Paul Giamatti opened up about his unique parallels with his character in the seventh season of Netflix and Charlie Brooker’s anthology series “Black Mirror” during a SAG-AFTRA Foundation conversation moderated by Clayton Davis, Variety’s chief awards editor. The Oscar nominee starred as Phillip in “Eulogy,” an episode that has received immense praise for his compelling performance portraying regret, loss and isolation. The sci-fi premise involves technology that recreates forgotten memories about a past relationship that Phillips uses re-examine his old romantic failures.

“There were lots of things that I felt an instinctual relationship to without needing to think a lot about it,” Giamatti said. “There was so much already there. And it’s an archetypal sort of story about regret and guilt.

I mean, everybody has these kinds of feelings…I have lots of regrets. In some ways, there was a big pool of that to draw on already, and so much of it was familiar. “ Giamatti revealed he was concerned about acting alone for the majority of the episode but expressed how the familial atmosphere with the crew eased his initial worries.

“I’ve done ‘Sideways’ and I was alone a lot in that movie, and it is interesting,” he said. “There’s a lovely crew on this, too, and that gave a sort of warm feeling and close feeling. I think a lot of people in the crew felt it was bringing up stuff for them, so it was a very sort of familial feeling.

So I didn’t feel alone.” As he touched on the episode’s final moments, Giamatti revealed that there was an alternative version that Brooker considered but ultimately abandoned, as it would have made his character’s storyline more complicated. “Philip was married and he had to go through this thing,” he said. “The idea was more that it actually made his marriage stronger in the end, but then they thought it’s better if he’s alone.” Best of Variety Sign up for Variety's Newsletter.

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