Liev Schreiber Reflects on 'Ray Donovan': 'I Would Consider It'

Liev Schreiber wouldn't mind seeing 'Ray Donovan' again, he told the Karlovy Vary Intl audience. Film festival on Sunday. The beloved Showtime series, created by Ann Biderman, was canceled in 2020 after seven seasons. Following fan outcry, "Ray Donovan: The Movie" premiered in 2022.

"I would think about it," he said during a masterclass.

"It was always the baby of David Nevins [longtime Showtime chief]. I know he loves this character and this story, and I wouldn't be surprised if we heard more from David."< /p>

Schreiber admitted he was both "disappointed and relieved" by the show's cancellation, but the outpouring of love and support touched him deeply.

"Naomi [Watts, her ex-partner] was a bigger star than me and we were flying all over the world with our kids. But they were growing up and they needed to go to school and live in the same She wanted to live in L.A., it was more like Australia, so I decided to try and get a job there. A job that would last,” he said.

“They let me help with the casting and writing and directing, and I thought it would be great to work in front of the camera again and again and again, every day. And that was – for a while."

"I didn't know a lot of people liked it. You realize that seven years of work you did for money really moved some people. It meant a lot to me," he said. he admitted.

Schreiber also spoke about his collaboration with actors such as James Woods and Jon Voight, known for their conservative political views.

"It was a very American cast - completely polarized," he joked.

"You better not sleep with your co-stars. It's not a very smart thing to do. If you learn that lesson, which I did at first, you know [she s' applies] to all the other things too. Jon and I had a few conversations and we agreed that we were never going to talk about that kind of stuff. "I love you and I support you, but I'm not going to talk about politics with you."

The actor opened up about his complicated childhood and his memory problems. "My memories don't start until I was about 24," he said, also mentioning his beloved grandfather, who emigrated from Ukraine.

“There were no men in my life. I grew up with a single mother who was a taxi driver. was riding in the passenger seat, which was illegal."

"My grandfather never talked about his past or where he was from, he never spoke Ukrainian, Polish or Yiddish. When he died, I went to see a psychiatrist and I had my head examined. I thought, 'Damn. If I forget about this person, who I know nothing about, it's going to be really awful.' That was the start of my creative writing.

He wrote a screenplay about a man who travels to Ukraine to "find out what it's like to be Ukrainian", only to come across a short story by Jonathan Safran Foer.

"It was filled with compassion and humor, and I wanted to adapt it instead of what I was doing. I met him, he's 19, and he comes with a shopping bag with a manuscript 400 pages. He says, 'This is not a short story.'”

The novel in question, "Everything is Illuminated", became Schreiber's first film. But the experience itself was harrowing.

"It was awful. I was terrified and really overestimated my abilities, which I normally do. But doing something wrong in front of a lot of people is very painful. It's also a great lesson: a lesson in ego, which is important for any actor or anyone who exists in the public eye," he noted.

Schreiber, who won a Tony for his performance in "Glengarry Glen Ross," also spoke about his love for acting.

"For all her craziness, my mother was into classical things. I played bass clarinet [as a child] and we played Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" in "A Dream of a Lady". summer night.' I was watching all these 13-year-olds playing Shakespeare and I thought they were terrible. he resisted the acting bug as long as he could.

"I was studying animal behavior, working on a senior thesis on why dogs bark. I didn't think acting was a very smart career."

He later became a respected classical actor.

"I had the foresight to be a big fish in a small pond. It was me and Michael Stuhlbarg, and we had all the major roles in Shakespeare's plays."

"Because of my Slavic eyebrows and fat pads, people in the movie industry saw me as a villain. Then Nora Ephron saw me in 'Henry V' and thought it would be funny that this really tall hairy guy is a crossdresser in a comedy on a suicide hotline ['Mixed Nuts'] That's how my fi...