Piven ‘goes deep’ to find ‘Smokin’ Aces’ character

When “Smokin’ Aces” director Joe Carnahan and star Jeremy Piven came to the area recently to publicize the movie, health was on their minds.

Carnahan missed the first part of the interview because he was talking to a doctor in the next room about staving off a bug, and Piven was on the floor of the hotel room, doing stretches and drinking herbal tea in hopes of avoiding a cold.

So my first questions were for Piven, who plays a slick Las Vegas magician on the bad side of the mob in the movie. Piven, a longtime character actor who’s recently made a breakthrough with his profane L.A. agent on the series “Entourage,” was wearing a ballcap and three-day stubble, and he had the same intensity he brings to his roles. At one point he interrupted our conversation to point out he’d achieved the full splits while stretching.

Question: You’ve gone “out there” in other roles, but this one takes you about as far out as you can go. Do you have to psych yourself up to get there?

Piven: I was lucky enough to do, onstage, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and I played Gonzo the attorney, and I was naked, running around, with a buckknife in my hand, demanding that Hunter S. Thompson throw the radio in the bathtub and electrocute me so I can get higher. So I’ve actually gone deeper than this character in exploring some really wild demons.

Q: Does your preparation for that craziness include the kind of physical stuff you’re doing right now?

Piven: Oh, yeah. People make fun of me, especially on “Entourage,” because I’m always warming my voice up – I mean, there’s a method to my madness, I’m not a “Kumbaya” guy, but you have to be ready. There are no excuses if you’re not ready, or not prepared, or distracted by what’s going on behind the camera … that’s your job. And I am so unbelievably honored to have that job.

It’s not a job. It’s my life and my joy, and it’s been passed down from my family to me. What you’re looking for as an actor is to have a choice. Along the journey you just don’t have a choice. The only roles that were even available for me to audition for the last 20 years have been the abrasive best friend. People say, “Why are you the abrasive best friend again?” And I’m, like, “Because I like to work. They won’t let me audition to play the guy who gets the girl.” There’s a real need for verbal stunt pilots, and I’m capable of doing that. But there’s many things I’m capable of. People see “Smokin’ Aces,” and say, “Wow, how did you learn to cry?” I’m an actor, this is what we do, we take on different forms.

Q: Are you one of those actors who work from the “outside in” building your character? Your wig must have helped you in this one.

Piven: We wanted to create two very different looks (for Buddy). One was a very vital guy in Vegas, doing his thing – well-tanned, coiffed. Then you’ve got a smash cut to his fall from grace. So we need gray to have grown in, the hair’s long and greasy. I played around with different looks, I wanted to go stripped-down, almost like Mike Tyson was in his heyday when he would walk into a ring with nothing but a bathrobe and shoes, kind of naked, so there was nothing to hide behind. I dropped 20 pounds, because the guy was deep into cocaine by the time you see him, and went from 180 to 160, because you don’t have a lot of nutrients flowing through your body when you’re doing $5,000 worth of cocaine a day.

(A publicist comes in with echinacea for Piven’s herbal tea.)

Piven: So in direct contrast to a guy who does nothing but cocaine, I do Eastern medicine and take care of myself. The reality is, if you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t play a guy who doesn’t take care of himself … you could do it, but you would burn out. I started at Second City with a guy named Chris Farley, and Chris was an incredibly vital spirit, with childlike energy, but you know, your body can only take so much.

Q: Did Joe Carnahan come to you early with the script?

Piven: Thank God Joe came to me, and he said, “Do you want to go deep?” And that is literally the question that every actor waits his entire life for. My mother – who was my acting teacher from the time I was a kid – likes to quote Shakespeare: “The readiness is all.” If you do what you love to do and you work hard at it, it’s not a question of “Will I get my shot?” it’s “When?” and then, “Will you be ready?”

(Carnahan comes back into the room.)

Carnahan: That’s pretty eloquent, dude. I like that.

Piven: Joe Carnahan is back from the dead.

Q: Joe, can you talk about writing a script with this many plotlines – how do you juggle these things and get them on the page?

Carnahan: I think it was largely the byproduct of spending 15 months working on “Mission: Impossible 3” (a project Carnahan then left). I think there was a period of creative paralysis and once I was able to unburden myself of the creative confines I found myself in, “Smokin’ Aces” gave me a full range of motion. It’s the idea of trying to throw everything at one movie that you can. Every creative impulse I ever had, I tried to stitch into this one collage.

Q: Along with the action, your films have very elaborately written dialogue.

Carnahan: The script, for me, that’s the first brick in the building, man. I love good dialogue. That was probably my biggest bone of contention I had from my time on “M:I3.” I put too much mustard on (the “Mission: Impossible 3” script), you know what I mean? It was the Randy Johnson fastball that runs up about 101 miles an hour, and it was like, “Whoa – OK, now, we can’t throw any more of those.” The creative process should always be malleable, and you should keep it as fluid as possible – but there are certain totems and tenets you need to establish, and I think the script is No. 1, and should always be. I always think first and foremost as a writer.