Jeremy Piven finally makes it -- but fame brings its own problems

by Tony Adler

Chicago Tribune

28 January 2007

EVANSTON, Ill.—It’s a weekday evening in October and Jeremy Piven is about to be interviewed onstage at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston. There’s a problem, though: The Hall has only 1,003 seats. They’re going to need a lot more than that to accommodate the crowd of students queued up outside. At about 15 minutes after the scheduled starting time of 8 p.m., someone comes onstage to beg our patience, telling us there’s still “a few hundred people” out there waiting—or at least hoping—to get in.

This wouldn’t have happened 2 ½ years ago, when Piven may very well have been the best-known unknown in show business. He’d performed in no less than 44 films, had a recurring role on HBO’s legendary “The Larry Sanders Show,” even had his own (short-lived) network television series, “Cupid.” And yet he remained tucked well in under the radar—everywhere and nowhere, a kind of Gen X version of M. Emmet Walsh.

Who?

Exactly.

At 39, after nearly 18 years before the camera, nothing the compact, barrel-chested actor had done had generated enough critical mass to make him a star. Sure, he’d had a few film leads, but they were all in little niche movies—most notably the “Animal House"-ish “PCU.” When it came to major releases like “Black Hawk Down”—well, his character gets killed right off the bat in that blockbuster.

Mostly, as he told the crowd at Pick-Staiger when things finally got under way, he’d “played like 900 best friends.” Piven didn’t appear in movies so much as he seemed to pop up in them.

“He’s worked and worked and worked since he was 22, constantly,” says Piven’s older sister Shira, a stage writer/director married to movie writer/director Adam McKay. “He had the gift of being a working actor, but he always had the frustration of being a little bit, you know—he just had a lot to offer and he wanted to do more.”

Now he’s got his chance. The radar is all over Jeremy Piven these days. He’s sought after, talked about. He’s known.

He’s Ari Gold.

And Ari Gold, as HBO fans know, is the preternaturally aggressive Hollywood agent who represents a hot-but-callow young actor named Vince Chase on the hit series “Entourage.” Or least he did until last season’s maddening final episode, in which Vince fired him (a new season premieres on April 8).

Ruthless, vulgar, exuberantly pugnacious, Ari is, as the series’ creator, Doug Ellin, describes him, “a pitbull. He won’t stop. Nothing will stop him until he gets what he wants.”

The role is famously based on Ariel, the superagent brother of U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.—but there’s no question Piven owns it. It’s Piven who pumps Ari full of what Ellin calls “a likable manic energy”; Piven who sidesteps expectations by making the beast pliant and puppyish at home; Piven who gives him a weirdly balletic jock physicality that shows up in everything from little war dances to computer heavings (and prompts Perrey Reeves, who plays Mrs. Ari, to remark admiringly that “he takes up a lot of space").

It’s Piven whose macho charisma led my son to email me from the University of Wisconsin when he found out I was doing this story, asking me to pass on the message that “if (Piven) wants to come to Madison, my frat will throw him the biggest party he has ever seen ... seriously, tell him that.”

And it’s Piven who parlayed Ari into a best-supporting-actor statuette at the 2006 Emmys last summer.

“Nobody else could do that part, because he completely embodies that character,” says Ann Cusack, Piven’s longtime friend and a member of the Cusack acting family that also includes John and Joan. “You can’t see anybody else doing that role with that emotional specificity and character and engagement. ... There’s nobody else who can bring humanity to that kind of sleazy character.”

Of course, Ari has had his effect on Piven as well.

Aside from straining the capacity of Pick-Staiger Hall, Piven’s new celebrity has drawn the rapt attention of gossipmongers, such as the New York Post’s Page Six ("Piven and actor Stephen Dorff nearly came to blows ..."), egotastic.com ("Lindsay Lohan Parties With Jeremy Piven ... In a Bikini"), and the ever-breathless perezhilton.com (which calls him The Pivert and recently reported that his publicist had “fired” him for being “out of control").

Most recently, Piven provoked a flurry of let’s-you-and-him-fight gossip items by seeming to suggest in Best Life magazine that his friendship with actor John Cusack had cooled because of Cusack’s failure to make “space” for Piven’s success (Piven denies making the implication).

On the other hand, that success has conferred unprecedented opportunities. “What it means to be a star is simply this: to have artistic choices,” Piven posits during a long phone conversation taking him from an “Entourage” table reading to his car ("people are surprised I drive a `77 Ford Bronco") to the 1920s-vintage L.A. flat he shares with his sports memorabilia, including a Michael Jordan-signed basketball. “And for the first time in my life I do have choices.”

