NYU grad Bryan Greenberg, 31, has worked his way up from bit parts on TV shows to star in the Wall Street movie “The Good Guy.” But his sexiest role is playing an up-and-coming fashion designer in HBO’s hot new show “How to Make It in America” – so he’s our go-to guy for pointers on making it in New York City.
1. Make sure the deli guy knows you.
Once the guy at the deli below your apartment starts knowing your sandwich before you’ve even ordered it, then you’re no longer a stranger in New York City. That’s a major accomplishment.
2. Know what you want to do.
I’ve been kind of fortunate to know that I always wanted to be an actor and a musician. So I never really strayed from that because I was like, “All right, that’s what I came here to do.”
3. Put yourself out there.
When it comes to making money, you can’t stick with one thing. Sure, I was an actor, but I was also working as a mortgage broker, a waiter, a caterer, a bartender. You’ve got to move around and be shifty and hustle. I was hustling on all ends and going to school at the same time — and auditioning. I didn’t do a whole lot of sleeping.
4. But don’t have a plan B.
If you give yourself an out, you’ll take it. The acting world is so competitive that I knew if I gave myself some sort of backup plan I would never follow through. I would take it because there’s so much rejection and hardship. You’ve just got to convince yourself to go for it if you want to succeed.
5. Find a roommate.
After NYU, I had loans to pay off and rent to pay. It was all about raising funds, getting a roommate, and then getting your girlfriend to move in. It was three people in a small, converted two-bedroom in the East Village, but that’s what we could afford.
6. Work hard, get lucky.
Success doesn’t just happen. I worked really hard to get where I am today. At the same time, I’ve been fortunate to be presented with opportunities. But I wouldn’t say that’s complete luck, because that would discredit all the years of studying and working and going for it.
7. Fall down, get back up.
I remember auditioning during the final round of a Broadway show. I actually got to go on the stage and the bright lights were hitting me on the face. I was ready and all of a sudden I had an out-of-body experience and I was just watching myself audition and screwing it all up. I just tucked my tail between my legs and walked out of there. It was pouring outside and I walked like all the way down to the East Village from Times Square. The whole time, I was thinking, “What am I doing?” That was my lowest point, but I just picked myself back up the next day and started looking for more auditions.
8. Take advantage of New York City.
I feel like there’s a rhythm to the city that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Fall into that rhythm and things just happen. I love running into people on the street and just seeing crazy interactions between strangers. As an artist, you’ve got to be a sponge and there’s no better place to be a sponge than in New York. There are so many crazy stories that unfold every day that you’ll see just by walking the streets.
HBO’s new series “How to Make It in America” comes from the same producing team as “Entourage” — but the thing you should know about it before anything else is that, aside from exploring the bond between guys and airing on HBO, it’s not a whole lot like “Entourage.”
Whereas Vinny Chase and his boys made it to the top and never really fell that far from it, “How to Make It” is about what it’s like to be on the bottom of the heap and looking for a way up. “It’s a street-level show,” is how creator Ian Edelman puts it. “It’s the beginning of a journey.”
The show stars Bryan Greenberg (“October Road”) and Victor Rasuk (“Stop-Loss,” “Raising Victor Vargas”) as Ben and Cam, long-time friends and would-be fashion moguls who have big ideas but less ability to execute them. The show follows their struggles to start a denim line — how they luck into the fabric is part of the story in Sunday’s (Feb. 14) premiere — and make their names in the business. Luis Guzman, Lake Bell, Eddie Kaye Thomas and Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi also star.
Here are four other things you should know going into the show.
Comedy with a side of drama. “How to Make It” has plenty of funny moments, but as with shows like “Hung,” “Nurse Jackie” and “United States of Tara,” it mixes in more dramatic material too (“HTMI” isn’t on those shows’ level yet, but its tone is similar). “It’s [about] a period in life where there’s a lot of hard work to be done and everything is — you’re figuring it out, there’s an existential window, and there are pressures, so some things hit harder than others,” Edelman says. “… It’s just kind of a realism and authenticity of this moment that we’re going for.”
Ensemble piece. Greenberg and Rasuk are definitely the center of the show, but the rest of the cast — particularly Guzman, who plays Cam’s ex-con uncle, and Bell, as Ben’s ex-girlfriend — have their own stories.
