‘The Holdovers’: Alexander Payne Recruits ‘Sideways’ Star Paul Giamatti For New Comedy

Following several canceled features across 2019 and 2020, Deadline reports that Alexander Payne has set Paul Giamatti to star in “The Holdovers,” a David Hemingson-scripted film produced by Mark Johnson. Production on the film will begin early next year in New England. At the same time, FilmNation will rep international rights, and CAA Media Finance will handle domestic as the film is shopped next week in the Cannes Virtual Market. 

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Payne and Giamatti worked together on the 2004 ‘Sideways,”  a comedy about a wine-tasting road trip that won Payne and co-writer/co-producer Jim Taylor Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay. ‘The Holdovers” is also a comedy, said to have the “poignancy and grounded characters of past films.”

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In a setup that sounds like well-trodden ground for Payne, Giamatti will play a “curmudgeonly walleyed disliked history teacher” at the prep school Deerfield Academy, despised by his students’ faculty headmaster. With no family and nowhere to go over the Christmas holiday in 1970, Paul remains at school to supervise students’ inability to journey home. After a few days, only one student holdover remains — a trouble-making 15-year-old named Angus, a good student undermined by bad behavior that always threatens to get him expelled. Joining Paul and Angus is Deerfield’s head cook, Mary—an African American woman who caters to sons of privilege and whose own son was recently lost in Vietnam. These three very different shipwrecked people form an unlikely Christmas family, sharing comic misadventures during two very snowy weeks in New England.

This new project follows several stalled-out productions initially intended to be helmed by Payne — a Mads Mikkelsen-starring Netflix project that was canceled last minute. Mark Mylod also replaced Payne on the Adam McKay-produced black comedy, “The Menu.” Around the same time, Payne was accused of sexual misconduct and assault against Rose McGowan when the actress was underage; his denial was published, seemingly without a second thought, in a guest column for Deadline in late 2020.