Entourage is a TV show, soon to be a movie, about a movie star who does not know he is on a TV show, so ensconced is he within Entourage’s showbiz fiction that nevertheless limns showbiz reality. It is a hall of mirrors that is all too easy to get lost in on the way to the bar, twisted with famous faces that are sometimes themselves but sometimes another. And it has trapped even Adrian Grenier, who is Entourage’s Vincent Chase, but is also not Vincent Chase, to his own constant consternation.
Like a man who must choose whether to do or not do a movie, Grenier must ask himself every day whether to be or not to be Vincent Chase. “Some days, Adrian Grenier doesn’t want to be Adrian Grenier,” Page Six reports of these dark nightclubs of the soul, when Grenier longs to be a famous movie star who’s beloved of women and worshipped by man-children, instead of a semi-famous TV star who enjoys the same. In those moments, Grenier can only laugh.
“It’s funny because what people don’t know is I too wish that I was Vince,” Grenier laughs of this, life’s cruelest joke. To be Vince on the outside, but to never be Vince on the inside. But Doctor…. I am Pagliacci.
“I’m not, I play the character,” Grenier reminds us—and himself. Page Six says he does so with “a little sadness,” lamenting that he would love to have “a lifestyle with no consequences,” of the kind that makes for compelling television and now cinema. But “at the end of the day I go home and I’m me,” says Grenier of that moment when he must finally let slip the vacant gaze and plastered smile that is the Vincent Chase mask, and don the plastered gaze and vacant smile of ordinary Adrian Grenier.
Still, are we not nearing the day when “Adrian” and “Vince” shall no longer be cleaved in twain? When we are facing the imminent existence of an Entourage movie—the sort of film that would only be made in a work of consequence-free fiction like Entourage itself—are the lines dividing life and this imitation of life not growing paper-thin?
Vince Adrian Grenier certainly thinks so. “Now that Vince is directing himself in a movie, we’re closer and closer to life,” he says of this terrifying event horizon. And as he talks, Page Six relays that he is swarmed by lines of fans “in their cutest heels and skirts, while others looked like extras from the set.” Grenier also casually remarks that some have even approached him at public urinals demanding he “hug it out”—at the urinal! While he is urinating! The world transformed into anonymous sex objects and background players, people spouting random catchphrases, stories of celebrity that aren’t especially funny… Surely the doors between our world and Entourage are now swinging open.
“It’s important to keep an eye on what’s important and always looking to find ways to nourish your spirit and mind and to challenge yourself,” Grenier babbled, his grip on reality loosening already.
With so little time left on this astral plane, and with the importance of keeping an eye on things that are important remaining important, Grenier recently embarked on directing his own movie—much like Vincent Chase, though it’s important to remember the importance that they’re different people. Notably, Grenier’s movie, recently funded through the generous donations of Kickstarter and Leonardo DiCaprio, will find him hunting for the “lonely whale”—a story that similarly blurs the lines between fiction and real life, Moby Dick and Not Moby Dick.
“A lot like Moby Dick, but it is not like Moby Dick in that we are not hunting this whale,” Grier said, drawing another crucial distinction. In that sense, Entourage is also a lot like Moby Dick.
Instead, Grenier’s film will traverse the seas, attempting to locate a whale whose lower-frequency song ensures it will always be calling out—saying, “I am here”—only to never be heard, nor loved as much the other, more popular whales he only resembles on the outside. And as we know now, it is also a search for the “lonely whale” within himself.