Jeremy Piven may be a decade nearly a removed from his last outing as Ari Gold, the super-agent driving the plot in Entourage, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still repping his old clients. Speaking with ComicBook.com in support of Sweetwater, his new drama about the integration of the NBA, Piven maintains that Vinnie Chase remains the definitive Aquaman, even now that Jason Momoa has a handful of appearances in the role and a billion-dollar blockbuster behind him. Chase, of course, is a fictional character — he’s the actor played by Adrian Grenier in Entourage, who famously starred in an Aquaman movie in-universe. At the time, superheroes had not yet taken over Hollywood, so the idea of a big-budget movie centered around a character most mainstream audiences knew nothing about, seemed pretty silly.
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Of course, it’s a lot sillier when all you know is that the guy wears orange and talks to fish, and a lot more marketable when he’s a mountain of tattooed muscle. You have to give Chase some credit for making a more conventional, potentially lame version of Aquaman work at all.
“You know, I have to be true to my guy, Ari Gold,” Piven said when ComicBook.com’s Chris Killian asked who was the better Aquaman. “I immediately almost went into Ari Gold, but I have to say Vinnie Chase. My guy Vinnie Chase. Let’s go, we’ve got to get him back on the board!”
Piven played the role of Ari Gold from 2004 until 2011 on the beloved HBO dramedy, and then returned to the role in 2015 with an Entourage film, which earned $49 million against a budget of somewhere between $25 million and $39 million — enough to keep it from being a bomb, but not enough to get it a sequel right away. Fans are still hoping for more, of course, but after eight years, it seems like the best opportunity for more from the world of Entourage would have to come in the form of a legacy sequel another five or ten years from now.
In Sweetwater, Hall of Famer Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton makes history as the first African American to sign an NBA contract, forever changing how the game of basketball is played. The film stars Everett Osborne in the title role, along with Cary Elwes, Richard Dreyfuss, Kevin Pollak, and Eric Roberts. Sweetwater is in theaters now.
