Don’t get the wrong idea about Jeremy Piven: despite his convincing performance as manic, type-A Hollywood agent Ari Gold on HBO’s “Entourage,” in real life he treasures peace and relaxation, whether it’s from a round of yoga or a good cigar.

By Joe Bosso, photos by John Russo

Jeremy Piven is zonked. After a week straight of shooting scenes in Las Vegas for the third season of “Entourage,” the hit HBO show in which the 40-year-old actor plays the hyperbolic, scenery-chewing, assistant-menacing über-agent Ari Gold, Piven has just landed at LAX and is slouched down in a Town Car, on his way to his home in Malibu. Bringing life to the Exxon Valdez-slick 10-percenter would take a lot out of any actor, but, as Piven notes, “a lot of the time when you spend these 14- and 17-hour-days on the set, you’re standing around and waiting to do your stuff. Conserving energy is the key. It’s like waiting all day for an orgasm.”

Anybody who has watched Piven in full-on Ari Gold-mode would appreciate the amount of restraint it must take not to go Krakatoa over anything and anybody in his path. In “Entourage,” guiding and protecting his golden goose actor client, Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), even at times at the expense of the young star’s crew of friends from Queens - notably Eric (Kevin Connolly), Vincent’s best pal and self-declared manager, whom Ari describes as a “pizza delivery boy” - Piven is a Hummer-driving, cell phone-screaming pit bull, full of bracing ripostes and face-ripping candor. But he’s not without the occasional surprise. One minute he’s stoic and heroic, the next he’s a little lost looking, plotting his next move; at times, you can practically hear the gears turning in his head as he concocts the machinations of 21st-Century agenting.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the penultimate episode of season two, in which Ari, in a vigorous nod to Jerry Maguire, is canned by his agency and, in effect, emasculated. Driven home by his assistant, the drunk Ari drops on his front lawn where he professes undying love to his domineering wife (nicely played by Perrey Reeves) with such searing emotion that you want to reach out, grab his hand and say, “It’s gonna be all right.” But no sooner than you can say “Ovitz,” Ari is back in action, down but not out, charting his comeback at, of all places, a local Coffee Bean. “He’s a fighter,” Piven says. “He’ll snap your head off, reach into you, pull out your integrity, cackle and then... tell you how much he loves you in the next sentence. That’s what I love about playing him. There’s not one note to Ari. He has all the octaves.”

And Piven plays him like a well-tuned Steinway. Roles like Ari Gold don’t grow on trees, and even though Piven is now breathing rarified air, having contributed the now-famous catchphrase “Let’s hug it out, bitch” to the worldwide lexicon, he’s waited years for his chance to shine, toiling earnestly within the Hollywood system, turning in decent and sometimes outstanding performances in a slew of pictures nobody ever saw (Me and Daphne, Livers Ain’t Cheap, etc.) and better performances in pictures that everybody saw (Old School, Black Hawk Down, Runaway Jury, etc.). But in “Entourage,” Piven has somehow become atomized - part of the culture, the air. It’s as if he were always somehow right under our noses. “I would say that’s entirely true,” he deadpans. “I’ve been working for years waiting to be discovered.”

Acting is part of Piven’s DNA. Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, his parents, Joyce and the late Bryce Piven, ran Chicago’s famed Piven Theatre Workshop, which trained both Joan and John Cusack, among others. (Piven and John Cusack, best buds from back in the day, have acted together in a number of films, most notably Say Anything, The Grifters, and Grosse Pointe Blank. “I got very good at playing the best friend,” Piven jokes. “Luckily, I don’t mind that role in real life.”)

As a teenager, Piven studied acting with his parents and played high school football, but it wasn’t until he moved to New York to take theater classes at NYU that “being an actor really seemed to be in my soul, as opposed to something I was good at.” After returning to Chicago and a stint with Second City, he applied - and got accepted - to the prestigious National Theatre of Great Britain. “Learning Shakespeare from the greats like Anthony Hopkins could have scared the shit out of most people,” Piven admits. “But I felt right at home.”

These days, Piven is navigating his newfound fame in some fascinating ways. A yoga and meditation enthusiast and a student of Hinduism, he took a camera crew with him to India to film “Jeremy Piven’s Journey of a Lifetime” for the Travel Channel. “I guess you could say it was a way of having a vacation on somebody else’s dime,” he jokes. “But the things that I encountered were fascinating and life-changing.

Later this year Piven will be seen on the big screen in director Joe (Narc) Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces. In a role that could send his film career to Paul Giamatti-like heights, Piven plays Buddy “Aces” Israel, a card shark and magician who gets involved in some very nasty mob business. The Byzantine plot is harder to crack than The Da Vinci Code, but with a hotshot cast that includes Ben Affleck, Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia, Peter Berg, and Alicia Keys, Piven is pumped and primed for this baby to pop. “It feels like a work of art that’s thrilling and entertaining,” he says excitedly. “I don’t know when I’ve felt so good about a picture.”

At the start of his car journey home, Piven cautions me: “You might not get much that’s useful. I’m that tired, man.” Yet the actor appears invigorated when discussing his recent success, his craft, his interest in Hinduism, and his love of a good cigar. “Believe me, brother. I remember the years when nobody wanted to talk to me about anything. The fact that people now want to know my thoughts is amazing.”

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