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.”
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
I think his brows make him look intense, not necessarily scary.
He’s always a fun and interesting interview and I really like him as an actor.
I hope he and Nai stay together forever.
He does look good as a villain but I always like to see a type-cast actor or actress in an unexpected role. I enjoy versatility..
while.. that other creepy dude with the serial killer eyes, Cillian Murphy, I can’t see him doing any comedy or anything that is not creepy… It’s unfortunate but, what to do, really?
Had to look up cillian Murphy, didn’t know him by name…you are absolutely correct, every time I see that guy I get creeped out. He seriously looks like a real life Norman Bates.
He is seriously HOT!
He’s so talented and they are a beautiful couple.
Neesons > cotton weary
Slavic fat pads”—i.e., his pronounced ASS cheeks.
see what i did there. *drools*
I like him.
Naomi Watts is so dang pretty. I guess that’s all I got.
I remember being totally mesmerized by her in ‘King Kong’, of all things! Just breathtaking! He’s not too bad himself. Never thought much about him before he was Raymond! Yowza.
Me too about King Kong. And Mullhuland Drive.
21 grams for me.
Wow, 10 years is good going. They make a cute couple. Naomi is ageing gracefully and looks all the more gorgeous for being natural.
It reminds me that Nicole and Keith are together about the same length. I never thought they would last because Keith was rumored to have a steady run of groupies. Maybe he quit all that when he went to rehab shortly after they married. He seems to be able to overlook the off botox face too. It must be love!
“Naomi is ageing gracefully…” – I hate that expression. It’s so sexist. They are BOTH aging and both look very fine.
Erm..what????? I think that both men and women can age with grace. where is the sexism at? It simply means accepting what comes with age gracefully without going bananas..ahem Nicole Kidman or that Orange George something or other guy.
I like his hairy and intense looks. Liev Schreiber, I so would.
How come he wasn’t asked: “How do you manage to keep your career and fatherhood in balance?”
Ugh I LOVE Liev so so much. He’s phenomenal as Ray. I’m counting down the days till it returns.
Fun fact, he and Naomi and their kids were on Sesame Street and were in the video for ‘Brush Your Teeth’ and they are seriously the cutest family everrrr.
He’s fantastic, pure and simple. On screen or stage, and he’s hilariously snarky (and sorely lacking a censor button). Love him. 🙂 Seeing him in NYC in “Cymbeline” is still a highlight of my theatrical life.
My darling fella calls me his “slavic squirrel”, thanks to my cheeks. Glad to remember I’m in good company.
Naomi made the first move on him. She told the story in Allure. It was cute.
“But as the Diana actress, 45, reveals in the November issue of Allure, they might never have hooked up if she hadn’t mustered up the courage to make the first move at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala eight years ago.
“It was a lot more ballsy than I would ever normally be,” Watts tells the magazine of pursuing the Ray Donovan star, 46. “Normally I want a guy to make the first move, and he wasn’t. Then he got up to say he was leaving and I was like, ‘Oh, s–t. Probably another couple years are going to pass by.'”
The British-Australian actress couldn’t let the opportunity go to waste. “I was wildly attracted to him and his work, so I said something cheeky as he was about to walk out,” she continues. “I said, ‘Don’t you want my digits?’ Because I couldn’t possibly say, ‘Would you like my phone number?'”
Her cheekiness worked. “It made him laugh,” she recalls. “He texted me five minutes later saying, ‘Would you like to go for a drink now?’ And I said, ‘No, I’ll meet you for breakfast tomorrow.'”
The rest, as they say, is history.”
Awww cute story.
Love him!!!
Liev is so sexy. He doesn’t look scary, but there is an underlying dangerousness about him.
I agree about Masters of Sex. I lOVED that show season 1. I didn’t even finish watching season 2. I thought it was awful.
I really like Liev Schreiber as an actor but that Ray Donovan series is not a great show. It’s like a fourth-rate Sopranos set in the L.A. of Entourage.
He’s gorgeous and that voice of his just kills me. Love his intense, brooding, dangerous look. Sexy as hell!
Can’t wait for season 3…
I love Liev! And the entire Watts/Schreiber family are too gorgeous for words.
I really want Liev to do more Shakespeare, IMO he’s one of a handful of American actors that can do it well.
He is soooo unattractive. Ewww
I think that he’s hot. I have a comedy theatre background, but I would always get cast as villains as well. Bad case of RBF.
He is so freaking hot. He really has been type-cast, because all I can think now is that I so need to see him in some Shakespeare.