Acting Tough
Liev Schreiber doesn’t like what he sees. He has his eyes on a computer screen, scrutinizing a digital photograph. It’s a gloriously sunny (if slightly cool) spring day in downtown Manhattan, and the penthouse apartment of the Standard Hotel has been turned into a photo studio. The photo on the screen is his own.
“I got old,” he says, his rich, familiar voice filling the room. He looks closer, scratches at a beard flecked with gray, then turns his face to the side. He jokes that what he thinks is an off-kilter look could be the result of having slept on one side of his face more than the other when he was a baby. He’s entertaining the room, throwing jabs at himself, acting more like an old friend showing up to a party than a veteran star of stage, television and film.
No matter what the 57-year-old says, his is a look many would envy: lean of belly, broad of shoulder and six-foot-three, tall for an actor. The same can be said of his career. Schreiber (whose first name is pronounced Lee-EV, but often mispronounced as Leev) is a multiplatform talent. He’s perhaps best known for his seven-year-run on television as the titular tough guy Ray Donovan. His film roles include the hard-driving editor Marty Baron in Oscar’s Best Picture of 2016, Spotlight, and the brainwashed politician in the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Meryl Streep and Denzel Washington. His start came in stage acting, including several major Shakespearean roles, and he won the Tony for his role in the 2005 revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
While he’s best known as an actor, lately Schreiber has had far weightier issues on his mind, namely the war in Ukraine. In March 2022 he founded the charity BlueCheck Ukraine to assist the people of Ukraine, who have been invaded by Russia.
BlueCheck Ukraine was created to help those who need it in the fastest way possible. “We picked a portfolio of partners that would be able to react to any given situation: There was a group that was supporting elderly communities, a group supporting children, children who have learning deficits, children who are orphans, children who are with single moms,” he explains.
Schreiber was particularly moved by seeing the elderly who were suffering. “I have one grandparent who was Ukrainian and on my mother’s side all my grandparents were from Kyiv and Odesa,” he says. “I visited Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv that had all of those horrible attacks. It’s barbaric that in our time we’re witnessing something as brutal as that invasion was. The elderly people won’t leave . . . they’re defiant, which is kind of a Ukrainian trait. So, all the resources—power, food—have been destroyed by the fighting. That was really hard to see, these elderly people who reminded me of my grandparents, stranded like that. Eighty, 90 years old, women where missiles had gone through the roof of their houses and they’re still living there.”
There are parts of Ukraine where life is close to normal—it’s slightly larger than France, making it the second-largest country in Europe after Russia—and the war is focused on the eastern portion of the country, where hundreds of thousands have perished and far more have been wounded. “Things are good in the west and life is going on as normal. But in these eastern regions and on the front line the men are all getting conscripted and the women and children are leaving.” The war caused him to question whether he could answer the call to action the way the people of Ukraine have. “When the ground war broke out—which seemed unfathomable to me that in 2022 a ground war would break out in Eastern Europe—I looked at these middle-aged men who signed up to fight . . . I imagined, would I be able to do that? Kiss my kids goodbye and go fight in a war where I was incredibly outgunned? Then you realize this is an existential situation for them, and maybe in a broader, geopolitical sense it’s about democracy. It’s about those values and principles that brought my grandparents to this country.”
BlueCheck Ukraine has provided more than $4 million in aid since 2022. “We have groups that build shelters, groups that provide warming kits, a whole spectrum of what the needs are,” he says.
While Schreiber has witnessed the effects of real-life violence in Ukraine, some of his most memorable on-screen roles are characters who specialize in violence of the fictional variety. His size, his memorable voice and his naturally arching eyebrows have made him a perfect fit for projecting menace in some of his roles. Those performances allow him insight into the psyche of these make-believe villains, or flawed heroes, in some cases.
“People who are fluent in the language of violence typically are hiding some terrible vulnerability. And that’s really interesting. Also, any college acting coach will tell you that great drama is couched in duality and conflict,” he explains. Schreiber’s tough guys bring much more to the table than scarred fists. “Maybe I get those tough guy roles because I look at them that way—not as tough guys, but as the opposite. They’re vulnerable people. Or afraid. Usually violence is, in one way or another, an expression of fear.”
Some of his bad-guy, on-screen roles include the sadistic Victor Creed (aka Sabretooth) who battles Hugh Jackman’s title character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In August, Caught Stealing has him playing an ultra-tough Orthodox Jew described by director Darren Aronofsky, quite simply, as a “bad motherfucker.” And of course, there’s his portrayal of the heavy-handed lead character in “Ray Donovan,” the kind of guy you’d want on your side in any dustup. “When people say somebody is a badass it usually refers to some aspect of violence in their lives,” says Schreiber. “I think Ray is probably the best example.”
