Actor Paul Giamatti Auditions for Klingon Role in Star Trek

Actor Paul Giamatti, known for his Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning performances, has expressed his lifelong love for Star Trek and his desire to play a Klingon in the popular sci-fi franchise. In a recent interview during a promotional junket for his award-winning role in The Holdovers, Danish movie journalist Johan Albrechtsen seized the opportunity to create a unique Star Trek audition moment for Giamatti.

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Albrechtsen convinced Giamatti to recreate his famous line from the wine-themed film Sideways, but this time in Klingon. The moment was captured on video and edited to create a new Star Trek “audition tape,” featuring Giamatti as a Klingon captain seamlessly integrated into a scene from The Next Generation.

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Considering Klingons’ preference for Blood Wine instead of Merlot, the expletive was removed from the line. The Klingon translation, “Merlot vItlhutlhbe,” was deemed honorable by the Klingon Language Institute. They acknowledged that the pronunciation of the tlh combination can be challenging without live coaching and praised Giamatti for his “great job” as a nonprofessional Klingon.

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Giamatti has openly expressed his desire to play a Klingon in previous interviews, including an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Although he self-deprecatingly remarked that those roles don’t come his way, he expressed flexibility, stating that he would be happy to play any character, even the “silly blue guys.”

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Notably, Giamatti has experience working with heavy prosthetics in the 2001 film Planet of the Apes, where he played the orangutan character Limbo. He even appeared as Limbo in a Pepsi commercial.

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Giamatti joins a growing list of famous actors who are also Star Trek fans and have expressed their interest in appearing in the franchise, including Tom Hanks, Daniel Craig, Rosario Dawson, Nicolas Cage, James McAvoy, and others.

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For more entertaining content from Johan Albrechtsen and Moovy TV, fans can check out his recent coverage of Avatar: The Way Of Water in 2022.