reveals what would've happened next The making of 'Matlock': 'I wanted it to be a love letter to women in the workforce' 'The White Lotus' will enter these 20 Season 3 actors - along with surprise submission Ke Huy Quan - for the 2025 Emmys '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.' Best of GoldDerby The making of 'Matlock': 'I wanted it to be a love letter to women in the workforce' Is 'SNL' new tonight? Host, musical guest details How Natasha Rothwell helped Belinda get her groove back in 'The White Lotus' Season 3 Click here to read the full article.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Never Bet Against Pete Rose
A. Bartlett Giamatti, in an academic gown or a J. Press suit, owned lecterns the way Pete Rose owned big-league dugouts. Giamatti was the former Yale president who became baseball's seventh commissioner. Rose was baseball's hit king, amassing 4,256 of them over 24 seasons, most of them singles in the service of his hometown team, the Cincinnati Reds. Both were career .400 talkers. On the day in 1989 that Major League Baseball placed Rose on its 'permanently ineligible' list for betting on games, Giamatti read a eulogy for Rose's baseball career that opened with this: 'The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is the sad end of a sorry episode.' Giamatti was drawn to the biblical power of that word, banishment. He wasn't trying to make friends in Cincinnati's river wards. He was answering to a higher authority: the rule of law, the foundation of a civil society. Rose, by contrast, had a certain outlaw, populist appeal. He was all business in the batter's box, crouched so low umpires struggled to find a strike zone for him, but loose most everywhere else. After he was booted from baseball, Rose served a short stint in prison on a tax-evasion conviction. His private life was made for reality TV. 'The matter of Mr. Rose,' as Giamatti called the gambling-on-baseball affair, might have been about assembled facts and reasoned adjudication. But the force of personality, featuring towering representatives from two great and wildly dissimilar American camps — the establishment and the renegades — has always hung over this contretemps. Or at least until the current commissioner, Rob Manfred, decided to step in. On Tuesday, Manfred removed Rose and 16 other deceased ballplayers, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, from the permanently ineligible list. That means there is now a clear path for Rose's enshrinement in the National Baseball Hall of Fame's Plaque Gallery (Jackson, too). It's some room: cold air, oak walls, bronze plaques, hushed voices, all those legends crowded together. With one signed document, Manfred gave populism a big win. You could say populism is on a hot streak. So is legal sports betting, now permitted in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Baseball fans are bombarded with bet-now messages, courtesy of FanDuel, Major League Baseball's official bookmaker. Gambling is a magnet for compulsives and always has been. Manfred is well aware. Ippei Mizuhara, the former translator for the great Japanese slugger and pitcher Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has been sentenced to a nearly five-year federal prison sentence for embezzling nearly $17 million from Ohtani. He needed the money to pay gambling debts from betting on sports, baseball not among them, according to investigators. But compulsion is an open door to desperation. In the 35 years after his banishment, Rose signed autographs (for a fee) at racetracks, at televised wrestling events and in the quaint upstate New York village of Cooperstown, in the shadows of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. When Rose died last September at his home in Las Vegas at 83, that two-word phrase, permanently ineligible, followed him into his obituaries. Giamatti delivered his banishment speech on Aug. 24, 1989. Eight days later, he was dead, after a heart attack in his modest summer home in Edgartown, Mass. He was 51. He was a chain smoker and a compulsive eater — and he was drowning in stress. The Rose gambling scandal consumed Giamatti's days and nights all through his five months as commissioner. In the coming years, Rose will almost surely get consideration from a 16-member Hall of Fame oversight committee and an opportunity to win the 12 or more votes necessary for induction. Joe Jackson will, too. Jackson, the unassuming and illiterate son of a South Carolina sharecropper, was a career .356 hitter whose life and times, and role in the fixed 1919 World Series — the famous Black Sox scandal — are shrouded in mystery. But mobsters did try to buy the outcome of that series, which is why baseball brought in its first commissioner, an imposing federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Landis understood that if the public did not have faith in the purity of the effort in every last baseball game, it wouldn't bother watching. For over a century, gambling on baseball was the game's cardinal sin. That was one of Giamatti's core beliefs and he was following Landis's example when he banished Rose. Giamatti was loaded with charisma. He was a public intellectual, a true believer in the value of critical thinking and academic independence. But he is known, all these years later, chiefly for the matter of Mr. Rose. It's painful. Manfred is baseball's 10th commissioner. He made his move a month after discussing the matter of Mr. Rose with President Trump. Rose had been on Trump's they-treated-him-very-unfairly list for years. Manfred said, 'Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.' Enter Bart Giamatti, laughing. 'Obviously.' Athletes in interviews abuse that word all the time. 'What's obvious is that Manfred needs certain accommodations from Trump for baseball, and Trump wants Rose in the Hall of Fame,' Mark Mulvoy told me the other day. Mulvoy was the managing editor of Sports Illustrated in 1989 when it published the first deep dive into Rose's gambling compulsion. Mulvoy told me he delivered football betting slips for the mobster Whitey Bulger as a kid in Boston in the 1950s and was paid handsomely for it, cash money and 10-cent beers. He doesn't romanticize any bit of it. He loves baseball. But baseball has lost him. The final straw was Manfred's decision. Anything populist is smack-dab in Trump's wheelhouse. Years ago, during an interview, he turned the tables and asked me how I felt about the 50-game suspension that the prodigious home-run hitter Manny Ramirez had received for violating baseball's rules on performance-enhancing drugs. I gave a high-minded, bag-of-wind answer of support. Trump smirked and said pleasantly, 'I do not care. I just want to see them hit the long ball.' As for the permanent part of permanently ineligible, it had a good run. Now? Whatever.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Does Pete Rose deserve to be in the Hall of Fame? It's complicated
