Jeremy Piven

After years of playing the best friend in dozens of films and on TV, Jeremy Piven says he's ready to be a leading man. Piven, you know, the guy from that show ...

It is lunchtime on the Toronto set of Serendipity, the upcoming John Cusack romantic comedy, and Jeremy Piven is sitting with his legs crossed on a chair, eating peas and rice with a plastic fork.

The two actors, who are real-life childhood friends, have just finished six hours of shooting. Piven plays Dean, a New York Times obituary writer trying to help his friend Jonathan (Cusack) find a long-lost love.

While Cusack has retreated to his trailer for a one-hour break, Piven sits alongside the dozens of extras and crew members who are chatting among themselves, barely noticing the actor as he shovels in more mouthfuls of food.

Piven is used to being left alone. After acting in dozens of films and television series -- everything from Very Bad Things to Ellen -- the actor has yet to reach headliner status.

"It is such a competitive business. There are a lot of really great roles, but a shortlist of high-profile actors that will get a first crack at them. I take what's left -- take the scraps and make a meal out of them. It is what I've been doing for 35 movies, and I don't feel cocky at all saying that," says Piven, 35. "I'm a guy that has been taking roles that aren't really fleshed out and, for a long time, kind of trying to make something out of them."

In an interview after his lunch, the actor says his fans realize he has been "scraping for parts" for years. "I'm not on the cover of anything, I'm just doing my thing, which is cool."

While he appears satisfied so far with his smorgasbord of medium-sized roles, he is getting hungry to play a lead character. "At some point maybe Kevin Spacey will sleep through his alarm and I'll get the call," says Piven, who aspires to play more than the "quintessential best friend role," which he also has in the upcoming Nicolas Cage movie, Family Man, and other films with Cusack such as Grosse Point Blank.

In Serendipity, which is slated to be released next summer, he is playing a supporting role for the first time with Cusack -- and crossing his fingers in the hope his star could finally be rising.

"Up until now I've been playing guys you run up into his [Cusack's] movies and throw up on his shoes, and now, in this, I get to go toe to toe, and I'm ready ... and maybe in some interesting way meant to be like this," Piven says, relating the happenstance to the film's title. (He had to back out of the part as Cusack's friend in High Fidelity, but says his Serendipity part is bigger.)

To really break out, though, he acknowledges that he must expand the types of characters he plays beyond the best friend.

"There are great layered bad-guy roles I haven't been near," he says wistfully. "I also have yet to play the tragically flawed leading man ... and very rarely do I ever get the girl. I usually get thrown off the roof and killed in some strange way."

He takes comfort in the fact that while "I am not a pretty boy," there are more average-looking (for Hollywood anyway) men in the business today compared to the days when the rugged good looks of James Dean and Sean Connery were the stuff lead roles were made of.

"I think movies are moving toward a different kind of vibe, where it isn't as physical. Other guys are leading men that aren't pretty, where it isn't as physical ... like [John] Malkovich, Nic Cage, even Ben Stiller."

Piven's acting career was inspired by his parents, Chicago theatre legends Joyce and Byrne Piven, who settled in nearby Evanston, Ill., when Jeremy was four. They put him and his sister Shira (now a stage director in New York) in classes in the Piven Theatre Workshop they started. Other classmates included the neighbours' kids, the Cusacks.

Piven and Cusack became friends at age eight, during a Chekhov play put on by the Piven company. (The two would go on to form their own theatre company in Chicago years later, called New Crime.)

After years of staging productions in Chicago, Cusack moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and was cast in his first movie. Piven had a movie offer, too, but turned it down for summer camp and had not given up a childhood dream of being a football player.

Piven's mother says it was during summer camp that his career ambitions changed. "I can remember Jeremy watching a production of Hamlet and leaning forward into that performance with his eyes bugging out," she said in one media report.

Piven went to Drake University in 1983 and later graduated from New York University. He then went to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut and studied Shakespeare at the National Theatre of Great Britain.

Soon after, he joined his childhood friend in Los Angeles and became a regular on Carol Burnett's 1990 variety show for NBC and HBO's The Larry Sanders Show. He did a number of guest spots before landing a regular role on Ellen, starring Ellen DeGeneres.

His first movie role was in the 1996 film Lucas, followed by three with Cusack -- One Crazy Summer, Say Anything and The Grifters -- and others such as The Player, Kiss the Girls and, recently, The Crew, starring Burt Reynolds and Richard Dreyfuss.

While TV has brought Piven the most money -- and breaks -- he is now seriously set on film. He has decided to turn down all future TV roles for the first time in a decade. "This is the first year I haven't accepted a TV role since college," he says. "People say the lines between the two are blurred now, but that is not necessarily true."

Just because you are a leading man on TV does not mean you can become one in the movies, he says, which is why he has rejected a number of roles such as the part Jay Mohr played in the 1999 series Action.

"I feel like I am in a good place now to do that," Piven says about his obsession to finally become a leading man. "Besides, I am a charismatic, sexy motherf-----, and the film community better just get ready, because if they clear the lane, I'll rip the rim down."

He then leans into the tape recorder and says: "The irony might not translate in print. You're going to put that in and I'm going to look like a damn idiot!"