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Jeremy Piven on Mastering Magic Tricks: In Smokin' Aces, Piven plays a magician who puts on shows at big-name venues such as the MGM hotel in Las Vegas. In order to make the magic tricks look good on film, Piven had to study with an expert.
“Paul Wilson was the guy that I worked with for the magic. The thing that he said that was the most important was to actually pull a trick off in front of people, and he was absolutely right,” explained Piven. “I went with Common and Joe [Carnahan] - Ryan [Reynolds] wasn't invited – but anyway, we went to the Magic Castle. We got up there and I actually did a trick. It is addicting. It really is. I've been on the stage my entire life as an actor and it's a kind of another level where you pull this thing off. And then to look in people's faces that are completely freaked out by something, I could see why you could dedicate your life to that as I did to the stage. So that was really informative for me. I had never really been around cards. I wasn't that guy and so I really had to work kind of extra hard and always have them in my hand. They're kind of like worry beads for the character that I incorporated. So that was really great, to always have them in my hand.”
Letting Go During Emotional Scenes: Piven was asked to really go for it emotionally in Smokin’ Aces and he didn’t mind it in the least. “That's just what you live for as an actor, to get there. Joe said to me when we met on this role, 'Do you want to go deep?' I mean, I've waited my entire life for that moment. I had been doing it onstage in Chicago for a couple of hundred people, and so I always knew that I have an emotional instrument. I'm accessible in that way and a big cry baby, to be honest with you. I knew that I could tap into that.
Also, even though a character like that is far from my experience, there are a lot of metaphors there when you have a guy like that that's looking at himself in the mirror and wondering who he is, and if he's a charlatan and what's happened to his life. I think that any one of us have had moments where we question ourselves. So these things are not too far from something that we can get into touch with. You just have to kind of make it real and go to that place.
We had a moment where I had to get really, really emotional, and I wasn't quite clicking in the way that I wanted to do. Joe asked me to put this little twist into it that threw me off balance for a little bit, and so I had to call upon some other stuff. It all sounds really cryptic what I'm saying here, but, anyway, I kind of connected on a very deep level that ends up being in the movie. I knew that it worked because I talked to Common afterwards and he said that he was in the other room and he felt something through the wall. …So it was like, 'Okay then.' It was confirmed that I was sort of onto something.”
Piven added, “The whole thing was just a complete gift. Joe and I knew that if you didn't care about this guy, if he had no heart when everyone was trying to kill him and extract his heart or put him on ice for the money, whatever their motivations were – everyone was converging on this hotel room – and if you didn't care about this character, if he didn’t have some potential as a human being and if it wasn't a tragedy, then all the hard work that everyone puts into it wouldn't mean as much. You needed to have that central character be tragic. It was just an honor to be able to kind of live fully through that guy.”
