The mystery of Paul Giamatti’s lazy eye in The Holdovers has (mostly) been solved
Giamatti is "sworn to secrecy" about the details, but the secret to the Oscar nominee's success can be found in the The Holdovers' credits
Aux News The Holdovers
When Paul Giamatti commits to a character, he really commits. His feet were apparently blue for “months” after being sprayed with layer upon layer of tattoo ink for 2002's (severely under-appreciated) Big Fat Liar, and he delivered his entire Oscar-nominated turn as curmudgeonly teacher Paul Hunham in The Holdovers with a lazy eye. Well, it wasn’t exactly his own eye, but it definitely wasn’t CGI either.
Mr. Hunham’s wandering eye is an important part of his persona, which serves to further alienate him from his students (who refer to him as “Walleye” behind his back) and the rest of society. In interviews, however, the veteran actor been oddly reticent about the whole thing. “I’ve been sworn to secrecy,” he said in a recent Variety cover story. “I wanted to tell people that ‘I trained with a contortionist from Cirque du Soleil to be able to do it, but I can’t do it anymore; it’s dangerous.’”
Giamatti has peddled this line before, telling People in December that the eye was a “state secret,” and that he and director Alexander Payne got a kick out of telling curious fans that “it’s the magic of acting in cinema… just movie magic.” Even Giamatti’s co-star Dominic Sessa, who played titular “holdover” student Angus Tully, had no idea how he and Payne did it. “It was a great frustration of mine!” Sessa told The Daily Beast last year. “I don’t know if it was pure acting, I don’t know if they had an eye contortionist, I don’t know what they did. I would see him on set, and his eye would be messed up, and then I’d see him when we wrapped and his eye would be… not messed up?”
Well, someone should probably get Sessa on speed-dial, because Giamatti finally revealed his hand. Well, kind of. “If you look in the credits, you’ll see how we did it,” he told Variety. “It was a special effect, a makeup thing. It’s not CGI. It’s physical. It’s a thing on my eye and I’ve never done anything like that.”
We obviously ran straight to the credits to bring you this breaking news, and while there are no sketches or complicated diagrams, they do provide either a next step in this case or the final answer—depending on whether or not you think anyone is asking the right questions. Right there, staring at us this whole time (sorry), is a name: Zach Ripps, contact lens tech. So there you have it. It’s a little anticlimactic, sure, but who knows—maybe Mr. Ripps will do a tell-all interview one-day and the process of acquiring and securing that contact lens will be more harrowing and dramatic than anyone could have possible dreamed. We can only hope.
For Giamatti’s part, the lens mostly presented an interesting new opportunity to hone his craft. “I was a little wary of it, but it turned out to be interesting,” he said. “It was useful to make the guy even more of an outsider. I’ve never acted with something like that before.” Maybe he’ll dust it off again for a quirky new twist if he ever gets to reprise his role as a giant talking orangutan in Planet Of The Apes, something he clearly really, really wants to do.
27 Comments
This was a mystery? My mother and I watched the film, and when we spoke about it afterward, the only question was if he changed which eye he was wearing a contact in from scene to scene, because the affected eye seemed to vary through the movie.
I noticed the same thing! I kept thinking I was sure which eye was which to only have it switch on me in the next scene.
Besides being explained by the credits of the film itself, it was discussed in an article published on the Vanity Fair website more than a month ago, but for some reason we’ve agreed to treat it like a mystery.
It varied! In the scene on the restaurant it was the other side and it bugged me so much I thought maybe it was an editing mistake where they mirrored the image for some reason.
Thank you. I noticed the same thing — eye changing sides — and thought I was losing it.
The mystery was certainly not how it was done, but why it swaps. At first I thought it was worst example of a continuity error in a movie, but apparently it was a creative choice.
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That’s what I assumed (and got sadly excited) this article was going to answer: why the lazy eye changes from Paul’s right eye to his left eye and back and forth throughout the entire movie. Nope. Not answered. Mystery remains.
I just watched it last night, and yeah the eye flip was weird. It’s on the left ~90% of the time, but here and there swaps over to the right. In the days of yore we would have assumed they flipped the negative by mistake, but obv that can’t happen with a digital camera. So, for whatever reason, it was intentional.But yeah, were people really wondering how they did it? Are people that stupid? Maybe so.
Quite. You could see the edge of the contact.
Didn’t he talk about the Contact Lens Tech on Colbert or Seth Meyers last week or the week before?
He said on Howard Stern weeks ago that it was a contact lens.
I love when Howard and Pig Vomit get together.
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Yeah he also mentioned it on Armchair Expert. Him treating it like a mystery is obviously just him playing around and having a little fun.
I listened to him on Armchair Expert and WTF/Maron and man that guy is just a delight. Not at all what I expected.
He also has a podcast called Chinwag to discuss just weird shit like bigfoot/mandela effect/etc because he “misses getting to talk about that stuff” ha. Awesome dude all around.
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I’m just here to say that Paul’s podcast is a gift to humanity. Take a listen, if you have not.
They didn’t call him “Walleye” because of his eye. They called him that because of his medical condition that made him smell like fish.
You think? Aside from the fish species, Walleye is also a term for someone with crossed eyes where one eye faces away from the nose relative to the other. It’s in the dictionary and everything.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/walleye
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humor
I was wondering about this while watching too…I’m sure it’s a combo of the two.
i really want to see this but i’m saving it to watch with my mom sometime, she is a sucker for this exact plot structure.
This isn’t a real article, right? “the thing on the movie is make-up and prosthetics 🤯”
I mean it was pretty clearly a contact lens, just a full sclera lens with an off center pupil.
I’ve know people with a “walleye” and a contact corrected, so I knew it was the reverse of that, no mystery.