Paul Giamatti has found himself in a hilarious game of phone tag with none other than Cher.
The Goddess of Pop has purportedly spent years trying to get a hold of Giamatti, who said Wednesday on “The Howard Stern Show” that he has “no fucking idea” why. The Oscar-nominated “Holdovers” (2023) star ultimately has yet to find out — but not for lack of trying.
“Every now and then, I get a message from somebody that says Cher … really needs to talk to me, like it’s important, like it’s crucial that she talks to me,” Giamatti told Stern. “And I’m like, ‘What the fuck? Why does Cher want to talk to me?’ Nobody will tell me.”
“And then I never hear anything,” he added, “and a year will go by, and it happens again.”
While most would move heaven and earth to talk to Cher, Stern reminded his guest of new phone scams involving artificial intelligence that can easily fool people these days. Giamatti said he finally managed to reach Cher via voicemail. However, in a cycle that never ends.
“Eventually somebody … did get in touch with her, and she did call me and leave a message on my phone,” he told Stern before imitating the singer’s baritone voice. “All she said was, ‘I hear you want to talk to me.’ That was it. That was all she said.”
He claimed this game of phone tag continued, as Giamatti said Wednesday that he returned Cher’s message with one of his own: “I left her a message and said, ‘That’s great, I’d love to talk to you, but I thought you wanted to talk to me.’ And that’s the last I heard.”
The actor explained, “I haven’t heard anything again.”
It’s certainly not uncommon for celebrities to reach out and befriend each other. Giamatti and Cher are fellow actors, after all, with the former recently receiving his second Oscar nod and Cher having won an Academy Award for “Moonstruck” in 1988.
Giamatti said he was honored but also genuinely baffled as to why the singer was trying to reach him.
“I don’t know what she could possibly want to talk to me about,” he told Stern. “And it’s killing me, I’m dying to know what she wants to talk to me about. I mean, it would be great! I’d love to talk to her about anything. I don’t care, it’d be fantastic.”
Whether the two will ever actually speak — or what comes of it — remains to be seen.