Guilty pleasure: Jeremy Piven

Some folks have a new celebrity crush every month or so. Some folks outgrow their celebrity crushes when they graduate from high school (or college or grad school or when they get married or when they join AARP). Some become obsessed fanboys (or fangirlz) and might someday wind up holding special stalker status.

I am a grown man with a celebrity crush on the actor Jeremy Piven, but I am not very good at being an obsessed fan. I discovered him when he played Ellen's cousin Spence on "Ellen." He's darkish complected, looks good with some stubble, and has a tight little compact body (and a nicely hairy chest which he's been plucking or waxing of late, tsk, tsk...), but it was really just as much his persona on that show that I liked: charming ex-frat boy, a bit of a loose cannon but likeable and funny. I watched "Ellen" (in prime time and later over and over in reruns on Lifetime) mostly for him, though the show's characters were all fun--as much as I loved that Ellen's character came out, that's when the show lost a lot of steam because the supporting characters got short shrift ever after.

After Ellen, Piven went right on to Cupid, and I watched the first couple of episodes but I never grew to like it, partly because Piven's persona was very different. I hunted down a few of his movies, and liked a charming little indie comedy romance called Just Write, but mostly he's better in movies as support, like being the best friend of the hero (The Family Man, Serendipity). He's naked in Very Bad Things, a violent dark comedy which is otherwise not really worth sitting through. Or course, he's excellent on HBO's Entourage, but as good as he is, I just can't bring myself to watch the show regularly--like most of the other projects he's been involved with, it's just not that interesting.

With the entire run of Ellen out on DVD and safe on our living room bookshelf, I've more or less decided that I don't need to keep keeping up with his oeuvre; however, I did enjoy the recent Smokin' Aces, a much better entry in the "violent dark comedy" genre than Very Bad Things, though it's really two kinds of movies: it begins as a Tarentinoish over-the-top crime comedy about a bunch of would-be assassins converging on a hotel in Reno to kill Piven, a cocaine-addicted stage magician (pictured above) who is threatening to talk to the Feds about his mob ties, but about 20 minutes from the end, it turns into a more serious thriller/puzzle like The Usual Suspects. The two halves don't mesh perfectly--the second half could have used a lot more plot and character development--but the movie is one of the better things he's done, and it also has the pleasure of a solid performance from Alicia Keyes as a lesbian hitwoman, and though Ryan Reynolds may never win an Oscar, he's pretty to look at.

I guess I shouldn't class Piven as a guilty pleasure, as he's an award-winning actor with a solid resume, but my interest in him has little to do with his acting ability and more with his looks and the persona he created over several seasons of a TV show. I have some pix of him up on my cubicle walls and he is the star of my DIY Starbucks tumbler. I watched a documentary TV special of him journeying to India and, honestly, I'm not sure I'd want to meet him (the picture below is as close as I'll ever get, me and a gigantic picture of Jeremy in a Gap store in Chicago). I just want to meet Cousin Spence (and maybe get him drunk), and that's why he's a guilty pleasure.