Paul Giamatti Says He Was Blue for “Months” After Big Fat Liar’s Iconic Pool Scene

The 2002 kids comedy Big Fat Liar may have been big at the time of release because of stars Frankie Muniz and Amanda Bynes, but its secret weapon would end up being making Paul Giamatti blue, literally. Upon release, Big Fat Lair was just the third movie from director Shawn Levy, who would go on to executive produce Stranger Things and direct the upcoming 3, Speaking in one of their trademark “Breaks Down His Career” videos on Vanity Fair, Paul Giamatti opened up about his time making Big Fat Liar, and how its “iconic” blue pool scene ended up staining his skin for real after they’d finished the scenes.

“Shawn Levy was a friend of mine in college, so he really wanted to do it with me,” Giamatti revealed. “It was basically me and him just making each other laugh, and the guy who wrote it, John Hamburg, I’d worked with before too. So it was just us trying to push the envelope of how much we could get away with in a kid’s movie, like, how much of an asshole I could actually be? It was really fun, it was great. The kids were great, and it was just stupid, you know? I mean, I never had that much to do and he gave me total carte blanche to do any dumb thing we could think of, and it was great, it was totally fun.”

Giamatti then brought up the most memorable scene of the movie, noting: “Iconic, the blue pool scene, yes, indeed. That’s one of those things where when you sort of read it in the script, you don’t really process exactly how long you’re gonna have to actually be blue. It was like weeks I feel like I had to be blue. I only was blue my entire body once, but the rest of it was my hands and face, like, every day. It didn’t come off my feet for like three months. My feet were blue for months afterwards.”

Levy previously had high praise for his pal Paul, telling Forbes in an Oral History of Big Far Liar: “Paul has not changed in the 30+ years I’ve known him. He’s always been a shy, sweet, authentic guy, but he’s really good at playing a**holes. The script was so funny and Marty Wolf is so relentlessly obnoxious, that Paul just wrapped his arms around [the role], sunk his teeth into [it and] created a look with his stupid little chin goatee and his Prada outfits from top-to-bottom and we just leaned into it. The key about Paul is he did that performance with no self-consciousness.”

Fans may not know that a sequel was made years after the first Big Fat Liar, with Bigger Fatter Liar premiering direct-to-video in 2016. Shawn Levy previously teased to Cinema Blend back in 2022 that he had hopes for returning to the world of the original movie with an idea for a direct sequel, which he described as a “Marty Wolf revenge sequel.”