Broadway star Pablo Schreiber makes his name
NEW YORK (AP) - Pablo Schreiber may not have the most recognizable name on Broadway this season, but his performance in Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” has cemented his reputation as one of his generation’s most promising talents.
But despite glowing reviews and a Tony nomination for his turn as a young idealist in the 2006 revival of Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing,” the lanky 31-year-old has trouble accepting praise.
When recently reminded about a reviewer who compared his acting to Marlon Brando’s work in “On the Waterfront,” Schreiber bursts into an embarrassed laugh.
“Oh, shut up,” he groans. “That’s a little silly, because – well, that was just over the top.”
In director Robert Falls’ ambitious revival of O’Neill’s dark and difficult tragedy, Schreiber plays a young man trapped in a destructive love triangle with his father, played by Brian Dennehy, and his father’s young wife.
The play’s marketing campaign made much of Schreiber’s chiseled abs and sexual chemistry with co-star Carla Gugino. In person he towers above his co-stars at 6 feet 4 inches tall, and is appealingly boyish.
“It’s a beast,” he says about the play over brunch.
“There’s just absolutely no irony in O’Neill,” he says. “He’s the least ironic, most earnest writer you can imagine. And to jump off that cliff and to go through those feelings in an earnest way and hope that the audience is going to come along for the ride – it’s terrifying.”
The play’s violence is physical as well as emotional. “I have the bruises to show for it,” Gugino says later. “We really have to go to the depths of our soul every time. There’s no phoning this in.”
Schreiber, who’s married with a 7-month-old son, is perhaps best known for his performance as a dockworker in HBO’s crime drama “The Wire” – the role that drew the comparison to Brando – and for “Awake and Sing.”
His older half-brother Liev Schreiber – they share the same father – happened to be one of the actors announcing the list of Tony nominees in a live telecast that year. He woke Pablo with a text message an hour before the nominations aired. “He didn’t tell me,” Pablo Schreiber recalls, “He just said, ‘You better watch this.”‘
Schreiber was not as fortunate with “Desire Under the Elms.” After failing to receive any Tony nods, the play will close on Sunday.
“I think being shut out in terms of Tony nominations was a real disappointment for everyone involved,” Schreiber says, “but everybody who sees it seems to be really moved and affected by it. And that’s all you can really ask for.”
Schreiber he has built an impressive resume. On screen, he was a skateboarding guru in the 2005 movie “Lords of Dogtown,” with Heath Ledger. On stage, he’s done off-Broadway productions, including Neil LaBute’s “reasons to be pretty,” which won Schreiber a Drama Desk award.
“There was this sexual energy that he sort of radiated,” Falls said of Schreiber’s performance. Despite his pedigree – his father, Tell Schreiber, is also an actor and director – Schreiber did not seem destined for Broadway at an early age.
He grew up in the Canadian Rocky Mountains of British Columbia. “Up in the mountains, middle of nowhere, town of 300, nearest neighbor was a mile away,” he says. “There were two forms of work you could do up there. You were either growing pot or you were logging.”
His parents split when he was 12 and Schreiber moved to Seattle with his father. He acted in high school plays, starring as Tevye in a production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” but his first love was basketball. After high school, he enrolled at the University of San Francisco, where he hoped to win a spot on its basketball team.
“I was not really athletically talented enough to compete at that level,” Schreiber says. He ended up auditioning for Carnegie Mellon’s drama program “kind of on a whim,” he says. He got in.
He didn’t meet his older half-brother until he was 6. The brothers didn’t get to know each for another decade, when a 16-year-old Pablo visited Liev in New York when he was performing in “The Tempest.”
Only once did Pablo Schreiber ask his brother to connect him with
a casting director: “His advice, which was the best advice he’s given me was, ‘I’d be happy to call this person for you, but is that how you want to have a career? Do you want to be the guy who’s getting what he gets because he has a famous brother?”‘
Without his brother’s help, Schreiber landed an agent when he graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2000. His first job was a small part in the 2001 comedy “Bubble Boy.”
“The big turning point was getting ‘The Wire,”‘ Schreiber says. “It was just an incredible, incredible show that I was so fortunate to be a part of.”
By KRISTEN A. LEE Associated Press Writer
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