Jeremy Piven

“`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.”