For Your Consideration: Supporting Actors – Jeremy Piven and Michael Hogan

[In Week One of Cultural Learnings’ 59^th Annual Emmy Awards Nominations Preview, we’re looking at possible contenders for the Supporting Actor awards in both comedy and drama. Today, we present our second set of candidates. For all candidates, Click Here]

Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy

Jeremy Piven (Ari Gold)

Entourage

HBO’s Entourage has been receiving attention from the Screen Actor’s Guild and the Golden Globes for the past two years, and it is about ready to break through in a big way in the series category at the Emmys this year. However, ahead of the show itself, Jeremy Piven won an Emmy in this category last year. While there is no question that the show as a whole has its merits, it is Piven’s performance that has often garnered the most attention, and for good reason.

Ari Gold is a high-powered Hollywood agent, but you wouldn’t know it from his behaviour. He’s crash, rude, vulgar, quick to anger, neurotic, and usually out of sorts for a variety of different reasons. All of these things could become overbearing, but Piven’s performance sells us on Ari’s inner sanity while still providing some hilarious and occasionally touching character moments.

And that is what makes Ari such a strong supporting player: despite being outside of the titular entourage, Ari is constantly a presence in their lives, and when the show cuts to Ari’s non-Vince related projects it’s actually a welcome break. He’s strong enough to sustain his own storylines, but plays a fantastic role within the core ones as well. He’s a strong foil, a brilliant performer, and without a doubt is going to garner his third straight nomination for this role.

Episode Selection: Manic Monday (Airdate:April 22^nd, 2007)

While Entourage’s entire third season will be eligible, it is this episode from just a month ago that represents Ari’s finest moment. Asked to fire an agent, Ari is unable to pull the trigger (despite it being an experience he relished in the past). His therapist tells him that it’s because he’s still hung up over losing Vince as a client. Ari, still unable to get it out of his system, tracks down his therapist on her day off (on a golf course) and in the process gets his anger back and delivers a memorable firing to the agent in question. It is an arc that deals with his emotional connection with Vince, his more hilarious moments, and even his relationship with his wife. It’s over-the-top, but grounded. And it’s the best performance to win Jeremy Piven his Emmy.

YouTube: “Manic Monday”

Best Supporting Actor in a Drama

Michael Hogan (Col. Tigh)

Battlestar Galactica

While I am personally more fond of the performance of James Callis as Gaius Baltar, I cannot deny what PopWatch and others are saying: if there is ever a chance for Battlestar Galactica to get some attention, it might well be in Hogan’s performance as the alcoholic mess that Sol Tigh became on New Caprica after the occupation. Newly eyepatched after time spent in a Cylon prison, he emerged from that experience a broken man.

That broken man that had to bring himself to come to terms with what happened on New Caprica, and he never really recovered: he is still the same broken man when he takes the stand at Baltar’s trial at the season’s conclusion. This does make his performance somewhat one note, but yet also all the more tragic. When we, as an audience, see what has truly happened to him, we see that it all makes sense: no man could recover from the things he had to do, the decisions he had to make.And that’s what gives him a shot a this: out of all of Battlestar Galactica’s performances, his has the most emotional resonance and distance from the show’s sci-fi elements. Callis’ turn as the president turned prophet is a strong one, and also has a shot, but I think that Hogan has perhaps the most powerful and universal character arc in the series’ short life. And thus, Michael Hogan could hear his name called on July 19^th.

Episode Selection: Exodus (Airdate: October 16^th and 23^rd)

It was the decision that changed Tigh’s life, and yet one he had to make. He sacrificed everything for the resistance: his eye, his sanity, but more importantly his wife Ellen. In his final moments on New Caprica before Galactica returned to rescue them, Tigh’s wife makes a decision to steal an integral map that puts the entire rescue mission in jeopardy. As a result, Tigh takes care of it by poisoning his wife. At episode’s end, as everyone is celebrating their rescue, Tigh cannot. He is forever changed. That, my friends, is a powerful character arc.

Youtube: “Exodus”