Entourage: Let's Blog It Out

Newsday colleague Rob Kahn scored an interview with Jeremy Piven at the U.S. Open on Tuesday afternoon. Have a look at what Piven said and what Kahn wrote.

“This is kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?” Jeremy Piven asked yesterday in tennis-land, where he was dividing his attention between Novak Djokovic (on the court) and David Mamet (on his lap).

The New York-born actor next week begins rehearsing Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” ahead of an Oct. 23 opening on Broadway. It’s a revival of the 1988 drama that was Madonna’s Broadway debut — and it’s why Piven had a dog-eared script balanced on his knees all afternoon.

“We have a short amount of time to mount this beast,” Piven said. “For me, it’s my Olympics.”

Yesterday marked the multi-tasking actor’s second day at Arthur Ashe Stadium. On Monday, he saw Serena Williams in her fourth-round victory, then took the court himself, smacking balls into the audience at the bequest of USTA honchos.

“It’s every kid’s dream to lob balls at people,” Piven said, equating the experience to “performing theater-in-the round.” “One of the perks of being a person of some profile is that you get to walk onto a court that you have no business being on.”

“Speed-the-Plow” is about Hollywood dealmakers, not a stretch for Piven, who plays name-dropping power agent Ari Gold on HBO’s “Entourage.”

The series begins its fifth year on Sunday. The season finale, already wrapped, was filmed around Queens, which made it “like playing a home game.”

“I really feel like this is my favorite of all the seasons, because it’s finally getting to something,” Piven said. “If it’s just about a bunch of guys [looking for sex] because their best friend is famous, that’s not really that interesting. You start to wonder, ‘So what else have you got for me?’ This season, you’ll see.”