Sweetwater Star Jeremy Piven Comments on Appearing in Rush Hour 4 (Exclusive)

Sweetwater star Jeremy Piven would love a chance to bring back his fast-talking Versace salesman from Rush Hour 2, if Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker could find a use for him in the planned fourth installment of the action-comedy franchise. Piven, best known for his role on Entourage, was a character actor for years, best known for minor roles as comic-relief sidekicks and the occasional starring turn in comedies like PCU. Not long before blowing up on HBO, he had a brief role in Rush Hour 2, where he jokes he’s only a little bit bitter that he didn’t get the massive $20 million payday the stars did.

Speaking with ComicBook.com’s Chris Killian in support of the new drama Sweetwater, Piven said that he would love to get back on set with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker for a fourth Rush Hour. He also broke down a little bit about how his scene-stealing cameo came to be.

“From your mouth to God’s ears,” Piven said. “How great would it be to be back on set with Jackie and Chris Tucker?”

“That was me as that hungry Chicago stage actor before Entourage,” Piven added. “Look at that cameo — the way that I have a career is, I would take these roles, and I would be ready to improvise and I would write down all the possibilities of what I could do or whatnot. If the director doesn’t yell ‘cut,’ I just keep going, and that’s what that role is. I had a blast. Poor Jackie Chan, looking at me, he had no idea what I was going to say, and suddenly I’m just speaking gibberish. It made it into the film, and I had the time of my life. They each made $20 million, I made $270.”

The first movie released in 1998, and it took until 2007 to get the third and final installment into theaters. The series, which stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, pitted a motormouthed LAPD officer (Tucker) who is given the unwanted responsibility of working with a Hong Kong police inspector (Chan) on a high-profile kidnapping case. As tends to be the case with adversarial buddy-cop movies, the two grew much closer by the end of the first movie, and would be forced to work together for years after, with the acrimony and culture clashes that defined the first one still part of their dynamic.

Rush Hour was enough of a success that, even without Chan and Tucker, Ted Lasso and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence revived it for TV in 2016. It ran for only a single 13-episode season before being shuffled off the air, but that still doesn’t mean the franchise is done. Back in December, Jackie Chan said that Rush Hour 4 is in development.  

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.