Liev Schreiber is the sex on Ray Donovan, which returns for its third season on July 12. Masters of Sex is also premiering that Sunday, but I stopped watching it after the plot got tedious last season. Ray Donovan, on the other hand, remains a solid, watchable show with riveting drama and high level performances. If you’re a MOS fan please forgive my extreme bias. (I’m hoping that Katie Holmes’s stunt casting on Ray Donovan doesn’t detract too much, but it’s kind of inevitable that it will, considering her side-mouth talking and wooden acting.)

Of course I would watch Liev, 47, in anything. I wish he would get more lead movie roles. If Liam Neeson can be an in-demand star at 63, Liev could have his own action franchise too. He has such a badass roughness to him. Liev says he’s more comfortable on the stage, though, and that he loves having a live audience. Vanity Fair has a kind of bullet-point profile of Liev, and there were some things in there that I didn’t know about him. Liev actually co-founded an ad agency in 2012, and he does real work there.

HE IS so committed to Shakespeare that he has schemed as Iago, sleazed as Iachimo, dreamed of playing Richard III—alas, at six feet three, Schreiber fears he is too tall—and “can’t imagine dying without getting the chance to play Lear.”

HE CREDITS his Russian and Eastern European heritage for what he calls his “Slavic fat pads”—i.e., his pronounced cheeks.

THE DOWNTURNED arch of his eyebrows gives him a villainous resting expression. In real life, he laments his menacing visage because people “think I’m a lot meaner than I am.”

WHAT SHOCKS Schreiber is that he sired “such beautiful children”—his blond, blue-eyed sons, Alexander (named for Schreiber’s grandfather and called Sasha), seven, and Samuel (known as Kai), six. “But then, of course, they look like their mother,” he says, referring to his partner of 10 years, Oscar-nominated actress Naomi Watts.

THE SETTING for his first date with “Nai”—his nickname for Watts—was outside Magnolia Bakery in the West Village, where the two chitchatted over cupcakes (Schreiber prefers “the white ones”) on a park bench. “It was all very aboveboard,” assures Schreiber

HE PAID off approximately $70,000 in student loans after playing a suicidal transvestite in Nora Ephron’s 1994 comedy, Mixed Nuts, his first movie and the site of one humiliating memory: while rehearsing a dance scene with a co-star, a nervous Schreiber remembers fixating on how “inappropriate it would be if I got an erection while I was doing the fox-trot. … Sure enough, it happened.”

HE CRAVES another comedy project, although maybe not one involving the fox-trot.

DESPITE HIS intensive drama training, he had no qualms about appearing in the mainstream horror movie Scream. “For Shakespeare roles, I was making $300 or $400 a week. And suddenly Bob Weinstein at Dimension says, ‘I’ll pay you $20,000 to walk down a flight of stairs.’ ”

HIS FIRST brush with the Bard came during a sixth-grade production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was in the band, playing Mendelssohn’s Wedding March on bass clarinet, and, he recalls, “I was thinking how ridiculous it looked onstage and how I thought I could do better.”

MORE COMFORTABLE onstage than in front of a camera, Schreiber says, “There’s nothing more exciting than that conversation you have with a live audience. It’s the best feeling in the world.”

[From Vanity Fair]

Vanity Fair also has a brief video interview with Liev (below). He says he’d love to do a comedy after Ray Donovan (he’s previously said that it takes him to a dark place). “I started doing comedy but you know, it’s like that joke ‘you f* one goat.‘” I guess he’s referring to the fact that he gets typecast as a villain, which he’s attributed to his features. He told NPR’s Fresh Air in 2013 that “being menacing [was] something unfortunately I was sort of born with. I often describe it as the ‘arched eyebrows and Slavic fat pads.’ It’s just something about my face. When I started out acting I really wanted to be a comic actor, but I naturally fell into these roles.” I think his face has character and that he doesn’t look scary at all. Schreiber also has this depth to him that really comes through on screen (and surely onstage). He projects so much with his eyes, and you get the sense that he’s conflicted but that he will power through to get the job done. He truly embodies that character. I really do think he’s more badass than Neeson, but I know those are fighting words to many of you.

Here’s the video from VF. It’s titled “What Liev learned from living on a Ashram,” but he doesn’t even talk about that.

Photo credit: Getty Images