“Ray Donovan” debuted on Showtime in 2013, and starred Schreiber as a man who is quick to use his fists. Donovan is a fixer, the guy you call to get out of trouble when the law can’t help (or, in most cases, gets in the way). He loves his kids, fears his criminal father and is trying to run from his past, when he was abused by a priest. The family dysfunction has left its mark on his psyche, making him a complex yet flawed character.
“With Ray—it was that feeling like he would do anything for his children, which is not hard for me to identify with. But he’s also hiding something. A fear of being found out. I think I’ve always lived with a profound fear of being found out for fraud. And I think Ray is afraid,” says Schreiber. That fear meant his lead character was the strong, silent type, with a heavy emphasis on the silent. “That’s why he doesn’t talk. He had like six lines a week. I kind of felt like the guy didn’t want to talk, he didn’t want people to hear. He was afraid of giving away too much. He felt so insecure about who he was. A guy who had been abused by a priest from a blue-collar family in Boston. He just doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“Ray Donovan” ran for seven seasons, and ended abruptly in early 2020. A 2022 movie that aired on Showtime (called Ray Donovan: The Movie) concluded the story arc. There’s much more to Schreiber than only “Ray Donovan,” of course. With an acting career that started more than three decades ago, Schreiber has played a vast repertoire of roles, including a young, cigar-puffing Orson Welles in the 1999 HBO film RKO 281, the story about the battle to bring Citizen Kane to the big screen. He feels playing real-life characters increases the demands on the actor. “I’ve done some biopics and they used to drive me crazy. The pressure of having to play somebody who’s alive. . . . I like very much characters that are inventions. I think one of the great things about acting is you’re on this journey of identity and you’re exploring aspects of yourself. I think probably every character I’ve ever played is in one way or another some version of my grandfather, and me looking for myself.”
Schreiber is particularly fond of the stage. “I don’t think there’s anything more kind of exciting and immediate for an actor than to be on stage and interacting with 500 people in a dark room,” he says. At the time of the photo shoot, he was starring in the August Strindberg play “Creditors” with Maggie Siff, who was on the cover of Cigar Aficionado in 2017. “Love her, she’s amazing,” says Schreiber. “It’s a tiny little theater. We’ve got $35 tickets, there’s free tickets if you stand on line, and I love that spirit of theater. It can be like a church or a community center.”
Seeing Schreiber on stage is illuminating. He inhabits his character seemingly without effort, communicating to the audience with words, a simple shrug of his shoulders, a lift of one of those eyebrows. No matter who is on stage with him, it’s hard to tear your eyes away from what he’s giving to the audience.
His role in “Glengarry Glen Ross” had first been brought to Broadway in 1984 by Joe Mantegna, who also won the Tony. His was a performance Schreiber watched as a very young man. Mantegna now says that when Schreiber won the same award for the same role more than 20 years later, he contacted him. “I didn’t know him then and sent him a letter stating, ‘People often use the phrase, I know how you feel. In this case I believe I really do. Congratulations.’ He wrote me back stating that he saw me do the play those many years previous as a high school student that his dad took him to see. He said seeing my performance had a huge impact on him,” Mantegna says. “It was the most moving compliment I’ve ever received. And needless to say, Liev has earned every accolade he has received since.”
As an acting student, Schreiber learned to check his ego at the door. “When I was at Yale, Lloyd Richards [then Dean of the Yale School of Drama] straightened us all out. Because as actors we thought we were the big deal. He said, ‘I want you to understand, actors are the instrument of the playwright. Your job is to take an idea and share it with a group of people.’ And when those ideas are good, and that feels important to you, there’s a chance that it might feel important to someone else. That’s a nice gig, when you got a good play. But it really is about the play. That’s a good way for a young actor to realize that it’s not really about them.”
If plays resonate with Schreiber, those by Shakespeare resonate the most. He has played Hamlet, Macbeth and Henry V, to name just a few. “Shakespeare to me really is magic,” he says. “It’s like being an archaeologist—you go on a dig and you pull some extraordinary thing out of the earth and it makes you wonder who the last person to touch it was. That’s the great thing about these characters.”
