Supporting actor finally taking the lead

Jeremy Piven is on one of those If-this-is-Monday-it-must-be-Miami publicity tours. A new day, a new city. Planes and limos, radio shows, TV, newspapers, the bloggers, and Q&As in movie houses every night - all to pump up interest in

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

, a raunchy, politically incorrect comedy in which Piven stars.

So here he is - if this is Friday, it must be Philly - nursing an iced Starbucks at the rooftop bar of Stephen Starr's Continental Mid-town. And Piven is wiped.

"I'm teetering," he says, asked if he's been able to maintain his sanity as he crisscrosses the land. "I don't think I'm doing the right things. I think I'm just - I'm about to hit the wall, as my character, Don Ready, does in the movie. You know what I mean?

"I may wander off. You may find me on the Liberty Bell, just barking and stark naked."

The Goods' Don Ready is a ferocious type-A used-car liquidator, enlisted to save a foundering car lot (run by James Brolin). The movie, which opens tomorrow, co-stars Ed Helms, Ving Rhames, Kathryn Hahn, and David Koechner, and comes by way of some of the folks responsible for Anchorman and Talladega Nights. (Indeed, don't be surprised to see a certain Will Ferrell cameoing in The Goods.)

For Piven, 44, best-known these days for his portrayal of the take-no-prisoners Hollywood agent Ari Gold on HBO's Entourage, making The Goods is a big deal. After more than 50 movies in a career that goes all the way back to that 1986 Corey Haim classic, Lucas, Piven is finally the leading man.

"I'd been looking for that for a while, yeah," he acknowledges. "I've been lucky enough to have played opposite a lot of actors that have been carrying films for years, 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."

Piven cites working with and watching Dustin Hoffman in Runaway Jury. There were Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat, and Piven's buddy - and fellow Chicagoan - John Cusack. Piven has been a supporting player in a mess of Cusack titles.

"So that whole journey led me to this," Piven explains - this being Don Ready and The Goods. "It makes sense. It's like anything else in life, you have to apprentice the job. . . .

"And sometimes apprenticeships can take a while," he adds. "I think in this country, we're kind of a large group of immediate-gratificationers."

With The Goods about to go into the multiplexes, and Entourage inked for a seventh season, Piven is riding high. But don't ask him about that whole sushi/mercury-poisoning thing. Last week, he and comedian Chris Kattan got into a shouting match backstage at Alexa Chung's MTV talk show when Kattan alluded to Piven's dropping out of the Broadway production in December of David Mamet's Speed the Plow. Piven, you'll recall, cited "extreme mercury toxicity" from eating too much sushi as the reason he bailed. Playwright Mamet cracked that the actor was leaving show business "to pursue a career as a thermometer."

But it's no joking matter. The producers of the revival are suing Piven for breaking his contract. "It's not funny!" Piven reportedly told Kattan, after the two hurled insults and expletives at each other.

It's the kind of exchange that wouldn't be out of place on Entourage, in fact. Just another behind-the-scenes Hollywood contretemps, egos raging, tensions high.

Piven says that these days, as he's checking into hotels or eating in restaurants, most of the fans who approach him want to talk about Entourage and Ari Gold.

"Yeah, but then a lot of those people really want to point out, 'Hey, man, I knew you way before Entourage. I loved you in Old School, or Very Bad Things.'

"I probably did 40 movies before I even started Entourage. . . . But Ari has dominated for a couple of years now, and now I think Don Ready will, because there are so many quotable lines in The Goods. People are already starting to quote these lines and scream things out: 'Party at my house! Everyone's welcome! No guys!' or 'MC Hammer is so broke, he's living in the left leg of his Hammer pants.' "

But while Piven excels at playing turbo-charged jerks like Ari Gold and Don Ready, he says that's only one side of what he's capable of doing as an actor.

"For instance, Buddy Israel, who I played in Smokin' Aces, he's a very tragic character who thinks he's a gangster and he's really just a Vegas magician," Piven notes.

"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."

Piven takes a slurp of his iced beverage.

"I don't have to play characters that take up all the oxygen," he says. "I simply don't."

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Movie

The Goods

Opens tomorrow

at area theaters.