One huge consequence of this newfound freedom is “Smokin’ Aces,” a just-released black-comedy action movie in which Piven stars as Buddy “Aces” Israel—a successful Vegas magician who, as Piven puts it, “becomes a gangster, turns snitch, turns tragic figure” while professional killers swirl around him trying to collect the $1 million contract that’s been put out on his life.

The movie signifies much more than a bracket leap for Piven. More even than a way to avoid playing best friend No. 901. It’s a chance finally to unleash all the skill and power he feels he’s been stockpiling over the last two decades. A chance to end what he sees as a long, long apprenticeship.

“I remember (`Smokin’ Aces’ writer/director) Joe Carnahan said to me, `Do you want to go deep?’ “ Piven recalls. “And it was like those are the words that every actor—and I’m not kidding and I don’t care how silly this sounds—but that’s what you live for. For someone to want and allow you to go deep. That’s why we’re in it, I swear to you.”

Deep?

“Going inward, exploring the tragedy of one’s life and becoming as emotionally accessible as you possibly can,” he explains during another conversation, this one face-to-face over huevos rancheros at the Blind Faith Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant in Evanston. “Getting out of your own way and becoming as raw as you’re capable of, to enter into a character. (Buddy Israel) has a complete breakdown and identity crisis, and this is what I’ve trained for my entire life.”

Needless to say, Piven’s pre-"Entourage" roles seldom provided much room or reason for going deep. Still, he takes tremendous professional pride in his ability to build full characters out of even the skimpiest of raw materials.

And so, for that matter, do his friends and relatives. Everybody around Piven seems to have his own list of Jeremy’s Greatest Cameos. Perrey Reeves recommended “Rush Hour 2,” the 2001 Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker buddy movie in which Piven appears for a grand total of 60 seconds as a flamboyantly gay clothing salesman at a Versace store. Shira Piven sent me to Cameron Crowe’s 1992 grunge romance, “Singles,” and her brother’s 55 seconds playing a drugstore cashier named Doug Hughley.

Thing is, the performances really are kind of amazing. The very fact that Doug Hughley has a name should indicate the vividness Piven brings to what can barely be said to qualify as a role. “He had like three lines and he improvised an entire monologue,” says Shira. “He just took charge of it.”

In the scene, Campbell Scott is Steve Dunne, a sweetly earnest, 20-something urban planner buying a pregnancy test for his girlfriend; Hughley recognizes him from school days and pays tribute to Dunne’s youthful deejaying abilities. “You’re the only man I know who can mix Elvis Costello and Public Enemy!” enthuses Hughley, before launching into an insane demonstration ("What’s so funny `bout peace-peace-peace love and under-peace peace peace") that climaxes in riffy squeals while Dunne tries to sink into the floor.

The “Rush Hour 2” bit is even more extreme—and, according to Piven, based on even less than what he had to work with in “Singles.”

“Take a look at (the script for) `Rush Hour 2,’” he challenges me from across his plate of huevos, a Greek fisherman’s cap pulled down over the expansive forehead that constitutes his most readily identifiable feature. “There’s one written line: `May I help you?’ And (the description) says, `Female salesperson, Versace.’ And so (director Brett Ratner) calls me and I just told him, `Brett! It’s a woman and she has one line!’

“`I know I know I know, man. Just do whatever you want, man. I’ll let you riff.’

“`So, is it a woman or a man?

“`It’s a man, it’s a man! Whatever you want!’”

Piven’s answer to the gender question was, as he puts it, to make the salesman “a little bit of both.” We hear his sibilant “s” even before he appears in the frame; and as he slinks toward Tucker and Chan, his dyed blond hair and boy-band beard seem to signal a retrograde cliche.

Then something happens, something suggesting that this character isn’t your usual gay-baiting cartoon. Yes, he’s completely flaming, but he’s also fierce.

We aren’t getting the wink we expect as Piven’s salesman tells Tucker, “Let’s put a dead animal on you! Croc skin!” No, this guy’s utterly and completely convinced on the subject of croc skin for Tucker. More important, so is the actor playing him. The sense of conviction’s so intense that when Piven attempts to measure his waist without a tape measure, Tucker jumps away looking sincerely weirded out.

“That was my job with my first 40 movies,” Piven says. “To try to flesh out a nonexistent character.”

“He’s the kind of guy who comes off the bench in the fourth quarter and pours in 20 for you, like Nick Van Exel (last of the San Antonio Spurs),” affirms “Smokin’ Aces” director Carnahan—who believes that Piven will be rated up there with the likes of Al Pacino when the world finally gets a look at his “other layers.”

Ari Gold began as yet another nonexistent character to flesh out, Piven asserts. Another test of his ability to pull something out of thin air. He’s visibly taken aback when I recount what Doug Ellin said to me: that he knew Piven and Ari were meant for each other all along.

