THE FAMILY BUSINESS
Like his half brother Liev, Pablo Schreiber found his way to TV,
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.— Pablo Schreiber didn’t grow up with TV, but he’s all over it now.
The 35-year-old actor joins Blair Underwood this fall on the new, revised version of the wheelchair detective series Ironside. He sat with the rest of the cast last week at the NBC portion of the Television Critics Association summer press tour.
Asked if saw the original series, Schreiber said, “I grew up in Canada, so I wasn’t raised on TV.”
“Whaaat?” said every Canadian reporter in the room. I asked him after the session what dark corner of Canada he hailed from.
Schreiber told me he grew up in the Rockies in the southern interior, near Nelson, B.C., and further to that, he was born on a hippie commune where TV was verboten.
“They were all sort of progressive human beings, they didn’t want their children to be exposed to the evils of TV and now here I am,” he says.
Where he is, is all over TV. He’s currently co-starring in one of the buzz shows of the summer, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black. This fall, counting Orange, he’ll be on four shows: he’s returning from last spring’s cliffhanger to the Sept. 25 season premiere of Law & Order: SVU. A week later, Oct. 2, he makes his debut as a tough NYPD cop on Ironside (NBC and Global).
Three days later, he can be seen as a young Boston attorney assigned to write judgments for a Supreme Court justice in the real life drama Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (HBO Canada).
Despite all this exposure, Schreiber is still not on every reporter’s radar. This one told him the hippie commune upbringing he described sounded a lot like that of another actor, the guy who stars in the Showtime drama Ray Donovan (seen in Canada on The Movie Network/ Movie Central).
“You’re kidding me, right?” said Schreiber. “He’s my half-brother.”
Of course. Pablo Schreiber/Liev Schreiber. D’oh.
Schreiber patiently unscrambled their parentage. The story of the two brothers’ upbringing is too complicated to tell here but will someday make a hell of a movie.
Actor Liev’s half-brother Pablo stayed in B.C. until he was 12, when his dad moved his part of the family to Seattle
Suffice to say that, after their parents split, Liev — 10 years older than Pablo — lived a bohemian life in New York with his mother, whom he once described as a “highly cultured eccentric.” Custody battles and private detective searches kept them constantly on the move.
It would take the UN to sort out the heritages of their extended families.
Pablo stayed in B.C. until he was 12, when his dad moved his part of the family to Seattle. “We grew up on different sides of the country,” is Pablo’s shorthand of the story.
The father had been an acting teacher and Pablo — named after one of his dad’s literary heroes, the poet Pablo Neruda — figures his dad’s unfulfilled acting ambitions probably rubbed off on the two boys. “Probably unconsciously with Liev and more consciously with me,” he says.
Liev’s mother also forbade television and even the watching of colour movies well into his teens, leading the boy to embrace Charlie Chaplin as one of his favourite actors. After the move to Seattle, Pablo played high school basketball in San Francisco and studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh before graduating and moving to New York. So it was a “long and circuitous route” from a B.C. commune to the Broadway stage, but both boys found their separate ways there. When Pablo was finally on his own he started playing catch-up with television, binge viewing before that concept became popular. “I spent every waking hour watching ESPN and Cinemax and Showtime,” he says. Even though he didn’t subscribe to pay cable, he watched the latter two scrambled, “because every 15 seconds it would pop in and you would see a boob.” Otherwise, he was busy performing on and off Broadway. He made his professional debut in Blood Orange and was nominated for a Tony Award for his Broadway debut in a revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! He also scored a memorable role in HBO’s critically acclaimed The Wire and turned up on TV in everything from Weeds to White Collar to The Good Wife. A freelancer without a contract, he was in the middle of shooting the first season of Orange Is the New Black when he auditioned for Ironside. He got the part and is thrilled to be “surrounded by a group of incredibly creative and wonderful cocollaborators. I love this show with all my heart.” Whether he’ll be allowed to pop back into Orange is still being “worked out,” says Schreiber. As for juggling four shows at once, he agrees it’s a nice problem to have. “I’m not complaining.”