On the day that Pete Rose was banned from baseball in August 1989, Major League Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti did something that is impossible to imagine today. He stood in front of a horde of reporters at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan. He looked into a bank of television cameras beaming his news conference live into living rooms nationwide. He gave a short and poetic statement, announcing Rose's permanent banishment from the game and the reasons for it, and then Giamatti took the reporters' questions for about 45 minutes — on live television. In this moment, he didn't feel like a commissioner of a major American sport; he looked like himself — a former professor at Yale University, lecturing on a subject he loved: baseball. 'I will be told I am idealist,' Giamatti said that day. 'I hope so.' He thought it was important to find ideals in baseball — 'the national game,' he called it — and to protect these ideals at all costs. But he also believed in something else. Giamatti said that day in New York that Rose's name would appear on the ballot for baseball's Hall of Fame, as scheduled, in 1991 — five years after Rose's last at-bat as a player. Though Rose had bet on his own baseball games, risking the integrity of the game and violating its best-known rule, Hall of Fame voters would have a chance to cast a ballot for Rose. 'You have the authority,' Giamatti told the reporters that day, 'and you have the responsibility, and you will make your own individual judgments.' Frankly, Giamatti said, he was looking forward to seeing how the writers sorted through what he called 'the relationship of life to art — which you will all have to work out for yourselves.' Within days of the announcement, Giamatti died suddenly of a heart ailment. Two years later, the National Baseball Hall of Fame changed the rules, removing ineligible players, like Rose, from the pool of potential candidates. For the next 15 years, Rose continued to lie about what he had done, refusing to admit he had bet on baseball. Those lies hurt lots of people, including his family, his friends, his teammates, people in his hometown of Cincinnati, and the memory of Bart Giamatti. And in some ways, Rose never fully reckoned with his actions before his own sudden death last fall. Like a lot of addicts, Rose never fully got right with the world. But 36 years after Giamatti's news conference, Commissioner Rob Manfred will finally let at least a few Hall of Fame voters have that debate that Giamatti wanted. On Tuesday, Manfred ruled that a player's ineligibility ends at his death, thereby removing Rose, 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson and 15 other disgraced men from baseball purgatory. By rule, starting in 2028, Rose could now be voted into the Hall of Fame by a small committee that takes up the cases of players who competed long ago. It's a significant policy change for baseball and it threaded an impossible needle. In making his announcement, Manfred gave Rose's loved ones and maybe President Donald Trump what they wanted, without having to promise anything else. But Manfred's choice has also turned a long hypothetical debate into a real and raging one: Does Pete Rose deserve to be in the Hall of Fame? As usual with Rose, it's complicated. On the one hand, he compiled more hits in baseball history than anyone else — 4,256 — and he did so while playing the game in an iconic fashion. Fans loved how Rose sprinted to first base on a walk, slid headfirst into third, barreled into catchers trying to block home plate, and fought with shortstops out at second — anything to win. This approach earned him the nickname 'Charlie Hustle' and the name alone endeared him to us. He was the American dream, rounding third. So, of course, defenders say, Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. But while we were cheering for him, Rose was making grave mistakes off the field. As I learned in the reporting for my book, he ran with gamblers and bookies. He cheated on his wives. He had an affair with a teenage girl in Cincinnati in the 1970s. He lied about all of it. And by at least 1986, he was betting on his own baseball games and incurring massive debts to bookies on the fringes of the mob. These debts, without question, put the game at risk and made Giamatti's fraught decision easy: Pete Rose — trapped inside his lies and his addictions — had to go. So, of course, critics say, he deserves nothing, except for what he got: his banishment. The people on that committee at the Hall of Fame now inherit this thorny debate, and as a baseball fan and a historian, I'll be interested to see what they do. But I also happen to think it's the wrong debate. We like to put our favorite athletes on pedestals and ascribe moral values to them. The truth is, we don't know much about them at all. And we'll know even less about our favorite players going forward, in a time the most famous athletes live inside gilded bubbles, protected from journalists and fans by legions of handlers. So maybe it's time we stopped pretending that every great baseball player also happens to be a moral person. Maybe it's OK to acknowledge that they were just talented at playing a little kid's game. And maybe we should consider enshrining their mistakes along with their accomplishments. We could put their shortcomings in bronze too — for perpetuity. Under this format, there'd be a lot of interesting plaques to read at Cooperstown. The Hall of Fame already includes a long list of miscreants: gamblers, alcoholics, drug users, adulterers, cheaters, spitballers, ball scuffers, liars, deadbeats, racists, and at least two hitters once accused of conspiring to throw games for money. They're all there. Not great. Just really good at baseball. 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