Acting TOUGH

Liev Schreiber brings a nuanced approach to portraying such hard characters as Ray Donovan, while off-screen his passions include helping the victims of the war in Ukraine

- DAVID SAVONA

Liev Schreiber doesn't like what he sees. He has his eyes on a computer screen, scrutinizing a digital photograph. It's a gloriously sunny (if slightly cool) spring day in downtown Manhattan, and the penthouse apartment of the Standard Hotel has been turned into a photo studio. The photo on the screen is his own.

“I got old,” he says, his rich, familiar voice filling the room. He looks closer, scratches at a beard flecked with gray, then turns his face to the side. He jokes that what he thinks is an off-kilter look could be the result of having slept on one side of his face more than the other when he was a baby. He's entertaining the room, throwing jabs at himself, acting more like an old friend showing up to a party than a veteran star of stage, television and film.

No matter what the 57-year-old says, his is a look many would envy: lean of belly, broad of shoulder and six-foot-three, tall for an actor. The same can be said of his career. Schreiber (whose first name is pronounced Lee-EV, but often mispronounced as Leev) is a multiplatform talent. He's perhaps best known for his seven-year-run on television as the titular tough guy Ray Donovan. His film roles include the hard-driving editor Marty Baron in Oscar's Best Picture of 2016, Spotlight, and the brainwashed politician in the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Meryl Streep and Denzel Washington. His start came in stage acting, including several major Shakespearean roles, and he won the Tony for his role in the 2005 revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

While he's best known as an actor, lately Schreiber has had far weightier issues on his mind, namely the war in Ukraine. In March 2022 he founded the charity BlueCheck Ukraine to assist the people of Ukraine, who have been invaded by Russia.