Entourage: The Movie or Celebrities, Celebrities, and More Celebrities! as I’m calling it is set to open sometime next year and by the amount of rumors floating around the internet, every breathing celebrity in Hollywood is set to make a cameo. So far we’ve got Kate Upton and Emily Ratajkowski on track to appear, and that’s just in the bikini models bracket.
With all the models, athletes, and movie stars who will be popping up in the movie to sling zingers at Johnny Drama, we mustn’t forget that the real crew — the bro’est of bros — is what made Entourage such a guilty pleasure on Sunday nights. The show, loosely based on Mark Wahlberg’s real-life entourage, is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of its premiere. So of course there’s no better time to pull up some facts on the early beginnings, like how “Hug it out, bitch” came to be the most over-used phrase of 2005.
1. Kevin Connolly was ready to shift from acting to directing before joining the show. Connolly had directed a few episodes of his television series Unhappily Ever After and was rethinking the way he wanted to approach show business in 2003 after being dissatisfied with the acting roles offered to him. Connolly told Yahoo, that series creator Doug Ellin made him rethink his approach to acting and he decided to give the show a shot.
2. Johnny Drama is a take on Mark Wahlberg’s cousin. Johnny Drama’s goofy personality is based on Wahlberg’s real-life cousin, Johnny Alves, hence Turtle commenting in the pilot episode that he thought Drama was Vince’s cousin until the age of 14. Watch this clip of Johnny Alves on the reality show Wahlburgers and you’ll see where Kevin Dillon pulled inspiration for the character.
3. Whenever they boys were watching boxing it was always the same match. Anytime throughout the series you saw the guys watching a boxing match on television, it was the exact same match. It seems like an incredibly trivial detail, but considering that HBO has a good amount of televised boxing matches under its belt, they could have mixed up the footage a little more often.
4. Jeremy Piven coined “Let’s hug it out, bitch” after hugging Kevin Connolly. Kevin Connolly revealed in a Yahoo interview last year, that the show’s famous line developed after Piven caught on that Connolly didn’t necessarily enjoy having his personal space invaded. As Connolly tells it, the line was “Should we hug it out?” and that turned into Piven grabbing him and saying, “Get over here you little bitch.”
5. The license plate on the Lincoln is a reference to their hometown. The license plate we see on the 1965 Lincoln Continental at the beginning of each episode reads “QSV 11427.” This is the zip code of Vince’s hometown, Queens Village, New York.
6. Johnny Drama absorbed the character of Cal. In the pilot episode’s earlier draft, the guys had a live-in chef named Cal. By the time the pilot was shot, Drama’s character had absorbed most of Cal’s lines, taking over as chef for the house and Cal became the Entourage member that never was.
7. Season 1’s “The Scene” was loosely based on Mark Wahlberg’s Boogie Nights experience. Episode 7 of season 1, “The Scene” introduced us to one of the show’s more eccentric characters, Billy Walsh. If it’s been a while since you saw the episode, the guys meet with Billy about directing Queen’s Boulevard and Billy pitches a very homoerotic scene for Vince’s character. This situation is loosely based on Mark Wahlberg’s own experience while working on the sex scenes with Paul Thomas Anderson in Boogie Nights.
8. Jeremy Piven only considered doing the show because it was on HBO. Piven told the A.V. Club that when he was given the script, he thought the idea sounded funny, but didn’t put much weight on it since Ari was the sixth lead in the show. Not surprisingly, it was the fact that HBO was behind the series that convinced him to go after the part.
“So I was like, ‘Man, there’s a lot to play here, and HBO’s the place to be—they’ve got The Sopranos and Sex And The City—so it’s a company you want to be in. …So I went in and met them, and I had fun. I went in with, like, a power suit on—I dressed the role—and talked about who I thought the guy was.”