“The original outline treatment that I wrote, three years before we ever shot it, it was Jeremy Piven,” Ellin had claimed. “He was just in my head as the guy.”

Piven’s got all kinds of admiring things to say about Ellin, but he’s not going along with this. “You have to understand,” he tells me, “this role, this Ari Gold character—if you were to look at the pilot, (he’s in) one scene in the pilot. I know Doug says that, but you’re talking about one scene. Look at the progression of the first season: ... a pop here, a pop there, a pop there. It’s not until Episode No. 7 that I get an episode to run with.”

Ellin’s version of things doesn’t merely contradict Piven’s—it seems somehow to challenge Piven’s whole psychic biography: his sense of how he arrived at this point, and why—and not least, what he had to suffer to get here.

Throughout our conversations, Piven invokes a line from “Hamlet,” Act 5, Scene 2: “The readiness is all.” For Hamlet, the phrase is a way of keeping up his courage in the face of death. The full passage goes, “(T)here’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, `tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.”

For Piven, it’s about courage—and forbearance and perseverance—in the face of an industry that keeps telling you you aren’t what you’re absolutely sure you are.

“The trick,” Piven says of his decades as Hollywood’s foremost interpreter of cashiers, clothing salesmen and best friends, “is to hold it together.”

Meaning?

“Meaning if you have a lot to contribute and you’re asked to come to the party for four minutes and then you have to go, it can get a bit frustrating,” he replies. “(But) I was stupid enough to think that at some point I’m gonna wear them down. ... You just have to have that combination of `the readiness is all’ and patience, and I think (Ari Gold) is a direct manifestation of that.”

Getting offered Ari looked like a step backward at first. “Ten years earlier I was a regular on `The Larry Sanders Show,’ and now I (was being asked to play) the fifth lead behind a character named Turtle on `Entourage.’ ... Well, there are two ways to go. You either give in to your kneejerk ego side, which is ...”—he takes a long pause and then laughs—“not the way to go. Or you say to yourself, `Wow! HBO!’

Jeremy Piven’s a local boy, but he’s no Chicagoan. He’s a devout Evanstonian.

Actually, he was born in New York on July 26, 1965, and passed his toddler years in Texas, where his father, Byrne, taught drama at the University of Houston and acted at the Alley Theatre. But his mother, Joyce, was “truly unhappy” in Texas, so Byrne moved over to Northwestern University in Evanston.

This didn’t make Joyce—serious actress, nonconformist—any happier. She remembers walking 4-year-old Jeremy to the bus that took him to summer classes at a progressive pre-school, “drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, thinking, `What am I doing up at this hour? What am I doing in Evanston, Ill.? I had such dreams.’ “ But though they initially took furnished rooms at a residential hotel in expectation of a quick getaway, there they stayed.

And stayed. Even now, Piven identifies intensely, very nearly ecstatically, with his north suburban hometown. He was late for our meeting at the Blind Faith Cafe because, he explained, “I couldn’t jump in a cab, it’s so beautiful; I had to walk through Evanston.”

This triggered an inspired oration on “how incredible my upbringing was—and Evanston (Township) High School in particular,” where the integrated student body taught him “how alike we all are.”

Piven’s idea of high praise for a new acquaintance—Jamie Foxx or Terrence Howard, for instance—is to say, “I feel like he’s an Evanston boy.” And when the crowd at Pick-Staiger gave him a standing ovation just for walking onstage, the first thing out of his mouth was, “This much love for a townie?!”

Joyce Piven eventually came to terms with her new circumstances. In 1972, when Jeremy was 8, she and Byrne founded the Piven Theatre Workshop, which is still doing business at Evanston’s Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes St., despite Byrne’s death from cancer in 2002 and Joyce’s recent transition to emeritus status.

Given that both elder Pivens had studied with the formidable Uta Hagen, learned Viola Spolin’s watershed Theater Games at the source, and pursued their own professional theatrical careers, the fact that they chose to focus primarily on classes for children might seem like a stunning waste of talent—something on the order of Yo Yo Ma teaching Wiggleworms.

Training actors, however, was never their ultimate goal. The improv-based, collaborative approach that Joyce calls The Work “puts you in touch with your own self,” she says, “which is enough.”

“From an early age, we were onstage and allowed to improvise as if we had something to say,” Jeremy recalls. “That’s very empowering to a kid—that no matter where you come from or who you are or what age, you have something to contribute.”

Or, as Ann Cusack, puts it, “You are not debatable.”

