Piven Goes From TV's Gold to Broadway's Gould
By Donna Durham
Jeremy Piven
Jeremy Piven's not really a hyperkinetic character. He only plays one on TV and now on Broadway, as Speed-the-Plow 's conflicted studio boss.
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Slick 'n' sleazy, that's his style. Jeremy Piven has been swimming with sharks so long he just wrapped his fifth season of "Entourage" that by the time he finally got around to sticking his big toe in the Broadway waters, it didn't seem deep at all.
In fact, David Mamet's 20-year-old Speed-the-Plow should seem like home to him a 90-minute sprint across the same charred turf Piven normally traverses in half-hour spurts on HBO: Hollywood's fast-lane rat race, where he's King of the Road agent Ari Gold, a ferocious wheeler-dealer whose pit-bull bark always draws blood.
Now , in Mamet's satiric take on Tinseltown power-playing, he's Bobby Gould, who has landed in that room at the top toward which Gold is forever crawling a Head of Production, with the God-like gift to green-light movies. Enter, pitching, Charlie Fox (Raϊl Esparza) a fellow fugitive from the mail room who has settled slightly lower on the studio food-chain as a producer, proposing to Gould a big-gunned action flick. The wedge in their long, tenuous friendship is driven by Gould's office temp, Karen (Elisabeth Moss), who has her own naοve, noncommercial notion about what makes a good movie i.e., a socially conscious view of the apocalypse that might do mankind some good and, since Gould's new altitude in the studio ranks has given him a bad (or good) case of altruism, he seriously entertains this idea.
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At first, Piven feared the play would be seen by some as perpetuating his small-screen Hollywood wars: "My initial concern was 'Am I going to be repeating myself?' Then I reinvestigated the play, and I realized, 'No, I'm not at all, in fact.'
"Bobby Gould is celebrating the gods of success at the moment you meet him and, at the same time, is trying to be good. That's his main focus. Ari Gold is just trying to put food on the table for his family and would do anything to get it . Bobby is in a different place in his life. Both are driven, ambitious, Type-A American characters, but they're different. I think I relate much more to Bobby, actually, than to Ari."
Piven's only previous New York appearance in Neil LaBute's touchingly tortured Fat Pig Off-Broadway was, likewise, a long way from his usual Gold standard: a sympathetic depiction of a modern male who caves in to peer pressure and gives up his overweight girlfriend. "That was a case where the character was more like me than others I've played. People would say, 'Wow! How did you pull that character off?' Well , Neil LaBute writes tragically flawed alpha males so well, and I somehow related to the guy more than others. It takes energy and focus to whip yourself up into a frenzy to play a character like Ari Gold. My natural state is much calmer. People meeting me don't know if I'm putting on a calm act or not." [This is true.]
The role has rewards he has three Emmys to show for his four nominations and he has translated Gold into a Golden Globe (not so you'd notice, though: The year he won, the writers' strike cancelled the telecast. A few days later, a guy showed up with his Globe, gave it to him in his driveway, then whipped out a cell phone to commemorate the moment with a photo. "That was my Golden Globe ceremony," he notes ruefully). Continued...