In addition to acting and his charity work, Schreiber has a new business venture, as he is the cofounder and coowner of Sláinte, a blended Irish whiskey brand. He had been approached to enter the business, but declined, then reconsidered after tasting an 18-year-old Irish single malt that he ended up using for help with the charity. He later got into the business proper, and he’s now engaged in trying to build the U.S. distribution of Sláinte.
“There was a logic to an Irish whiskey, it’s my favorite spirit,” he says. It makes him think of his dad, whose name was Tell. Schreiber was born in San Francisco, then moved to the Lower East Side of New York with his mother after his parents went their separate ways. “I didn’t really know my father growing up. We didn’t spend a lot of time together. And he came to visit me in college, and he brought a bottle of Irish whiskey with him. And I just had never really drank Irish whiskey and I thought it tasted very strange. And he said to me it tasted like blood, sweat and tears to him. And I loved the poetry to that. And over time it became more and more meaningful to me as we proceeded to down half the bottle, get a little drunk and my father started to tell me how sad he was that he hadn’t been around. And started to weep and I was like wow, here comes the blood, sweat and tears.”
The drinking session helped him get closer to his formerly estranged dad. “We would see each other once a year, twice a year. And he passed away about five years ago.” His passing was a bit of a shock. “He was a super fit, healthy guy. . . . He was a carpenter, and a very good one. He had fixed up his house and property. They were going to move to Portugal. Did an amazing job on his house—and they found this bump on his hip. And it was a sarcoma, a really rare sarcoma. And he was gone in a matter of months.”
Perhaps it’s his father’s death that has age and mortality on his mind. He says his memory isn’t as sharp as it once was. “At my age, as my memory goes down the toilet [acting on stage is] even more exciting. It’s gotten a lot harder. . . . I guess I should start thinking about [playing] Lear, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to memorize the lines. That’s the problem with Lear—it takes a young man to perform it, but it’s an old man’s play.”
Does aging weigh heavily on him? “Doesn’t it on everybody?” he says. “Of course, in my profession it’s worse ’cause people are looking at me all the time. I just thought I’d be a lot more enlightened by now. I thought I’d be smarter, I thought I’d be better. I thought I’d be more Zen . . . I think most guys really don’t mature past 22, but their bodies change. So, you’re 55 years old and in your mind you still think you look like you’re 22.”
His mind goes back to his father. “It happens. And it’s gonna happen to us. So, you gotta feel like, I want to make my kids OK with it. I don’t know how to do it, but I think about it. And I don’t want you to feel bad when it happens.
“I have a 20-month-old baby [named Hazel], which seems insane for a guy my age. I get her up in the morning at 6:30. Taking the time—I guess that, maybe that’s the lesson of a good cigar, is taking the time to appreciate where you’re at and what you’ve got and who you’re with. And that piece of my life now, knowing that I want to be there for Hazel, I want to be there for Sasha and Kai [his children from his first marriage], I want to be there for my wife and my family in ways that I, maybe when I was younger, just felt ‘gotta go gotta go gotta go.’ ”
Schreiber knows his way around a good cigar, but smoking one is a ritual he reserves for special occasions. “I was on a diving trip once in Tahiti and a guy gave me a cigar after a dive . . . I had never seen so many sharks in my life. It was this exhilarating experience. On the boat trip back to the island we had a cigar. It was just delicious, it was just incredible. And it’s one of my vices—cigars and Irish whiskey. There’s something about a cigar—it’s the strange ritual, or marking of the event . . . Because cigars are slow and they force you to stop and savor the seconds, the minutes . . . It’s such a sensory thing. It reminds me of that visit with my father. That time with my grandfather. And when we mark things like the birth of a child or the death of a loved one or a graduation or celebration or a moment in time.”
The actor remains busy. On the heels of “Creditors” and the opening of Caught Stealing, he will start work on a project with “The Sopranos” director Tim Van Patten called Lazarus, in which he will play a Philadelphia police officer. And of course, the charity project is always at the forefront.
His attachment to BlueCheck Ukraine, Schreiber says, goes far beyond his Ukrainian heritage. “My perspective on this situation is not an insider perspective, it’s an American’s perspective. I’m American: I was born here, raised here, I profited and thrived from this country and the values that it represented and the freedoms that provided my grandparents the opportunity to make my life as great as it is, and I hope my kids understand that. It’s hard for people who haven’t lived through a war, for people who haven’t lived through pogroms, for people who haven’t lived through fascism, for people who haven’t lived through dictatorships, to understand how vulnerable and precious democracy is.” He takes a small sip of whiskey. “And that we need to maintain it. We need to do our part to keep it working.”