If the Piven Theatre Workshop wasn’t designed to train actors, a number of rather prominent ones nevertheless were trained there. Close family friends of the Pivens, the Cusacks sent all five of their children to the workshop. Lili Taylor, Aidan Quinn, Rosanna Arquette, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jami Gertz and Lauren Katz, as well as directors Jessica Thebus, Anna D. Shapiro and Eric Simonson, are all on the standard PTW alumni roster.

Naturally, Jeremy attended along with the rest. But acting professionally never figured into his adolescent fantasies. A popular, outgoing and athletic kid, he was dead set on playing football instead. When it came to the Workshop and The Work, he says, “It felt like, `This is what Mom and Dad do and they do it beautifully—but I’m an Evanston football player. I want to distinguish myself.’ The idea of being a 5-foot-10, 176-pound linebacker for anyone was a joke, but I thought I could live the dream.”

And he did, a little, playing for the Evanston Township High School Wildkits all four years—making varsity as a junior and senior before graduiating in 1984. His yearbook pictures show a kid with a puffy haircut, animated eyebrows, a thick-bodied gridiron physique, and—in his freshman year—crutches. “I did OK,” he tells me. “I was not a brilliant high school player by any means.”

Piven’s football dream clearly remains potent, even after all these years. He brings it up frequently, along with the few other subjects that seem to form leitmotifs whenever he attempts to explain himself to others: Evanston, his family, his search for the right woman. ("Maybe I should just stop looking,” he speculates, “ `cause that’s the key. Stop looking.") He allows that “if you take a look at what I do you’ll probably see that I’m just an out-of-work linebacker,” and acknowledges that some of his Wildkit experience carries over to his acting, and to Ari.

“There’s a certain kind of aggression that’s needed on the field,” he says. “I’m focused and disciplined. It transfers over to someone (like Ari) who can wake up at the crack of dawn and just hunt down $40 million by the time he’s 40 or he’s going to kill someone. It’s like bearing down on the fullback.” Piven likes to say that “a guy like Ari would never have the patience to represent an actor like me,” but he’d undoubtedly understand Piven’s tenacity—not to say the surges of jock feistiness that seem to overtake him at times (as when he reportedly confronted Dorff for cutting into the men’s room line at a nightclub) and make him come off looking simultaneously entertaining and weirdly adolescent for a man his age.

The notion of acting for a living didn’t hit Piven until he was at Drake University in Des Moines—and then it didn’t occur to him first. He had to be told.

He’d been cast in the role of Marc Antony in a school production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and his parents had driven out to see him. “So we were sitting there and the lights went down,” Joyce says. “He practically broke down the door in the back, jumped into the audience, and then onstage like he was electrified. We wept, we were so taken. `Who’s that?! Oh my God, we’ve got a newfound actor in our family!’ “

Jeremy frames what happened next as a kind of divine epiphany: the scales falling from his eyes; the voice—of his mom and dad, as it happens—issuing from the burning bush. “It was a revelation to me,” he recalls. “They made it clear to me. We were sitting after the performance, at a Denny’s . . . and they revealed to me for the first time, `Listen, we think you should do this.’

“You have to understand, from the time I was 8 until 18 I was studying with them all the time; they never once said, `This is what we want you to do, we think you should do this.’ So that was a complete turning point for me. My God! For my parents to say that!”

Soon enough, Piven was back home, performing on Chicago stages, acting and directing for New Crime Productions, the commedia-based theater company that also included John Cusack. Soon enough, too, Hollywood called. And so began his 20 years of wandering in the wilderness of 900 best friends.

Now that the wandering appears to be over—as signified, appropriately enough, by his arrival in the promised land of Buddy Israel—Piven has partnered up with an old Evanston acting pal named Leelai Demoz to form a production company called Luscious Mayhem.

They’ve already produced a documentary called “Jeremy Piven’s Journey of a Lifetime” (he goes to India), and are in negotiations to turn the concept of celebrities on trips into a series for the Travel Channel. MTV is interested in a nonscripted show they’ve been shaping. “And we also have several films that we’re developing,” says Demoz. “We’ve got a really exciting project that we’re working on with (Marvel comics genius) Stan Lee.” Called “Huckster,” it considers the “world of politics and p.r.” Meanwhile, Piven’s written a film script. Stardom is about choices.

Was it worth the struggle? Clearly. You can’t listen to Piven talk about going deep with Buddy Israel or exploring Ari Gold’s hidden dualities without feeling both his anger and his sense of triumph. Perhaps, his mom suggests, even the struggle was worth the struggle.

“He loves to perform. He loves to work,” Joyce says. “He loves it. It’s his passion. He gets to use every part of himself. It’s kind of awesome. It gives him total joy. And in order to have total joy as an artist—a person, an artist—you commit.”

© 2007, Chicago Tribune.