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Away From the Entourage but Not From the Whirl
JEREMY PIVEN was in repose, sort of. Dressed in a charcoal gray hoodie, both
hands hugging an oversize mug of Guatemalan yerba maté tea, Mr. Piven was curled
up on a couch in his rented Chelsea apartment one recent Saturday morning, the
Alison
Krauss-Robert Plant bluegrass album playing softly on his stereo. Is he
really this chill?
Nope. “I was listening to Rage
Against the Machine before you got here,” he said, “but I didn’t want to
scare you away.”
After five years — and three consecutive Emmys — playing the bombastic,
catchphrase-generating superagent Ari Gold on the HBO series “Entourage,” Mr. Piven, 43, is mindful of the energy he gives off. In
person he is calmer, quieter and more questioning than the Type A guy’s guys he
often plays, but he is by no means receding. There are flashes of the
off-the-cuff humor he has on red carpets and awards shows, and of the
sharp-edged boundaries that can result from working steadily — if, until
“Entourage,” without much fanfare — in Hollywood for 20 years. And there’s a
cultivated self-awareness about him that suggests what he really is: a lifelong
stage actor, an insider’s insider.
That combination — earnest craftsman projecting industry bristle — is not too
far from Bobby Gould, the budding studio executive he plays in the revival of
“Speed-the-Plow,” David
Mamet’s 1988 satire of Hollywood producers, set to open Thursday at the
Barrymore Theater in Mr. Piven’s Broadway debut. The production, directed by Neil
Pepe of Mr. Mamet’s Atlantic
Theater Company, also stars the multiple Tony
nominee Raúl
Esparza as Charlie Fox, the abrasive producer, and Elisabeth Moss of “Mad
Men” as the wide-eyed secretary interested in more than money. Written as a
meditation on art versus commerce — and, as all Mamet plays are, on men and
women and power — it still feels contemporary.
“It’s actually more true today, what he’s saying,” Mr. Piven said of the
show’s appeal. “He talks about the collapse of the economy, he makes these
metaphors for the correlation between the diseases in the body and the diseases
in the world and radiation as a metaphor for the world kind of collapsing. We’re
at a turning point in our lives that he’s kind of articulating in this
play.”
“I just felt it was really hard to walk away from,” he added, even though “I
should be taking a break right now. I really should. I don’t know if you can
tell, but I look like I’ve been beaten.”
He didn’t, of course, remotely look that way. He had the usual faceful of
scruff and the crooked smile that soften his stockiness. But he does seem worn
down by work. When his car came to pick him up for a rehearsal a bit later, he
toted a different kind of energizing tea and was still struggling with the
script. “I feel like I spend my life walking in circles, memorizing lines,” he
said. (In one early preview he stumbled over the text.)
The obvious parallels between “Speed-the-Plow” and “Entourage” initially
worried Mr. Piven. “I told David this,” he said. “I’m going to go right from a
show where the backdrop is Hollywood to a play where the backdrop is Hollywood.
And so you can understand why I would have my reservations.”
In the end, though, the Mamet mystique won out. Growing up, “I knew of him in
this way of being, like, this Jewish superhero,” Mr. Piven said. His father,
Byrne Piven, an actor, had worked with Mr. Mamet in Chicago and once accepted a
playwriting award — “a kind of bronze menorah” — on his behalf. “I was like,
wow, what do you have to do to win a bronze menorah?” Mr. Piven recalled.
He added, “I don’t think there would be an ‘Entourage’ without David Mamet,
or ‘The Larry Sanders Show,’” on which Mr. Piven began his career of playing
insiders, as a young writer.
If the Hollywood backdrop is well-trod territory for Mr. Piven, the stage is
even more familiar. He started performing at 8 at his family’s school and
playhouse, the Piven Theater Workshop near Chicago, taking direction from his
parents. Byrne Piven died in 2002; Mr. Piven’s mother, Joyce Piven, an actor,
teacher and director, is now the artistic director emeritus, as well as his
frequent award show date. (She came to the first preview of “Speed-the-Plow,”
which she has also directed, and gave her son notes afterward.)
“In the beginning they just kind of threw me up there because they needed a
kid,” Mr. Piven said. “I just really wanted to be outside playing.” But now he
considers growing up in a theater family — where the living room furniture would
disappear for months to be used as a set, and rehearsals were as much a part of
his after-school life as football practice (he was, he said, “a viciously
mediocre, small linebacker”) — a stroke of luck.
His parents, whose students included the Cusack siblings, Hope
Davis, Aidan
Quinn and Lili
Taylor, were focused on craft, not celebrity. “They made it very clear that
none of it was a means to an end,” he said. “They are theater artists, theater
beasts. They wanted me to experience it but not to become an actor.”
