If you told me that Cher plays a long-running practical joke on a friend by leaving a random phone message for them and then disappearing, I would believe you. If you told me she played this game on someone who’s more of an acquaintance than a friend, I would still believe. If you told me that Cher leaves a yearly message for Paul Giamatti — either directly or through an intermediary — insisting that she needs to talk to him and then turns around and ghosts him… I would need the “you” telling me this to be Paul Giamatti himself. Speaking with Howard Stern this week (part of his Holdovers Oscar campaign), Giamatti described this improbable years-long tease Cher has been running on him:

“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 f–k? 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 yet.”

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.

[From HuffPost]

In a world that is increasingly bleak down to a myriad of escalating disasters, this story has restored my faith in humanity’s ability to razz each other with random acts of phone tag. Everything about this makes me smile, starting with the fact that Cher selected Giamatti as her target and we have absolutely no idea why. Please Cher, don’t ever tell! I want this to remain inexplicable! Next, the commitment. You’d think that Cher would have any number of other things to occupy her time: launching her own gelato, dropping her first Christmas album, telling the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to f–k off — and all those are just in the past year. She’s been pranking Giamatti for years now! Does she have a yearly reminder in her iCal? October 22, leave Paul Giamatti annual phone message that leads nowhere. And best of all is Giamatti himself copping to the fact that the mystery is killing him… because of course it is! Cher has rendered Giamatti in his real life to be just like one of the baffled, exasperated everymen he’s so skilled at playing on screen (among a range of other characters, he’s a great actor). Only you’re not an “everyman” Paul — you’re the chosen one, by Cher!!

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