“Lake Bell has a much more significant role than what you see in the pilot,” Greenberg says. “The audience can follow what it’s like to be a single girl in her 20s trying to make it as an interior designer, and also dealing with the aftermath of a breakup and running into your ex at different functions, dating a new guy, and just questioning her career choice and life in the city. Eddie Kaye Thomas [as a high-school buddy of Ben's who's now a Wall Street big shot] is really funny. And Luis … we end up borrowing money from him, and there are consequences that come from borrowing money from him.”
Chemistry experiment. Despite that, though, the show wouldn’t work if Greenberg and Rasuk didn’t spark together, and they really do. Rasuk has infectious energy, and Cam serves as a great counterpoint to Greenberg’s more serious Ben. “When Bryan and Victor first met each other, we couldn’t have been happier,” Edelman says. “It was like instant chemistry. Victor is from the Lower East Side” — much of the show is set in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn — “and Bryan has spent so much time living there. … They were like instant friends — you could feel their back story. It was like a chemical thing; we couldn’t plan for it. We were fantastically lucky.”
Will they make it? Not right away (“It’s not called ‘Made It in America,’” Greenberg jokes). Edelman says the show is about “baby steps,” the little victories and setbacks on the road to achieving a dream. “We don’t want to slow the storytelling down too much [but we want to] find the joys along the way,” he adds. “But it’s a nonstop hustle and a nonstop grind. You take a step forward, and it’s three steps back. They’re kind of figuring it out.”
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“How to Make It in America” premieres at 10 p.m. ET Sunday on HBO.
I recently sat down with the two stars of the new HBO series, How to Make it in America, for the easiest interview I’ve ever done, and the most fun. They’re super nice guys, incredibly energetic, and absolutely into what they do. I’m sure most actors are into what they do, but it’s actually rare to see this kind of enthusiasm for the gig.
Bryan Greenberg and Victor Rasuk have a lot to say. And not just about their new HBO series, How to Make It. But about basketball, the 70s, Los Angeles, Twilight, growing up in the projects, acting, women, Hebrew school, music, you name it. Before How to Make It, Greenberg and Rasuk didn’t know each other. But they knew of each other. They’d played in the same basketball league out in LA. And Greenberg had seen Five Feet High and Rising, the Cannes and Sundance award-winning short that lead to Raising Victor Vargas and insta-cred for Rasuk. But now they’re friends. And it’s not bullshit, some angle cooked up by the marketing folks to get butts in seats. That chemistry they have in the show? It’s real. They enter the room animated, mid-conversation, tossing details into each other’s stories. They love stories, and as two young actors who’ve been in the business for years, they’ve got a lot of them to tell.
Like how Rasuk landed that short film. He was a 13 year old kid from the pj’s (projects he later brought Greenberg into, but that’s another story). Some NYU students were shooting in Tompkins Square Park. Rasuk was hanging around, but he was a New York kid. New York kids don’t stand back. “I was like, ‘Hey, can I be in your movie?’” That wasn’t Five Feet, but the next one was. Two years later there was Vargas and the Spirit Award nomination. Then Lords of Dogtown, Stop-Loss, hanging with Benicio on Che. But that’s another story too.
And like the time George Clooney gave Greenberg a talking-to. It was on Unscripted, and Greenberg had just nailed his big scene with Frank Langella. “You know, ‘You don’t know me! You’re my acting teacher, not my therapist!’ And at the end of the day, I was like, ‘I fucking killed that!’”
“No you didn’t, son!” Rasuk says. Their hands smack in the air.
“In my mind,” Greenberg says. “And the next day George brought me into his office and was like, ‘Come here.’ I was like, ‘What’s up?’” Greenberg shows how he sauntered up to Clooney, confident, cocky. Rasuk laughs. He’s loving this story. “And George said, ‘I don’t ever want to see you act. The minute I see you act, it’s over.’” Rusak sits back, eyes wide. Greenberg says, “I was like, ‘Noted. Got it.’ The best acting advice I ever got.”
“That’s kinda gangster,” says Rasuk.
