Have we ever been as happy as Paul Giamatti reminiscing about being an orangutan?

Paul Giamatti’s cinematic roles tend to land on the dour or frustrated side—something used to great effect in his latest critical success, Alexander Payne’s . And yet, there’s also a deep capacity for sudden sparks of joy lurking underneath Giamatti’s performances, one we might previously have described as “childlike”— but which we can now only refer to as “Being akin to Paul Giamatti talking about the time he got to play a talking orangutan in Tim Burton’s .” Giamatti may, in fact, be the person who remembers that particular abortive franchise starter fondly, but damn does he: , the star took the time to express to his fellow luminaries (including Colman Domingo, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Andrew Scott, and Jeffrey Wright) just how much he absolutely loved being covered in prosthetics to play orangutan slave trader Limbo in the 2001 film.

“That was the strange fulfillment of a deep dream,” he told his fellow stars. “To be an orangutan?” Giamatti goes on to reveal that his agents suggested he might maybe, possibly, want to push for a role in Burton’s film that would show his actual human face, given that he was on a major career upswing at the time.

“If you tell them I want to be a human,” Giamatti supposedly responded, “I am going to burn the agency.” Hilariously, this isn’t even the first time Giamatti has revealed this deep ape affinity in the last few months: He recently told ’s Josh Horowitz a similar story, relishing days when he was called to set on Burton’s film, put in makeup, and then had filming canceled.

“That was heaven from beginning to end. I loved it ,” he says with happy laughter in his voice. “I didn’t want to take that makeup off.” In both interviews, Giamatti connects his enthusiasm to his childhood love of , and it is really, genuinely, the happiest we think we’ve ever seen the man.

(Compare it to his , which while effusive and kind, simply can’t match the almost pathological joy Giamatti expresses while reminiscing about those god awful, hideous ape teeth from 22 years prior.).