Jeremy Piven talks about apprenticeship, "The Goods" and typecasting

August 13, 2009 by Lance Carter

On finally getting to play the lead:
“I’d been looking for that for a while, yeah. I’ve been lucky enough to have played opposite a lot of actors that have been carrying films for years (Dustin Hoffman in Runaway Jury, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat and John Cusack), and learning how they conduct themselves and how they navigate through a leading performance. So some of it maybe seeped in through osmosis, and some of it [from] just standing around hoping they would breathe on me. So that whole journey led me to this. It makes sense. It’s like anything else in life, you have to apprentice the job. . . . apprenticeship.

And sometimes apprenticeships can take a while. I think in this country, we’re kind of a large group of immediate-gratificationers.”

On the short memories in Hollywood:
“It’s fascinating to me when you have a director, or a producer, or a writer who wants to know if I can do something other than Ari. I just want to draw their attention to all those movies and those Buddy Israels. . . . I’ve been lucky enough to do so many different roles, and that’s one of them that’s a completely different tone than now in The Goods or Entourage. . . . And also I’ve played the kind of softspoken, put-upon best friend – you know, for instance, in Serendipity, or opposite Nic Cage in Family Man. Those are all in me, but people forget that because of the dominance of someone like Ari Gold. I don’t have to play characters that take up all the oxygen. I simply don’t.”