Piven was careful as to not give up much information on the upcoming episodes when we talked to him at the press day for his new film Smokin’ Aces.
“I know a lot about it just because it’s going to be twenty episodes and we’ve already shot eight of them. To me it’s the best stuff that we’ve done because I get to do so much. See, that doesn’t print right. Let that be a lesson to everyone. Irony doesn’t print and that just makes me look like a bad guy,” Piven laughed.
“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.”
We did get Piven to say what he thinks about his character being fired?
“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.”
The next episodes, titled “Dog Day Afternoon,” premieres on March 18.
