Paul Giamatti would just like to put it out there that maybe he doesn’t always have to play such a motormouth.

It might be nice, just to shake things up a bit, if he could portray someone more likely to express themselves nonverbally — a taciturn horse breeder with an anguished past, say, or a world-class safecracker with shrapnel-related vocal cord injuries.

“Please, don’t make me talk so much,” he said recently, in a low register, his hangdog eyes pleading with the universe.

Giamatti watchers may have a hard time imagining the actor tongue-tied. He is one of cinema’s great talkers, often cited for dazzling flights of oratory. Think of Miles’s profane rebuke of merlot in “Sideways” (2004), or the founding father flogging the virtues of independence in “John Adams” (2008) or the brash boxing manager Joe Gould in “Cinderella Man” (2005). For Giamatti to yearn for fewer lines of dialogue might sound like a Formula 1 car pining for a bus route.

His latest role, as Paul Hunham in “The Holdovers” — a solitary and cantankerous New England boarding-school teacher saddled with babysitting duty over Christmas break — adds a number of memorable monologues to the actor’s oeuvre. But Giamatti also imbues the character with a deep well of melancholy and thinly disguised tenderness, traits that tend to reveal themselves in wordless, physical gestures: a crumpling of the chin, a narrowing of one eye.

“There are close-ups where you can see not only his transition from one thought to the next, but all of the little micro-thoughts that happen in between,” said Alexander Payne, the director of “The Holdovers,” who reteamed with Giamatti nearly 20 years after “Sideways.” “You could hire him to play the Hunchback of Notre Dame and he’d do a great job with it.”