Jeremy Piven steps back into the spotlight, from a hypnotist’s dark portal to talk of working again
jeremy piven is appearing at the center of two very different conversations: one on screen, where he plays a celebrity hypnotist who pulls a client into dangerous territory in the Manchester-set mystery Past Life, and another off screen, where Adrian Grenier says the two are “ready to work” as talk of a possible Entourage continuation resurfaces.
What is Jeremy Piven doing in Past Life?
In Past Life, Jeremy Piven plays Timothy Bevan, described as a celebrity hypnotist who claims he can help people access past incarnations. The film is set in Manchester and also stars Pixie Lott and Aneurin Barnard.
The story follows Jason, a traumatised Manchester journalist portrayed by Barnard, who is preparing to return to Syria after witnessing jihadists slit a colleague’s throat six years earlier. Just before leaving, Jason volunteers on live TV to be hypnotised by Bevan. The session takes a darker turn: Jason is transported into a vivid “hall of horrors, ” and one portal reveals what appears to be a horrific stabbing committed by his previous self.
Back in his day-to-day life, Jason’s pregnant wife, Claira, played by Lott, pushes him to return to Bevan in an attempt to shut the door on what the hypnosis has opened. The journalist and the hypnotist then act as “temporal detectives, ” tracking down clues connected to the serial-killer predecessor suggested by the vision. The film’s visual language includes giallo-tinted prowler-cam, and the first crime scene is on Mangle Street.
The film layers in moments where memory and reality blur: Jason’s arthritis compression glove mirrors the killer’s sheathed hands, and a blues musician’s howls signal unsettling psychic eruptions in waking life. That musician also appears in a poster pinned up at the home of a true-crime podcaster, played by Nicholas Farrell, who is consulted by Jason and Bevan.
As the plot tightens, a psychology lecturer played by Tim McInnerny enters the frame. The narrative gestures at ideas of projection and false memory, though it is also described as leaning into plot contrivances in its final stretch. In the film’s dynamic, Piven’s character is marked by “haughty defensiveness, ” a texture that helps prop up the story’s tension.
Past Life is set for release in UK cinemas on 20 March, with a digital release on 6 April (ET dates not stated in the available details).
Is an Entourage revival happening, and where does Jeremy Piven fit in?
Adrian Grenier has said he is open to a revival of Entourage and has described himself and Jeremy Piven as “ready to work” on a continuation of the series, which originally aired on HBO from 2004 to 2011. Grenier said this while discussing a recent run-in that became a “mini reunion” shared on Instagram.
The reunion came after Grenier, who has lived on a sustainable farm near Austin, Texas, since 2020, saw Piven in the audience while he was on stage. Grenier also said that Jeremy Piven had “just moved” to Austin. In the Instagram caption quoted in the available details, Piven joked about finding Grenier in Austin “farming the land” and “doing Indies, ” adding that he had not seen Grenier in almost a decade.
Grenier’s remarks about returning to work were accompanied by a joke that they were ready “until AI comes to drag us off set. ” He also said he would consider making a full-time return to acting if opportunities keep coming. Grenier connected that possibility to the scale of film and television investment in Texas, saying the Texas state government has put $2. 5 billion into film and television projects in the state and that three movie studios are being built not too far from him.
Mark Wahlberg, identified as a co-executive producer of Entourage, has said he would “definitely support” a resurgence of some kind, calling the show a “cultural phenomenon” and praising the cast. Representatives for HBO did not provide a comment in the available details.
Why these two stories matter to audiences right now
Placed side by side, the two storylines show the range of roles and public attention moving around the same name. On one track, jeremy piven anchors a low-budget British mystery as a hypnotist whose promises of past-life access lead into peril, as a journalist and his wife try to understand what was unleashed in a single televised session. On the other, an off-screen meeting in Austin feeds a different kind of suspense: the open-ended question of whether a well-known ensemble might reunite for another chapter, in an industry Grenier suggests is shifting geographically and financially.
Image caption (alt text): jeremy piven in a news-style collage theme, from Past Life’s hypnotist role to renewed Entourage revival talk
