The mystery of Paul Giamatti's lazy eye in The Holdovers has (mostly) been solved

When Paul Giamatti commits to a character, he really commits. His feet were apparently blue for “months” after being sprayed with layer upon layer of tattoo ink for 2002's (severely under-appreciated) Big Fat Liar, and he delivered his entire Oscar-nominated turn as curmudgeonly teacher Paul Hunham in The Holdovers with a lazy eye. Well, it wasn’t exactly his own eye, but it definitely wasn’t CGI either.

Mr. Hunham’s wandering eye is an important part of his persona, which serves to further alienate him from his students (who refer to him as “Walleye” behind his back) and the rest of society. In interviews, however, the veteran actor been oddly reticent about the whole thing. “I’ve been sworn to secrecy,” he said in a recent Variety cover story. “I wanted to tell people that ‘I trained with a contortionist from Cirque du Soleil to be able to do it, but I can’t do it anymore; it’s dangerous.’”

Giamatti has peddled this line before, telling People in December that the eye was a “state secret,” and that he and director Alexander Payne got a kick out of telling curious fans that “it’s the magic of acting in cinema… just movie magic.” Even Giamatti’s co-star Dominic Sessa, who played titular “holdover” student Angus Tully, had no idea how he and Payne did it. “It was a great frustration of mine!” Sessa told The Daily Beast last year. “I don’t know if it was pure acting, I don’t know if they had an eye contortionist, I don’t know what they did. I would see him on set, and his eye would be messed up, and then I’d see him when we wrapped and his eye would be… not messed up?”

Well, someone should probably get Sessa on speed-dial, because Giamatti finally revealed his hand. Well, kind of. “If you look in the credits, you’ll see how we did it,” he told Variety. “It was a special effect, a makeup thing. It’s not CGI. It’s physical. It’s a thing on my eye and I’ve never done anything like that.”

We obviously ran straight to the credits to bring you this breaking news, and while there are no sketches or complicated diagrams, they do provide either a next step in this case or the final answer—depending on whether or not you think anyone is asking the right questions. Right there, staring at us this whole time (sorry), is a name: Zach Ripps, contact lens tech. So there you have it. It’s a little anticlimactic, sure, but who knows—maybe Mr. Ripps will do a tell-all interview one-day and the process of acquiring and securing that contact lens will be more harrowing and dramatic than anyone could have possible dreamed. We can only hope.

For Giamatti’s part, the lens mostly presented an interesting new opportunity to hone his craft. “I was a little wary of it, but it turned out to be interesting,” he said. “It was useful to make the guy even more of an outsider. I’ve never acted with something like that before.” Maybe he’ll dust it off again for a quirky new twist if he ever gets to reprise his role as a giant talking orangutan in Planet Of The Apes, something he clearly really, really wants to do.