The World's Best Character Actor

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Howard has a vested interest, but he thinks Joe Gould is the kind of role that could earn Giamatti an Oscar. At the very least, it's fine territory on which to build the next act of his career. As Gould, unlike such gigs as Limbo,the slave-trading orangutan in Planet of the Apes, or Kenny (Pig Vomit) Rushton in Private Parts, Giamatti gets to play more than just one exquisitely sweaty comic note. Howard thinks people are only now waking up to Giamatti's ability. "I so loved him as Pig Vomit, and that, balanced with the detail of Pekar, blew me away," he says. "He got Joe Gould without having to read for it."

Giamatti is not so self-abnegating that he denies his skills--"I've been pretty good in some stuff," he says in a satire of gruffness--but ever since his days at Yale (where his father Bart was president before becoming commissioner of baseball; he died in 1989), he has made team play a religion. "He was hands down the best actor at Yale," says Shawn Levy, who directed Giamatti in a school production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and painted him blue in the 2002 Frankie Muniz vehicle Big Fat Liar. "He could have dominated every play, but he served them and took nothing for granted."

Giamatti still prefers to audition rather than be handed a role, and his opinion of stars who monkey with scripts ("That's a really good way to f___ up a movie!") is usually in synch with those behind the camera. That partially explains why an unusual number of directors have remained close to him long after he has left their sets. But as a talented, literate, funny guy who spends a lot of time orbiting the Affleckian universe, he is also a tempting canvas on which to project their frustrations. "I can't tell you how hard it was to cast Paul in American Splendor," says Robert Pulcini, the film's co-director. "When you have to fight to get a hugely talented guy in a movie, it makes you question everything you're doing."

Giamatti appreciates the sympathy, and he is happy to play a lead when the fit is right (he's a bird-loving auto upholsterer in this fall's indie The Hawk Is Dying), but really, he'll do anything. "I love that up-at-2-a.m.-and-a-bizarre-movie-comes-on feeling," says Giamatti. "I enjoy being in those things." One of them, Duets, a 2000 karaoke-road-trip killing-spree film that the New York Times said "flops around like a carp on the kitchen floor," was actually not bad enough for his taste. "In the script there was bloodshed and incest and karaoke. I thought, This is great!" He sighs: "They ruined it in the edit."

The shock of Giamatti's good humor is ultimately a testament to his performances. Harvey Pekar and Miles Raymond ennobled themselves by overcoming their bitterness; Giamatti, who lives with his wife and 4-year-old son in Brooklyn, N.Y., has none to overcome. "We were out once," says Pulcini, "and he ordered a Chianti, and he was really surprised when it came. He thought it was going to be white. I mean, he knows nothing about wine. You forget it was just a performance." Great actors can do that to you. •