Paul Giamatti names the worst audition of his career: “I just went in, and I sucked”
Paul Giamatti has a more impressive résumé than almost all of his contemporaries, but even great actors can bomb an audition.
A recurring sentiment among working actors is that there are few tasks more challenging than nailing an audition, even for those who have prepared their monologues and memorised their lines completely, wherein trying to showcase their talents in a brief window of time can be an intense experience that can cause even the best performers to lose their cool.
There’s no better proof of the exhausting process of auditioning than looking at the brilliant actors who admitted to screwing up during their readings, and while Paul Giamatti is certainly one of the most decorated actors working today, appeariing in many acclaimed films and shows, as he told Backstage, he once had a miserable experience auditioning for Happiness, a dark comedy from director Todd Solondoz.
“I don’t have any baroque story,” he admitted plainly, “I just went in, and I sucked, and I just couldn’t get much better. I was just horrible”.
Given that Happiness was an ensemble piece packed with standout roles for all sorts of character actors, it’s not hard to imagine Giamatti slotting right in. Missing out must’ve been a proper gut punch. Even though he’d already worked with big-name directors like Cameron Crowe, Woody Allen, Sydney Pollack and Mike Newell, he hadn’t quite broken through as a household name just yet – and maybe rubbing shoulders with that kind of cast could’ve fast-tracked things a bit.
But, in all fairness to the actor, it may have been a particularly difficult audition, for while Solondoz has always been a filmmaker who has pushed audiences outside of their comfort zone by incorporating uncomfortable content in his films, Happiness is a very dark satire that tackles such topics as paedophilia, addiction, pornography, anhedonia, and depression, which has been praised by some as brave and compassionate, but others have discarded it entirely as offensive and exploitative.
However, Giamatti managed to rebound the same year with several standout turns, and between playing a ruthless control room director in The Truman Show, a snarky con artist in The Negotiator, and a soldier in Saving Private Ryan, he proved himself to be a truly chameleonic actor who could do anything, regardless of genre.
It’s also unlikely that Giamatti would have gained much exposure had he appeared in Happiness, as the film was slapped with an NC-17 rating, which limited its ability to screen wide and advertise itself; it was also denied the opportunity to show at the Sundance Film Festival, which is typically the best platform for independent films to promote themselves.
Thankfully, the actor got the opportunity to work with many of the stars of the venture that eluded him at different points in his career; he co-starred with Jared Harris in Lady in the Water, and later appeared alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Ides of March. He may have missed his chance of working with Solondoz, but given his upward trajectory, nothing seems impossible for him in the next few years of his career.
