Isaac Liev Schreiber ( LEE-ev SHRY-bər; born October 4, 1967) is an American actor. He has received several accolades including a Tony Award as well as nominations for nine Primetime Emmy Awards and five Golden Globe Awards.
Schreiber's early film roles include Mixed Nuts (1994), Party Girl (1995), The Daytrippers (1996), and Big Night (1996). He acted in the first three Scream films (1996–2000), Ransom (1996), The Hurricane (1999), Hamlet (2000), Kate & Leopold (2001), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Painted Veil (2006), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Pawn Sacrifice (2014), and Spotlight (2015). He acted in the Wes Anderson films Isle of Dogs (2018), The French Dispatch (2021), and Asteroid City (2023). He made his directorial film debut with Everything Is Illuminated (2005).
He made his Broadway debut in In the Summer House (1992). He earned the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for playing Richard Roma in the David Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross (2005). He was Tony-nominated for the Eric Bogosian play Talk Radio (2007), the Arthur Miller revival A View from the Bridge (2010) and the John Patrick Shanley revival Doubt (2024). He also acted in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (2016).
On television, he most notably portrayed the titular character in the Showtime drama series Ray Donovan (2013–2020). He reprised the role in the television film Ray Donovan: The Movie (2022). The role has earned him nominations for three Primetime Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards. He also portrayed Orson Welles in the HBO film RKO 281 (1999), and Otto Frank in the Nat Geo miniseries A Small Light (2023).
Early life and education
Isaac Liev Schreiber was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Heather Milgram, a painter, and Tell Schreiber, an actor and carpenter. His father was Protestant and his mother is Jewish. His maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram, emigrated from the Russian Empire. Milgram, who was the most significant male in Schreiber's youth, played the cello and owned Pierre-Auguste Renoir etchings, and made his living by delivering meat to restaurants. His mother, who is an aficionada of classical music and Russian literature, has said that she named Liev after her favorite Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, while his father has stated that Schreiber was named after the doctor who saved his mother's life. His family nickname, adopted when Schreiber was a baby, is "Huggy".
When Schreiber was one year old, his family moved to the unincorporated rural community of Winlaw, in the southern interior of British Columbia. Over the next four years, his mother was hospitalized on several occasions and underwent therapy related to a bad experience on LSD that she had near the beginning of her marriage (in San Francisco), according to Schreiber's father. After Schreiber's father threatened to have Schreiber's mother admitted to a mental institution, Schreiber was kidnapped by his mother, eventually leading to his mother gaining full custody of him. They squatted on the Lower East Side in New York City.
Schreiber has described his mother as a "far-out hippie bohemian who hung out with William Burroughs". She was "a highly cultured eccentric" who earned a living by splitting her time between driving a cab and creating papier-mâché puppets." In 1983, his mother bought him a motorcycle on his 16th birthday to "promote fearlessness." The critic John Lahr wrote in a 1999 New Yorker profile that, "To a large extent, Schreiber's professional shape-shifting and his uncanny instinct for isolating the frightened, frail, goofy parts of his characters are a result of being forced to adapt to his mother's eccentricities. It's both his grief and his gift."
Her bohemian proclivities led to actions such as making Schreiber take the Hindu name Shiva Das, wear yoga shirts, consume a vegetarian diet, and briefly attend Satchidananda Ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut, when he was 12. Schreiber's mother also forbade her son from seeing color films. As a result, his favorite actors were Charlie Chaplin, Andrew Cartwright, and Basil Rathbone. In retrospect, Schreiber said in a 2008 interview that he appreciates his mother's influences, saying: "Since I've had Sasha, I've completely identified with everything my mother went through raising me... and I think her choices were inspired."
Subsequently, Schreiber attended Friends Seminary, a Quaker school. In high school, Liev played the bass clarinet.
Schreiber went on to attend Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he began his acting training at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, through the Five Colleges consortium. In March 1989, he played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice alongside Jeffrey Donovan. He later attended the Yale School of Drama, where he studied with Earle R. Gister and starred in Charles Evered's The Size of the World, directed by Walton Jones. He received a master's degree in drama from Yale in 1992. He also attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He originally wanted to be a screenwriter, eventually settling on acting.
Career
1992–2004: Early work and breakthrough
In 1992 Schreiber acted in the comedic play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald at the Classic Stage Company. The following year he made his Broadway debut as Eliot in the Jane Bowles play In the Summer House (1994) acting opposite Frances Conroy. That same year he made his feature film debut as Chris, a depressed trans woman in the Nora Ephron directed dark comedy film Mixed Nuts (1994) starring Steve Martin. In 1995 he had supporting roles in the independent films Mad Love and Party Girl. His first leading film roles in the Greg Mottola comedy-drama The Daytrippers and Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking were both released in 1996. Following Schreiber's string of supporting roles in various independent films, his big break came when he played the accused murderer Cotton Weary in the Scream trilogy of horror films. Though the success of the Scream trilogy led Schreiber to roles in several big-budget studio pictures, Entertainment Weekly wrote in 2007 that "Schreiber is [still] best known for such indie gems as Walking and Talking, The Daytrippers, and Big Night."
After Scream, Schreiber was cast as Orson Welles in the HBO film RKO 281 (1999). Laura Fries of Variety wrote of his performance, "Schreiber, as Welles, manages to capture the essence of a man of many passions, and creates a nice balance of hubris and self-loathing to give the part real depth". He earned nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film. He then played supporting roles in several studio films, including Ron Howard's 1996 remake of Ransom, the 1999 film The Hurricane, A Walk on the Moon (1999), the 2000 film adaptation of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke, and as a spy in The Sum of All Fears (2002) acting opposite Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman. He provided the narration for the HBO Special "Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team" about the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey team, He played the time-traveling ex-boyfriend of Meg Ryan in the romantic comedy-fantasy film Kate & Leopold (2001), also starring Hugh Jackman. The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, was another major film for Schreiber, stirring some controversy as it opened during a heated presidential election cycle.
Schreiber has narrated several documentaries, many of them aired as part of PBS series such as American Experience, Nova, and Secrets of the Dead from 2001 to 2011. He is the voice behind the television commercials for Infiniti. In 1995, he provided narration for the BBC/WGBH documentary co-production Rock & Roll. In 1994, he narrated Two Billion Hearts, the official film of 1994 FIFA World Cup.
Along with his screen work, Schreiber is…