Paul Giamatti says Black Mirror's Eulogy episode made him confront his own past

“I knew a lot about that world,” says the 57-year-old on set in Shepperton, far more approachable and cheerful than the curmudgeonly roles that brought him to prominence in the likes of Sideways and Billions. “The rooftops on set are re-created very accurately, exactly the kind of place I lived in on the Lower East Side, although a few years later than Philip.

“What I mostly remember about those years was scrapping around, looking for work, then having a baby in this ridiculous apartment that was in no way suited to having a baby. It was a real death trap, open sockets in the walls… There were no dividing walls, so we made them out of bookshelves. It was a good time.”

The work picked up eventually. Now, with two Oscar nominations (for Cinderella Man and The Holdovers) to his name, Giamatti is one of America’s most in-demand actors. He is also no stranger to working in the UK, having shot here on a range of projects, including Saving Private Ryan, Downton Abbey and, er, Thunderpants.

“I love that movie!” Giamatti beams of the 2002 film he made with Rupert Grint post-Hogwarts. “There’s a kind of sanity to the work here that we lack in America. It doesn’t feel rushed. The days are normal and there’s an eye towards people having a life outside of work, which is not the case in America a lot of the time.”

Giamatti was delighted to return to Britain to film Eulogy, despite the unusual demands it placed on him: “I don’t often feel that I consciously bring anything of my own life into something, but there were definitely moments of thinking about my own past here. Regrettable relationships, things that were left open-ended in uncomfortable ways...”

A long-time fan of Black Mirror and dedicated reader of Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov and Ted Chiang, Giamatti appreciates the show’s measured view of technology while being no tech trailblazer himself.

“I am on Instagram, although only my friends know it’s me,” he says, explaining that he uses a pseudonym he declines to share with me.“My girlfriend [Billions co-star Clara Wong] is heavily into TikTok but I don’t want to engage in that. That endless scroll and loop is terrifying. The second that you’re confronted with algorithms and nudges, you feel coerced. It’s strange and troubling.”

Despite that, the actor adds, he isn’t one to retreat into the past for comfort. “I’m not a big nostalgia guy and I don’t have a ton of photos. I regret that now. I wish I had kept a lot of things – photographs, but also letters, school papers, tests, reports. I never kept anything. I was always just thinking, ‘What’s next?’”

As he is called back to set, we end our conversation, appropriately if morbidly, with the subject of funerals. “I think about death a lot as I get older,” he says. “Do I believe anything is going to happen to me after I die? I used to think not, but now I’m not so sure. I go back and forth between burial and cremation, but I have this funny thing of wanting to know that my body is still around, just in case.

“Maybe I should be cryogenically frozen. Or maybe I have been watching too much Black Mirror!”

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Black Mirror season 7 will stream on Netflix from 10th April 2025. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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