The cult of Liev Schreiber

Liev Schreiber doesn’t lack identities. He’s “Huggy” to his mother—never Issac, his given name. He’s Mr. Schreiber, one supposes, to the fellow delivering his Fresh Direct. He’s Li, we’ll guess, to his inexplicable fans in Osaka. He’s Ev, certainly, to no one. And surely he’s Liev to Robert Falls, the director of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, now playing on Broadway with Schreiber in the shock-jock leading role.

While Talk Radio marks the first Bogosian play bathed in the Broadway spotlight, its Schreiber’s stop-you-in-your-tracks talent that’s outshining everything right now. If the play reminds us that Bogosian’s still the radical poet of the American theater, Schreiber is its brainy, barnstorming bad-boy: “The finest American theater actor of his generation,” gushed the Times’ Ben Brantley. So read all the squibs the tabloid gossipmongers write, click on all the posts uploaded into the blogosphere; Schreiber, unique among his peers, seems forever lavished with Kilimanjaro-high praise for all he says and all he does.

The first and most obvious reason for the cult-like fervor surrounding Schreiber is his ripping-good backstory. In a 1999 profile in The New Yorker, John Lahr scrupulously painted a surreal picture of a man so bruised by a dysfunctional, bohemian childhood (his poverty-loving mother, Lahr wrote, raised him in an East Village flat without furniture, wouldn’t let him watch films in color and kept his hair shoulder length until age 10) that he’d already committed petty larceny by puberty. Each time you read another profile of Schreiber—and each time the actor does a play or film, another journalist unearths a salty nugget—you understand more and more how his I-made-it-through-the-rain quality fuels his intensity: the sense, watching him act, of a lava chamber buried beneath his volcanic persona; the sense that even the slightest tectonic shift would cause all the magma to explode.

The second reason for the cult-like fervor is that Schreiber can position that molten substratum within almost any character: Richard Roma, the ruthless, pugnacious real estate salesman he won a Tony for in Glengarry Glen Ross; the antiestablishment hero he’s playing today in Talk Radio; any of the Shakespearean men he’s played to date.

Ah, Shakespeare: The third reason for the cult of Schreiber isn’t because the actor is a polymath who’s demonstrated dervish-like versatility in more than 30 films—like 2006’s The Omen or 2004’s The Manchurian Candidate—or because he has branched into other disciplines, like directing the 2005 film Everything Is Illuminated. It’s because Schreiber’s addicted to pressing his flesh against the very soul of the Bard. Memories fade fast, but it was the enraptured Brantley who himself became a charter member of the cult in 1998 when he pleaded, at the end of his review of Cymbeline, for “more Shakespeare, Mr. Schreiber.” The actor has obliged: Macbeth in 2006 and Henry V in 2003, both in Central Park; Iago in Othello in 2001 and Hamlet in 1999, both downtown at the Public Theater. And his smoldering looks, loping walk and dizzying height—either six-foot-two or six-foot-three, depending on the source—has served him consistently well, whether on Broadway in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal opposite Juliette Binoche or Off-Broadway in Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat opposite Sigourney Weaver.

But let’s say you’ve never seen Schreiber on stage. Let’s say you’ve never seen him on film—you’ve missed, as Lahr breathlessly recounted, his “fetching transvestite in Mixed Nuts; the dithering nerd in Walking and Talking; the pretentious, humiliated would-be novelist in Daytrippers; one of the supposed slashers in Scream 2; and the tattooed kidnapper in Ransom.” And let’s say you didn’t see him last year on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” His voice is everywhere! Thus, reason number four: On LievSchreiber.org, more than 40 voiceover projects are listed, including multiple episodes of “The American Experience” and “Nova” on PBS. If Big Brother exists, Schreiber would clearly voice it.

How curious that Schreiber is the most ubiquitous actor Joe Sixpack has likely never heard of—bringing us to reason number five. The cult of Liev Schreiber is like hitting on a trend before the trend hits. Like knowing Barack Obama as a freshman state senator or watching Paula Deen cooking with anonymity in the kitchen.

Sixth, finally, is the babe factor. Just witness his announcement on Conan O’Brien that his Oscar-nominated girlfriend Naomi Watts is pregnant with their first child. And in Elle Schreiber spoke about having sex on the Staten Island Ferry and liking public sex. No wonder when New York photographed Schreiber for its recent cover story, it chose such an odd image: His hand obscuring nearly half his face, one scary, bulging eyeball daring the reader not to join the cult, to skip the Kool-Aid, to buy a ticket. Why do we relent? Because Schreiber won’t let us settle for anything less.