Jeremy Piven reveals audiences are ‘gasping at certain points’ of ‘The Performance,’ based on an Arthur Miller short story
Jeremy Piven is willing to wait. Just look at his new film “The Performance”: The 59-year-old, three-time Emmy winner (for “Entourage”) has spent the last 15 years shepherding the project from short story acquisition to script to screen – and he’s got lots to say about it now.
In “Performance,” Piven who stars as a rising star tap dancer in the 1930s who’s hired to bring his troupe to perform in Nazified Germany. He first attached himself to the Arthur Miller short story over a decade ago by picking up the film option from Miller’s daughter Rebecca. But for all of Piven’s enthusiasm, the topic was just not landing for potential producers.
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“If I pitched you as I did for the past over a decade what this film is, you would most likely laugh in my face,” he tells Gold Derby. “I’m a Jewish tap dancer in 1937 that dances for Hitler. Yeah, check please, and it’s a wrap.”
But source material from Pulitzer Prize winner Miller demands attention, and Piven says this was a fresh take on the Holocaust he hadn’t seen before. Early audiences so far seem to agree, according to Piven: “I’ve never had an experience where I’m with an audience and they’re gasping at certain points in the film, and you know that they’re with this film.”
“Performance” has always been a family affair for Piven, who first learned of the story when his mother (and lifelong acting teacher) Joyce Hiller Piven passed it to him, and ultimately his older sister Shira Piven co-wrote the screenplay (with Joshua Salzberg) and directed the film.
“She’s an actor’s director,” he says, noting that their parents Joyce and Byrne Piven were also performers. “We grew up with the work.”
But, he adds, “We had a couple [of] moments, I’m not going to lie to you. I forgot that I was the producer of the film, because I’ve been an actor my whole life. We had a moment … I could have just said, ‘Shut up!’ [But] it was a dream. We’re lucky to have each other.”
One of those moments came when he broke multiple ribs after falling during a scene. Piven had begun learning how to tap shortly after picking up the script, and kept it up throughout the extended process of getting the film made. But that didn’t keep him from getting injured.
“[Shira] was the adult in the room and said, ‘You don’t have to do this. You have a stunt man right there,'” he recalls. “She and I were at odds about how I wanted to accomplish this dance sequence. And everyone in my troupe, all the actors, they’re all British actors and they grew up in a system. … I was the challenged one in the group, even though I was supposed to be the leader.”
Now he says the injury helped his performance. “Ironically, breaking my ribs allowed me to master the final sequence in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to [otherwise], where you can use all my dancing and everything in one take,” Piven explains. “So, what I’m saying to you is I sacrificed my ribs for the film. Everything works out.”
Not necessarily, though, for Piven’s character Harold May. Things become extremely difficult for him in the film, in part because – as he puts it – he may be a Jew in Nazi Germany, but he’s been “passing” as a non-Jew in America for years, which has led him to believe he is untouchable.
“It was very important that my character was blonde, so that he really felt like … he wouldn’t be susceptible to the Nazis,” says Piven. “This is the way life is when you’re after something and you’re obsessed with it and you really are very focused on playing through at all costs – you’re justifying a lot of things.”
Meanwhile, Piven is visibly excited about the film’s limited December opening (to make it awards-eligible) in Chicago, with a wider theatrical expansion in January. And he continues to keep up his tapping, even though the film has wrapped.
“It’s really annoying for people to be around me,” he says. “Because if I’m standing there and there’s a hardwood floor that, ‘Oh, this sounds good acoustically.’ So, I’m keeping my ankles loose in case my my number gets called. You have to stay ready so you don’t have to get ready, man.”
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