Paul Giamatti does some of his finest work in The Holdovers, which is saying something. But it’s not just his god-tier crabbiness, his defiantly flowery patois, his penchant for calling his peabrained pupils things like “snarling Visigoths” that are impressive. He also does something freaky with a key part of his face. For months he’s refused to explain how he pulled off his character’s lazy eye, which frankly looks absolutely realistic. Now he’s let the cat out of the bag, and the cat? It’s actually not that impressive.
Per The Daily Beast, the In-N-Out enthusiast went on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show Wednesday, during which his host admitted he thought the lazy eye was real. It wasn’t, revealed Giamatti, who’s said a lot of people have gone up to him, saying it looked like it was. When that’s happened, Giamatti has had a blunt thought to himself.
“How f*cking stupid are you? It’s a thing in my eye!” he said. “But I guess it worked really well.”
Okay, but what thing is in his eye? Stern pressed him, and it turns out it’s really obvious.
“It’s a lens,” Giamatti said. “A big soft contact lens.”
Putting a giant contact lens on his eye wasn’t ideal for Giamatti, who admitted he’s “squeamish” about putting anything on his eyes. The fake lazy eye lens took “a lot to get used to,” and though it was opaque it did leave him “blind in one eye,” including for scenes where he’s driving a car (or chasing around co-star Dominic Sessa).
Seems pretty obvious now that Giamatti’s pointed it out, doesn’t it? It’s still an impressive contact lens, though. It’s so good that perhaps, like Stern, you, too, thought that Giamatti had always had a lazy eye and you simply never noticed it somehow. But no, it’s just movie magic that’s been around as long as contact lenses have been.
The Holdovers is now in theaters and it streams on Peacock. It’s pretty good, you should watch it.
(Via The Daily Beast)
Source: https://uproxx.com/movies/paul-giamatti-the-holdovers-explained-eye-thing/
