Jeremy Piven

Chicago Tribune - 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").

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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.”

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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!’

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