You've gotta love Paul Giamatti. When he's not out earning his cine-omnipresence, he's happy to talk to the press about his upcoming projects. During his latest cornering by the press, he spoke about three of them.
His next appearance onscreen after Lady In The Water will be alongside Ed Norton in The Illusionist. Oddly enough (or not, for Hollywood, come to think of it), the film has been completed for some time, and will finally be distributed this autumn. "It's great that this movie will now come out, because it's a different thing than people have seen me do, which is nice. Maybe that means I'll get more period things; I like doing stuff like that."
"It's basically a very dirty cartoon," said the actor of a very different project, The Haunted World Of El-Superbeasto. This is the animated film being put together by Rob Zombie. "It's just a lot of sex and drugs and violence, which is good, because I think we need a cartoon like that. It's like those '70s cartoons like Fritz the Cat and stuff like that." Giamatti will be voicing the villain of the piece, Dr Satan, "who is trying to take over the world and may be gay or something. I don't know."
He's already done his part proceedings, saying of the experience "[Rob Zombie] was great, and he's a really smart guy, and the script is very funny, so we had a good time doing it. That was the most fun I had doing one of those kinds of things… it's unusual, because someone hasn't done it in a long time - a dirty feature cartoon like that."
Then there's Joe Clause, a Vince Vaughn vehicle in which Paul plays Santa (Vaughn being his younger, screw-up brother who has to go cap-in-hand for a job at the North Pole). "It's a very funny Santa Claus… the whole jolly thing, but he's actually kind of depressed and neurotic and stressed out, and he wants his brother to do it." You can expect this around Christmas 2007.