‘Black Mirror’: Paul Giamatti, Issa Rae headline new Netflix episodes
A look at the six new episodes in Season 7 of the Netflix sci-fi anthology series “Black Mirror,” featuring Paul Giamatti, Issa Rae and Rashida Jones.
How Paul Giamatti knows he’s made it: The Oscar-nominated actor gets to wear one of those super-cool signature Experiencer Disks in “Black Mirror.”
“That was very thrilling,” says Giamatti, a noted sci-fi fan and headliner of a new episode in the Netflix anthology series’ seventh season (streaming now). In “Eulogy,” he plays an older man who, courtesy of a virtual Guide (Patsy Ferran) and a nifty device he places on his temple, enters pictures from his youth to help recall memories of a lost love.
Giamatti is known for his cinematic work, including “The Holdovers” and “Sideways,” but the 57-year-old actor also co-hosted the “Chinwag” podcast, which discussed science, the occult, mysteries and more, so “Black Mirror” is “very much” his sort of jam: “I like stuff like this.”
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Though many episodes veer toward the bleakly dystopian or technology-run-amok variety, “Eulogy” is one of the few, like “San Junipero,” that leans emotional and more life-affirming than heartbreaking. Giamatti, for one, is glad to hear that.
“It was always a little bit of a debate, whether it was (positive) or not,” he says. “But when the episode was all put together, I was like, ‘Oh, it is kind of a good thing that happens for the guy.’ ”
“Eulogy” centers on Phillip (Giamatti), a grumpy sort who lives on Cape Cod and gets a message that Carol, a former flame, has died in England. Her daughter is putting together an immersive online memorial, and Phillip is asked to contribute memories from his mind via a virtual-reality device. The problem is, Phillip has done his best to forget her after a nasty breakup several decades ago, including angrily scratching out or tearing up her face in old Polaroids. With the Guide’s help, Phillip is able to immerse himself in these photos from the past to try to piece together what she looked like and what happened in their relationship.
Though punching a viewer in the gut is a “Black Mirror” specialty, creator/writer Charlie Brooker hopes “Eulogy” is “equally powerful, but in a different way. It’s evocative (and) bittersweet, tragic and warm at the same time.” Brooker was inspired by recent efforts to “polish up” the past, like Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary, “Get Back”: “We are not just the near-future dystopia show. Sometimes we’re the future nostalgia show.”
And Giamatti was “the perfect fit” for the episode, Brooker says. Not only is he “one of the best actors ever to walk the Earth,” but “he can walk the fine line between grouchy and standoffish and sort of inherently warm and likable, which is no mean feat.”
As his character goes through the paces of recalling this difficult period in his life while revisiting the beautiful feelings as well, Giamatti recalled “the intensity of the relationships you have when you’re that age, and all of that was very much coming back” while filming. “What’s nice is he’s allowed to find her again and fall in love with her again, but let go of it, too.”
The story resonated with Giamatti; it took him back to his early years as an artist. “The first photograph that you see (in the episode) looked in an uncanny way like the rooftop of a lot of places in New York. I wasn’t a musician, but I was trying to be an actor. I was living in a loft like that, in a kind of crappy building on the Lower East Side. A lot of this is just already in my own head because it’s very similar to my youth in 1989,” when he was 22.
Phillip, however, is a very analog person and not very technological − Giamatti says he’s “frozen a little bit in time” − so he gives the delivery drone that brings him his nifty device a curmudgeonly look. In real life, Giamatti thought it was pretty cool. “I had not seen this happen yet with a package. I live in New York City; I don’t imagine it needs to happen here. It’s like, ‘Oh, that works pretty well, actually.’ I thought if I lived out in the desert in Utah, it’d be kind of a great way to have this arrive.”
And like his character, Giamatti has a bunch of old photos, but he confesses he’s “not a nostalgia guy in that way. I’ve kind of inherited them from people who have passed away. I just never pull them out and look at them a lot (or) put them in scrapbooks.
“But they’re there, and I haven’t gotten rid of them. I’ll look at them at some point.”
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