SXSW gets an early listen to actor Paul Giamatti's new ‘Chinwag’ podcast at live recording

A South by Southwest audience got an early listen of actor Paul Giamatti’s forthcoming podcast, “Chinwag,” at a morning featured session on March 12 that doubled as a recording of one of the show’s first episodes.

Giamatti is hosting the podcast with author and philosophy professor Stephen Asma from Columbia College Chicago, and the show will debut on April 5. Notably, the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning Giamatti gets top billing. The full title is, “Paul Giamatti’s Chinwag with Stephen Asma.”

Giamatti and Asma got on stage 10 minutes early for a very brief jam on guitar (Asma) and theremin (Giamatti) before returning for an hourlong talk on the topic of monsters. They talked and talked, displaying good chemistry, recalling scary movies they grew up on and trying to dig a little deeper into the appeal of pop culture monsters.

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The format was simple: no format. Just two hand microphones and two middle-aged white guys having a free-flowing conversation for an hour, which felt like a throwback to what shows sounded like before tighter formats and bigger-budget production values changed the podcast landscape.

If that was a concern for the viability of “Chinwag,” the audience didn’t seem to care. They laughed at Giamatti’s perplexed conversational rhythms as he spitballed questions like, “Why are so many more people interested in vampires than werewolves?” A question like that led to the actor saying he wishes he could play a werewolf (it has yet to happen) and that he can’t imagine himself being cast as a vampire. Even star-studded panels often get walkouts at SXSW as people rush to other events; this one kept the Austin Convention Center audience glued to its seats until an end-of-session Q&A portion.

Co-host Asma was there, seemingly, to add context to Giamatti’s musings on, say, the existence of the chupacabra. Asma suggested that younger people often identify with monsters as outsiders. As far as movie monsters, Asma said, “We’re drawn to them, we’re horrified. We pay money to see people carve each other up.”

Giamatti, who’s been on Showtime’s “Billions” for seven seasons, said he’s been drawn to movie creatures since a babysitter allowed him, unwisely, to watch “Carnival of Souls.”

“It marked me deeply,” Giamatti said. His mother had a sense of the macabre, but the actor said the fascination with the darkness hasn’t been passed down. He hasn’t been able to get his son into the genre.

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As format-less podcasts tend to do, the topic wandered off-assignment a bit. About 35 minutes in, the two hosts were talking about alien abductions and why things that are small (bugs) and things that are too large (a giant Crayola toy, for instance) are so freaky.

Will the show be the next big thing in podcasting? It’s hard to tell if “Chinwag” will break out in an oversaturated medium, but Giamatti is a known quantity and a gregarious talker. It’s not surprising his podcast got a good reception at SXSW.

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This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Paul Giamatti records podcast at SXSW with philosophy professor