Fear not for Ari Gold. Despite being fired at the end of Entourage's third season, Jeremy Piven is back at work on season four. "I know a lot about it just because it's going to be 20 episodes and we've already shot eight of them. To me it's the best stuff that we've done."
Interview: Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) on Season 4 of Entourage
Of course, details are as secretive as Lost or 24, but Piven is happy with the material. "HBO does something that most networks don't do which is give a show a chance to find their voice and unfortunately with networks everyone is worried about their jobs and they pull these shows based on ratings and back in the day all of these great shows, Seinfeld, and everything they never had ratings out of the gate. They just didn't and it was impossible to get it. So I think that the show is hitting it's stride and the best stuff is sort of in the season to come and Ari Gold will rise like the Phoenix. You can't count him out of it."
The boys only wanted Ari to apologize for blowing a deal for Vince's Joey Ramone biopic, but wasn't Ari really trying to protect them from a dangerous partner with no industry skills? "It's interesting because one of the great things that you should never do that I learned from John Malkovich is to never judge your characters. So I don't have any distance to be honest with you because I'm so kind of in that Ari Gold space in terms of trying to flesh him out and give him as much integrity as possible. So I don't see the totality of it like you do. So, my view of it is totally skewed. I say that they were wrong."
Entourage is actually Piven's second inside Hollywood show. You may remember him as a staff writer on The Larry Sanders Show. "There is a DVD coming out with the whole show, seven or nine seasons. It's a real comprehensive thing and I did this long interview and in it I said that all the shows that were doing now, Entourage, all of this stuff, we're all chasing the level and the bar that was set on The Larry Sanders Show. That was the best show about the backstage life of the entertainment industry that's ever been done. I hope that [Garry] Shandling comes back and does more stuff."
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