“I’m really surprised this is going so well,” says Paul Giamatti early on in our conversation. It’s a typically sardonic remark from the American actor famed for his Oscar-nominated roles in the mordant movies Sideways and The Holdovers and the TV show Billions. Yet the cause of his concern today is not existential but technological. “I’m an extremely wary user of technology,” he says. “I always feel like I have some strange negative body charge or something, because nothing ever works for me.”

That we are speaking over Zoom seems fitting given the nature of the project we are here to discuss: an episode of the new season of Netflix’s dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror in which Giamatti plays a reclusive man asked to contribute to a memorial service for a person from his past. His guide on this Proustian journey is an AI played by Patsy Ferran who soon has him scouring his attic for old photographs. 

It’s an analogue-first lifestyle to which Giamatti, 57, can relate. “I live in an apartment, so I don’t have an attic, but I do have boxes of photographs and some stacks of dusty CDs. And I have a lot of books. I like books a lot.”