Paul Giamatti

Paul Giamatti plays the fictional self of the comics writer Harvey Pekar in American Splendor. Xan Brooks, in the British Film Institute archive, lays out how the film is built: the real Pekar narrates and presents the man playing him as our man, or as the guy playing me. Elsewhere in the same archive John Wrathall calls him pop-eyed in a notice on Duets, from 2000, and reckons that after a run of nerdy supporting parts he has finally landed a juicy lead. A DVD review in the magazine counts four minutes of his narration on the disc of a sixties adventure picture as a pleasure in itself. Of the six pages in the archive that carry his name, three list him in the credits and nothing more, Man on the Moon among them. American Splendor brought him a male lead nomination at Film Independent's 2004 ceremony, and the following year he took that award for Sideways.