No Miso Soup for You!

Jeremy Piven plays a smarmy, morally bankrupt Hollywood agent on the HBO show Entourage, and it would seem that he’s engaging in a bit of Method acting these days.

During the Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Piven and his entourage got a table at Nobu Matsuhisa, dined, paid, and left. All that would have been business as usual had Piven not decided to leave a tip in the form of an Entourage DVD rather than the usual medium of actual money.

VH1’s Best Week Ever comments, “[I]t is becoming increasingly clear that Piven plays Ari the Loveable Asshole so well because that’s who he really is.” Except for the loveable part, right?

According to a report in the New York Daily News, this tip of sorts wasn’t left because Piven’s waiter was a huge Entourage fan who hadn’t the means to buy his or her own copies of the show. No, reportedly Piven wasn’t exactly thrilled with his time at Nobu—which is very odd, considering he and his party of 12 walked in without reservations and still managed to secure a table on a busy night—
and even snapped at the manager, “Thanks for nothing,” as he and his hangers-on left the restaurant. A Nobu employee who may or may not have been the stiffed waiter ran after Piven’s party and flung the insulting DVD at them.

Apparently, Piven has now been asked to stay away from all Nobu restaurants, but Piven is ignoring this and has stated (from the safety of his rep) that he is a fan of all the Nobu restaurants and thoroughly enjoyed his time there.

See, I think everyone is reading this all wrong. This is how I think it went down: Piven realized that the waiter didn’t immediately recognize him as the guy who played Droz in PCU, the random checkout guy in Singles, or the drunk freaker in Say Anything, so he decided—quite altruistically, in fact—to educate the poor, benighted restaurant employee. Maybe the server would have been happier with 15 episodes of Piven’s canceled Cupid.

Or, here’s another idea: Piven has become so successful that he no longer knows what actual money looks like. See, he has people to wipe his mouth, brush his teeth, and pay his bills. To him, maybe that big round silvery DVD was an extra-large dime.

OR! Piven heard someone call Entourage a “cash cow” and figured the two were interchangeable.

We should really pity Piven for living such a sheltered, brain-dead existence. I know I do.