By Donna Durham
21 Nov 2008

Whether there's a Tony in his future is almost irrelevant. The thing is… Broadway: "Everything I've done has led up to this moment. I grew up in the theatre. Both my parents were theatre animals. I was eight years old when I climbed onstage with my mother and father and did Chekhov's The Darling, not knowing what I was doing, probably butchering Chekhov. My mother still runs the Piven Theatre in Evanston."

In Chicago, he fell in with The New Criminals, a theatrical troupe that did a three-hour adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (he was Hunter Thompson's sidekick) and practiced Tim Robbins' style of commedia dell'arte ("That style really set me free"). Then calls from Carol Burnett's "Carol & Company" and Garry Shandling's "The Larry Sanders Show" sent him west.

With 22 years in films and TV, it has taken this "child of the theatre" his whole 43 years to get to Broadway — but theatre was a constant.

"People said when Speed-the-Plow came up, ‘What'll you do? There's no second take.' They don't realize I'm, first and last, a stage actor. What I try to create when I work in front of the camera is the momentum you get onstage. You can't get it anywhere else — and you need it since you work in fragments if you work in film. I don't even think of it ["Entourage"] as TV. Here we are, shooting on film with language that's not curtailed by the standards and practices of network TV — so we have that freedom of language. It's as if I'm shooting a stage play. At least that's the way I envision it.

"I've always wanted to come to Broadway. It has definitely been a dream of mine — and my family — to play on a grand stage like this. I've dreamt of doing Julius Caesar on Broadway — Marc Antony is a role I've always wanted to do, and Brutus is incredible — and to be in the Barrymore, a place with such great history, where A Streetcar Named Desire was first done!" Maybe Piven will pick up some Brando vibes during his stay on Broadway. That would really send Ari Gold over the edge!

Raúl Esparza, Jeremy Piven and Elisabeth Moss in Speed-the-Plow
photo by Brigitte Lacombe

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