Actor Jeremy Piven says people need to start listening to one another.
The 60-year-old actor recently spoke with Fox News Digital about his transition from acting to stand-up comedy and his 2025 U.S. National Stand-up Tour. During the conversation, Piven said the culture of outrage has gone too far — and it’s hurting people’s ability to listen to one another.
“I think that what I’m experiencing is this kind of need to be right, and that need to be right and hold on to one’s beliefs or preconceived notion of what your beliefs are, and then if you are defined by your judgments, and then you introduce something that is the inverse of that, and I’m so tied to it, and that I get triggered,” he explained.
He said he thinks that if people “could let go of all that and really hear each other,” they would “understand that issues are nuanced.” Piven then admitted to feeling “hesitant to even unpack” his feelings on the topic because people are quick to start “labeling each other and trying to vilify each other based on where you’re coming from.”
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Piven further explained that comedians should not be afraid of cancel culture and censor themselves out of fear of triggering their audience, saying: “Creativity at its core is the ability to be totally present and to not monitor yourself.”
“So I think the enemy of creativity is being self-conscious and trying to figure out how it’s going to be received,” he said. “And I think authenticity is the highest vibration and, you know the ones, the comics that we gravitate to the most, are the most authentic ones, the comics that we gravitate to the most are the most authentic.”
The “Serendipity” actor transitioned from acting to stand-up comedy in 2017, and began touring full-time by 2019.
He said while people may think “Oh wow, okay, this seems like new territory for him,” he said he “grew up on the stage doing improv and sketch comedy,” so this has always been a part of his background.
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“I could literally run down the street and come back and come back with material. It’s everywhere. It’s absolutely everywhere,” he said about where he got the inspiration for his act. “I mean, life is insane, and we’re all trying to do the best that we can. And hopefully we’re growing and learning every day and I unpack it all on stage.”
When it comes to his career as a stand-up comedian, Piven said it helped him realize “that I’ve taken myself way too seriously at times” and that if people were “a little more silly and have fun, life would be more interesting.”
Piven’s breakthrough role in Hollywood was Ari Gold in the hit HBO comedy series, “Entourage,” which earned him three consecutive Emmy Awards and one Golden Globe Award. In his opinion, the show would still be a success today.
“I think it would, I think, because of the times that we’re in, it would be such fertile ground to explore with someone like Ari Gold, for instance, who in these times would be a bit of a relic,” he said. “And I think he would stay he would walk in a lot of landmines, and it would be really funny to watch.”
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He continued: “So I think it would do really well. You know, there’s a whole new generation of kids that have been binging it since the pandemic. So we got a whole new audience along with the ones that haven’t gone anywhere. And I think if we didn’t f— it up, it would do really well.”
