ROUND-TABLE: 'The Last Station' star Paul Giamatti

Paul Giamatti has played John Adams; he has played a wine aficionado; he has played himself. Now, in The Last Station, he gets to play an antagonist who literally has a habit of twirling his mustache. The Last Station is a film about Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), the young secretary whom Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) employed toward the end of his life, but the film also explores Tolstoy's own relationship with his wife (Helen Mirren) versus his relationship with his confidante Vladimir Chertkov (Giamatti). Herein he talks about his character; War and Peace; and the joys of being vile. Enjoy.

Hi.
Hey. How are you?

So can you tell us a little bit about what attracted you to the role?
Uh… well, I guess I was in love with the script, and I liked the period thing; America doesn’t do a lot of period stuff. And the Russian stuff was interesting to me: I’m interested in the whole Tolstoy stuff, even if this film isn’t really necessarily about Tolstoy. It’s just a love story that happens to take place near him. And then the part of Chertkov, I thought, was a good kind of ambiguous bad guy, which I thought was interesting. I don’t know what to make of him, and I hope the audience doesn’t know what to make of him either.

You’ve got to admire his loyalty, though.
Yeah, and he’s pretty dogged about it. Absolutely. There may be people out there who actually sympathize with him and think he’s doing the right thing, I don’t know, but I think most of the people will fall on the other side and sympathize with Tolstoy’s wife.

Is that how you kept him from—because he can easily read as a complete bastard.
Hopefully he doesn’t read as a complete bastard, but hopefully that element is there so the audience can be confused about whether he’s a complete bastard or not. I tried to make him out as a total… dick. [laughter] But I tried to really make it believable that he believed in what he was doing, for whatever twisted reasons he thought he was doing it.

Were you a fan of Tolstoy?
I’ve read a lot of it over the years, yeah. I liked it a lot, yeah, and I read a lot of the religious stuff for this, which was kind of tough going. I thought I should read it, but my not being a religious person made it kind of rough going, all of that stuff. But, yeah, I do like him. He’s amazing.

You get to literally twirl your mustache. [laughter]
I know. That was in the script, too, and the director… I mean… [laughs] Part of the idea with this is that he should be somebody you can laugh at, too. I mean, he’s an ass in a lot of ways, and he’s pompous and sort of a dick, and when you see pictures of the guy—he was a very wealthy, high-born guy, and there was a rumor that he was the illegitimate son of the Czar. And he was very vain. You see these pictures of him and he’s beautifully turned-out; his hair is perfect and his mustache and everything. So part of it was that I wanted to look sort of silly and vain, and it also becomes a bit of a neurotic thing that I do when I get nervous. But that was the director’s idea. [laughs] But it does make me a bit of a mustache-twirling fiend, but it’s supposed to be funny. You know, hopefully people get that it’s funny.

Have you since adopted that habit on your own? [laughter]
No, I couldn’t imagine, no. It’s such a weird thing to do. I don’t know.

And it requires special equipment!
It requires special equipment, and my mustache was not real, too, so it was really hard to do without pulling my mustache off all the time. It was not easy to do; it was a tricky thing.

Do you prefer playing the mustache twirling villain? [laughter] Or the hero?
…I don’t think I’ve ever played a hero. [laughter] I don’t think I’ve ever actually played the hero in anything, so I wouldn’t know what that was like. But I would say, yes, I do prefer playing characters like that. Definitely.

As you said, though, your character’s ambiguous.
Yeah… although it’s fun to play an out-and-out psycho bad guy, too, which I’ve done a couple of times. I used to do it a lot when I was younger, but I’ve done it a couple of times.

Like Shoot ‘Em Up.
Yeah. And what’s fun about that is there’s no conflict about anything. It’s all about—just keep going and shoot somebody in the head ‘cause it’s fun. [laughter] And you break somebody’s fingers ‘cause it’ll be a good time. It’s just no conflict, and in that way it’s sort of fun to be able to do.

This is gonna date me, but I think the first film I ever saw you play that character in was Big Fat Liar. [laughter]
Yeah, yeah! No, that was a fun, ridiculous bad-guy part, and all I do in that is go off on people for being fat. And stupid. [laughter] So it’s fun. I think that’s why those guys are fun: because they have no problem just being vile to people.

Could you talk a little bit about this amazing cast that you’re working with? Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren…
The two of them are amazing. I think they’re both great. He… he… I’ve always had a thing particularly about him. I’ve always thought he was great. In anything, everything he’s ever in, he’s great in it. I went off to him about being the guy in Star Trek with the patch on the eye… [laughter] He’s so great in that movie, though! He’s so great in it. And what’s great about him is he’s completely unpretentious, you know? I mean, he does goofy stuff like that, and he’s clearly having such a good time. It’s so great. Um, I think McAvoy is actually kind of amazing in this movie. They’re great, but I really think he’s kind of remarkable in it. He’s an incredibly charming, really good actor, and it’s hard to play the innocent guy like that and not seem stupid or not seem vapid or something like that. He’s really good in it, I think.

Russian literature is probably some of the densest literature that’s out there. I remember trying to get through Crime and Punishment and wanting to kill myself. When you were getting ready for this role, did you revisit War and Peace? Did you try to go down that route, or…?
I feel like I did read some short stories that I’d never read before, and for him short stories are like seventy, eighty pages long. Or, you know, a hundred and twenty pages long. But I feel like I did reread some… I can’t really remember. Like I said, I read the religious stuff because I’d never really read any of that, and I also ended up taking some things out of them to put into my dialogue to just give it more authenticity. To actually quote him. I have some line in it about how love can’t be stupid and can’t be weak-minded, which is right out of one of Tolstoy’s writings. So, um, no, but I didn’t go back. I didn’t have time. And War and Peace is amazing; I read it in college, but I don’t think I could probably do it again. But I certainly did like his short stuff, and I can’t remember what I reread but I did reread a couple of things.

Did you study up on the utopian movement that involved these characters?
No, but I got the idea of what it was supposed to be. Like I said, reading the religious stuff, there’s a lot of stuff about how to conduct your… I mean, it is all utopian writing. So I got some of it from that. But I find that stuff really interesting. I don’t know that much specifically about the Tolstoyan commune, but it’s interesting. At one point I think you see them doing Tai Chi, and I think they really did, and I think it was an early… and he was bringing a lot of Buddhist stuff into it, I think, which was interesting and sort of ahead of its time, and it was very unusual at the time to be doing that sort of stuff. But I would like to have done more about it.

Is there a lot of information about Chertkov?
Not a ton. I mean, the biographical facts are known about him. He lived for a really long time; he died in like 1938 or something like that. And the one thing that was most useful is he wrote an account of Tolstoy’s death which is really strange. It’s written in third-person and it’s written like one of the gospels or something, and it’s really peculiar! [laughter] It definitely tells you a lot about what a weird guy he was. And some of the other people’s diaries talk about him, and he was definitely a peculiar, strange man.

The Last Station is out now in select theatres.