After seeing Entourage, you'll see why I think the movie could have been called Ari.
Jeremy Piven conquers the movie as Ari Gold, the hot-tempered agent who becomes a film studio head in the new big screen revival of the HBO series.
His outbursts are bigger than ever and the veins on his neck are on the verge of combusting for much of the film.
"He's such a drama queen," Piven told me Monday at the L.A. premiere of Entourage. "He really is. It's such a fun role to play—to go in, dig in, swing for the fences, just give everything you got and leave no stone unturned. It's just a feast. I love it."
In one scene—SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT!—Ari has a meltdown during a couples therapy session with his wife (Perrey Reeves).
Reeves told me that Piven asked creator Doug Ellin to include a therapy session. "I never know what he's going to do and it's like jumping off a cliff," Perrey said of Piven. "You don't know what's going to happen, but you know something good will."
Piven heads back to the U.K. soon to shoot the fourth season of his Masterpiece period series, Mr. Selfridge. "I'm voluntarily schizophrenic," he said. "I love it. I have this cast of brilliant actors who also love Entourage. But it's another world over there. I love going back and forth."
Meanwhile Jerry Ferrara admitted there was at least one move he didn't do himself during his fight scene with real-life champion MMA fighter Ronda Rousey.
"Ronda said, 'You know, Jerry, you can do it if you want but I've broken guys' ribs bigger than you. You may want to let the stunt double do that,'" Ferrara recalled.
Not that Rousey went soft on the actor. "I pushed kicked him as hard as I could," she boasted. "Every time I kicked him in the scene, that was him. And the cage wasn't bolted to the ground so the whole thing moved over like a foot or two the whole time I was kicking him. He took it like a champ. I was impressed."
Entourage is in theaters now.