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“Wow, guys, I didn’t think my week could get any better than going viral for eating a cheeseburger,” New Haven native Paul Giamatti jokingly said in his acceptance speech on Sunday, Jan. 14.
The 56-year-old actor also won an award at the Golden Globes for his part in “The Holdovers” and then went viral for a photo of himself eating at an In-N-Out Burger joint.
Giamatti played a longtime teacher at a prep school in Massachusetts in the movie.
“Serious guys, I need that endorsement. So let’s all just pray for me,” Giamatti said. “Everybody get their pizza in a bag, by the way? I think that’d be a good endorsement. Paul Giamatti for pizza in a bag.”
Giamatti thanked the critics for being “the toughest crowds” as well as his son and late father.
“I want to think about my father tonight who never saw me act professionally,” he said. “If that’s what I do is professional acting. I’m not so sure. But he was a critic. He was a literary critic. And so you couldn’t get away with anything but good work with him. So this would make him really happy. And that makes me really happy. So thank you.”
Giamatti was also up against Bradley Cooper, Leonardo DiCaprio, Colman Domingo, Cillian Murphy and Jeffery Wright.
Giamatti's father, Bart, served as Yale University president from 1978 to 1986 before becoming National League president and then Major League Baseball commissioner. Paul Giammatti was born in New Haven during the time his father was a professor at Yale.
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