It wasn’t until college at Drake University in Des Moines, when they saw him
play Marc Antony in a production of “Julius Caesar,” that “they sat down with me
and said, ‘We think you should do this,’ ” Mr. Piven said. He received a
graduate degree in theater from New
York University and studied with the Second City comedy troupe and with Tim
Robbins’s Actors Gang; he considers himself on the same continuum as Chicago
actors like William
H. Macy, John
Malkovich and his sister, Shira Piven, an actor and director and a luminary
in the improv comedy world. (She has also directed “Speed-the-Plow,” so more
notes may be forthcoming.)
Mr. Pepe, Mr. Piven’s current director, agreed that he belonged in that
group. “The Chicago actor work ethic, the scene, always seems all about the
story and all about simply and truthfully doing the best acting you can,” Mr.
Pepe said, “with — forgive the expression —” and then he used a Mamet expression
for “no fuss.” He added that one of Mr. Piven’s strengths was “the ability to
cut to the chase, both as a person and an actor.”
Mr. Piven surely appreciates directness. (“They have such a pure, rebellious,
beautiful energy,” he said of Rage Against the Machine. He plays the bongos
himself.) He credits Mr. Robbins with introducing him to commedia dell’arte, the
centuries-old Italian technique that emphasizes basic, unfiltered emotion, which
he tries to channel into his performances, especially as Ari.
“Jeremy always has a way of bringing a likability to kind of a nasty
character,” said Doug
Ellin, a creator of “Entourage,” who cast him based in part on his
performance in “Larry Sanders.” Asked how Mr. Piven sustains or marshals the
character’s manic, mile-a-minute energy, Mr. Ellin said: “I have no idea. I know
he does yoga.”
Mr. Piven wouldn’t reveal how he prepares either — boundaries, please — but
he has made a cottage industry of finding something universally relatable in
negative personas. In his last stage role in New York, Off Broadway in Neil
LaBute’s “Fat Pig” in 2004, he received good notices for playing the
somewhat reluctant boyfriend of an overweight woman.
Reviewing the production in The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote, “Mr.
Piven insists that you are always aware of his character’s soft and craven
center, but in ways that hold a mirror to anyone who has ever felt even slightly
embarrassed about a romantic attachment.”
Given this history it may be surprising that Mr. Piven chose to play the
lesser of the two cynics in “Speed-the-Plow,” not the guy with all the zingers
holding out for the million-dollar deal but the one considering making a movie
for its own worth. “It takes more out of me, and it’s more energy and work to
play a revved-up, abrasive character,” Mr. Piven said. “That’s one of the
reasons I was attracted to Bobby: because he has the availability of
stillness.”
He talked a lot about his need for balance, and for a break. Even after his
most recent Emmy success, in September, he spent part of the HBO party shooting
a promo for “Speed-the-Plow”; it was posted on funnyordie.com, the Web site run
by Will
Ferrell and Adam McKay, Mr. Piven’s brother-in-law. His next movie, after a
smallish part in Guy
Ritchie’s “RocknRolla,” out now, is “The Goods: The Don Ready Story,” in
which Mr. Piven is the lead, a car salesman. Mr. Ferrell also stars, and Mr.
McKay produced; he described it as a cross between “Glengarry Glen Ross” and
“Anchorman.”
It is their first major collaboration, though Mr. McKay did write Mr. Piven’s
monologue when he hosted “Saturday
Night Live” last year. It poked fun at Mr. Piven’s reputation as a player —
he seduced an audience member — though Mr. McKay said, “I personally have had
zero encounters with ‘Single Hollywood Guy.’ The Jeremy Piven I know is the best
uncle to my two daughters.”
In 2006 Mr. Piven produced and starred in a documentary for the Travel
Channel, “Jeremy Piven’s Journey of a Lifetime,” about his two-week trip to
India. Did he want to play Bobby because he was searching for some stillness in
his own life?
There was a long pause. “I think, consciously or not, I think we may
gravitate toward work that, that we feel that we could lend some authenticity
to, possibly,” Mr. Piven began, and trailed off. When he picked up again, his
voice was definitely not chill. “That’s a hard question to answer, and I would
love to divulge to you all the inner working of my own private life and psyche,
but I don’t know how healthy that would be, to be honest with you. What do you
think?”
Does he need another cup of tea? After that follow-up phone interview, in
which he again made an offhand remark about how badly he needed a vacation, Mr.
Piven called back to ask that the sentiment be stricken from the record because
to include it would be “destructive” to him “as a human being.” (Pearl
Jam played in the background.)
That recognition for Mr. Piven’s talents has come relatively late in life —
until “Entourage” he was known chiefly as a sidekick, especially in his buddy John
Cusack’s movies, and for a series of middling TV roles — means that Mr.
Piven’s professional identity was forged as a second-stringer, dedicated above
all to the work. Neither a Broadway opening nor celebrity will affect his sense
that he is just an actor from Chicago, he said.
“We always laugh,” Mr. McKay, who is married to Shira Piven, said, “that it
literally seems like Jeremy is more comfortable acting than just walking around.
I think the stage, for him, is literally like a living room for the rest of us.”
Well, in the Piven household, it was. “My mother has this great saying about
just respecting the space you occupy when you act,” Mr. Piven said. “The stakes
are always high when you’re performing.”