During the pandemic, like many
others, Paul Giamatti found comfort in Zoom. The seasoned actor attended an
online talk by Stephen Asma, an author and philosophy professor at Columbia
College Chicago, and was impressed by Asma's insights on imagination and consciousness.
Giamatti, being well-connected, reached out to Asma.
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| Paul Giamatti AUSTIN HARGRAVE |
"We were Zooming when Zoom was a new thing. It was nice to chat with this guy, and we found each other having these longer and longer chats," Giamatti said during a rare break from his best actor Oscar campaign for his role in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. "Stephen jokingly said, 'We ought to do something with this.'" The joke eventually turned into a serious idea.
To develop their concept, they sent
one of their chats to visual artist Alex Sokol, who added animations and
striking images to illustrate their discussions about aliens, UFOs, and
Bigfoot. "We sat around thinking,
'Who do we take it to?'" Giamatti recalls. It didn't take long for
them to decide on Treefort Media, a podcast production company, to co-produce
with Giamatti's Touchy Feely Films.
Treefort, an independent podcast
company founded in 2018 by Kelly Garner, Lisa Ammerman, Thom Monahan, and Oscar
Guido, serves as a welcoming home for creators. With nearly 50 series, Treefort
provided a perfect platform for Paul Giamatti and Stephen Asma's freewheeling
chats on esoteric subjects with "a weird bent." This led to the duo
unintentionally becoming creators and hosts of a weekly podcast called Chinwag.
"It kind of came along accidentally," Giamatti remarked.
Chinwag was announced a year ago and debuted with a special live episode at SXSW about monsters. The first official episode was released in April 2023, and over the following months, Giamatti and Asma amassed a loyal audience of fellow enthusiasts for the unconventional. Giamatti decided against booking fellow celebrities to discuss their latest projects, opting instead to offer his peers a platform to have hour-long discussions on topics rarely explored during press junkets.
Giamatti and Asma's guests have
included Tom Hanks discussing time travel, Billy Bob Thornton swapping ghost
stories, Kathryn Hahn talking about cults, Patton Oswalt exploring the Mandela
effect, Amy Sedaris gushing about Japanese subways, Don Cheadle sharing how
religion helps tame the ego, Stephen Colbert delving into Jungian archetypes,
and Natasha Lyonne discussing her belief in extraterrestrials, ghosts, and
Bigfoot.
"I know from being interviewed over the years that I often get most
excited when the conversation goes off-topic and I get to talk about something
other than me," says Giamatti. "I get bored talking about myself or a particular project, I gotta be
honest."
Treefort founder and CEO Garner comments, "One of the things that’s so great about working with Paul is how unafraid he is. He is not guarded; he is not worried about handlers. He cares passionately and deeply about UFOs, Bigfoot, aliens, and the hollow earth theory. He doesn’t go into anything political. [Chinwag] is just about a genuine curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, and turning over rocks that other people don’t to see what’s underneath. For someone of his stature, in an Oscar race for best actor, it’s remarkable how much fun he’s having, and there’s no agenda here."
Ammerman from Treefort describes it
as refreshing. "So many people in
the public eye are so concerned with just talking about the craft or why they
were interested in a role, and this allows Paul to talk about all his myriad
interests that he’s been cultivating since he was a kid. The people that he
brings on are so interested in talking about that stuff too," she says.
"It’s all about intellectual curiosity."
The November release of The Holdovers,
and the subsequent acclaim Paul Giamatti received for his role as a
curmudgeonly boarding school professor, had a significant impact on Chinwag's
trajectory. Treefort co-founder Guido explains that while the show had been
steadily growing its audience faster than others, it wasn't until the awards
season bump in December that they noticed a threefold increase in the show's
audience, which continues to grow weekly despite Giamatti's busy awards
schedule.
"We tapped into a really hungry audience," Guido says. "It's gotten the show to the top 25 in Apple podcast rankings in the shortest amount of time compared to other shows and talk shows. We've had a couple of million downloads total over the lifespan of the show." Guido also highlights the pristine engagement, noting "thousands of five-star reviews" and no negative reviews yet, which he finds unusual.
"We receive long letters from folks, not only expressing their love for
Paul and Stephen but also diving into their own experiences of the supernatural.
I'm talking about four- or five-page-long essays," Guido adds. "We've received fan art, sketches, posters.
The engagement on this has really been through the roof."
The creators of Chinwag are
considering expanding the podcast's universe due to the unusually high level of
fan engagement. While discussions are in the early stages, the team is
exploring the possibility of a TV series, a book club, and more live events.
Plans are expected to develop in the spring, once the awards season concludes
after the Oscars on March 10.
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| Paul Giamatti and Stephen Asma at a live event during SeriesFest. TOM COOPER/GETTY IMAGES |
Dan Carey, Giamatti's partner at Touchy Feely Films, shares, "It’s been a learning curve for me and for Paul. Unlike film, you can kind of do it on the fly and make quick choices. It’s very mobile unlike a film production. We’ve really enjoyed it. It was an experiment that could’ve lasted for 10 episodes and that would’ve been fun. The fact that it has continued to be as interesting as it was at the outset gives us an interesting path to follow."
Giamatti has no intention of
straying from Chinwag now that it's becoming more intriguing. "I’ll be able to fully concentrate on it
again soon because for the past three months, my attention got completely taken
away," says Giamatti. "Hopefully,
all these things will come to fruition in different ways."
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