Paul Giamatti, star of The Holdovers, recently spoke to Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, and said he would like to join the next installment of Rian Johnson's Knives Out franchise.

Horowitz asked the actor if he ever wanted to join any film series or franchise, Giamatti replied, “There's been this really great revival of the kind of like specifically Agatha Christie, but the kind of like drawing room murder stuff. I love stuff like that and I think that it's great that people are making stuff like that again – like Knives Out and all the Agatha Christie stuff.”

Knives Out 3: Craig vs. Giamatti?

“Knives Out 3… I would like to do something like that. It would be fun to play a detective like that – or just somebody in that movie. That kind of world I love, that whole thing,” he continued.

The podcast host did him one better and suggested that Giamatti could play the rival detective to Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc.

That got the actor's immediate approval, and he said, “Sure! Yeah, that would be great: to be the guy who's going up against him.”

“Yes, I like that! That's very good!” Giamatti added.

Currently, the actor is playing The Holdovers' classics teacher Paul Hunham. The film follows the story set in 1970 of New England boarding school students who don't have anywhere else to go to during the Christmas break. The critically acclaimed film also stars Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa.

As for Knives Out 3, Johnson told The Wrap a few months ago, “I've got the premise, I've got the setting, I've got what the movie is in my head. It's just a matter of writing the damn thing.”

In the 2019 movie, Knives Out was set in Massachusetts with Blanc investigating the death of bestselling author Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer). In its sequel, 2022's Glass Onion, Blanc is drawn into a murder mystery game orchestrated by a tech billionaire played out with his friend group the Distruptors on a private Greek island.