NOT ENJOYING IT.(The Talk of the Town)

The bigger a star you are in the movies, the closer the camera gets to your face. Those in below-the-title supporting roles appear mostly with their shoulders, and a character actor is seldom seen without his belly. It is only those whose salaries have passed twenty million dollars whose tiniest characteristics and tics we have seen so greatly magnified that we know them more intimately than we do our own: the delicately protuberant vein in Julia Roberts's forehead; the twitching around Jim Carrey's eyelids. So it is perhaps a sign of status ambivalence on the part of Paul Giamatti, who, with last year's film "American Splendor," made the rare transition from character actor to leading man, that he misses the days when, as an actor onstage, he could be seen from his head all the way down to his feet.

On a recent afternoon, shortly before the release of his new movie, "Sideways," Giamatti sat at a table in the back of Junior's, the old restaurant and cocktail lounge on Flatbush Avenue, in Brooklyn, because Junior's was close to bam, where he was about to go and see the 1968 Lee Marvin movie "Hell in the Pacific." Giamatti was dressed as a nondescript guy from any decade, in faded jeans, a black polo shirt, and a beige anorak. His face, which when clean-shaven in movies is disconcertingly round-featured and babylike, was roughened by some facial scruff and thick black-framed glasses. Giamatti often says that, with his looks, he's lucky to get any parts at all. "Julia Roberts can just stand there," he said. "I can't just stand there. There's too much flesh on my skull blocking my emotions or something."

Still, he knows that as long as he can play the sort of character role that he has played in the past--Howard Stern's lunatic boss, Pig Vomit, in "Private Parts"; Andy Kaufman's best friend in "Man on the Moon"; the evil psychiatrist in "Dr. Dolittle"--the excess skull flesh, or whatever it is, doesn't matter. "There's always a need for a balding, slightly overweight guy," he has said. "Everyone else has to worry about losing their hair, but you don't. It doesn't matter if you look like crap--in some ways it's better to look like crap." And he cherishes the romance of being an old-school character actor, in the tradition of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and the casts of old horror films. "Those guys were just stranger than people are now," he said. "Jim Carrey will behave strangely, but those guys were strange. Vincent Price was weird. Boris Karloff was just weird."

In "Sideways," Giamatti plays a depressive, pedantic wine snob and failed novelist who takes a failed-actor friend on a wine-tasting road trip through California, in the course of which each suffers a failed romance. One of the things Giamatti liked about shooting the movie was that the director, Alexander Payne (who also made "Election" and "About Schmidt"), doesn't use a monitor. Instead of watching the action unfold on a small screen some distance from the set, he ...