Despite its name, How to Make It is not a primer for our times. Though it’s the latest show to call NYC home, it’s setting is the New New York, eight years after 9-11 but with fresh Wall Street wounds and a creeping feeling that the famous dream we all cling to, along with our babies and guns, has become a nightmare. Greenberg and Rasuk play Ben and Cam, two friends struggling to make something happen, on their own terms, in the outer boroughs. Ben’s a struggling artist and designer who works at Barney’s by day, and Cam’s an exuberant hustler who’ll chase a dream all the way to the Bronx if he has to, even on his bike. “My character,” Rasuk says, “in a lot of ways is a composite of guys I grew up with or came across in New York City.”
And in a lot of ways, Greenberg’s character symbolizes Manhattan. “Ben can go into the projects [before shooting, Rasuk took Greenberg to the LES pj's where he grew up], he can go to the Wall Street guys, he can be in the art scene, he can blend into the nightlife with the skateboarders and promoters, he can go to the upper east side with his Jewish folks. He embodies all of it. And he brings it all together.” The actor was raised in the Midwest and went to NYU but lives now, like Rasuk, where the sun never stops shining. “I don’t love LA,” he says, “but I love working.” Even though Rasuk hasn’t looked back since Victor Vargas, he feels the same way. It’s about the work. When Greenberg says, “It’s just being in the moment and loving what you do,” Rasuk says, “Just like How to Make It.”
“Yeah, like How to Make It,” Greenberg echoes. “We’re trying to capture the vibe of people on the grind, not being satisfied with their place in life, doing whatever it takes to get ahead. The beauty is we don’t really know what we’re doing. We just have a dream.”
A dream that finds them, in the pilot, borrowing three grand off a drug dealer to buy a roll of primo Japanese denim off the back of a truck. The jeans they’ll make will sell for hundreds a pop. But, “We might launch into something else too,” Rasuk says, almost in character, loving the mystery of what’s to come with the first season of a show that everybody’s excited about. They grin, smack hands, and keep talking.
Entourage written backward doesn’t quite spell garmento, but that is the gist of “How to Make It in America,” a new series on HBO beginning Sunday that comes from the producers of “Entourage.” Here they have reversed the premise to look at guys from the neighborhood who haven’t left the neighborhood.
Instead of exploiting instant fame and wealth in Hollywood, these New York slackers are dodging creditors and cops, hoping for a break in the garment business, or at least enough cash to pay the rent.
Failure isn’t as much fun as success, probably because there is so much more of it. Dreams aren’t the same as drive, and self-pity is less attractive than hard work. Accordingly, it takes a while to care about Ben (Bryan Greenberg), a mopey Fashion Institute of Technology dropout who folds jeans at Barneys and moons over his ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Lake Bell). His best friend, Cam (Victor Rasuk), has more energy, but he wastes it on lame projects like selling designer skateboards and bootleg leather goods.
The two pals have some tenuous fashion and art-scene connections, mostly rich girls with downtown lofts. They have ambition, sort of, but first they have to repay a loan from Cam’s cousin, Rene (Luis Guzman), an ex-con who views physical harm as collateral.
Appealingly, the heroes inhabit a more multicultural milieu than the one on “Entourage.” But the grittier, graffiti-and-bodega backdrop is not necessarily as winning as palm trees and swimming pools. “Entourage” was a Cinderella story for guys that provided a new and amusingly wry look at show business — and the culture of young stars and their posses — through the eyes of losers from Queens who luck out.
Twenty-somethings trying to make it, or depressed about not making it, is a more familiar and well-explored subject, from “Reality Bites” to “Clerks.” Even “Bored to Death,” a recent HBO series about Brooklyn slackers, got bored with ennui and put its dope-smoking hero to work as a private detective.
“How to Make It in America” picks up steam as its heroes pick themselves up by their sneaker laces and try to start their own business, in this case a line of retro 1970s designer jeans. Theirs is not a Horatio Alger or even a Ralph Lifshitz to Ralph Lauren business model; this is a recession-era, empire-in-decline morality tale. They can turn a quick deal — Cam coaxes Ben into helping him move a shipment of leather coats bought off the back of a truck. But persistent effort isn’t worth the trouble.
Attitude and connections are the best way to make it in America, a point slyly reinforced with visual cues, like a party in a cool Lower East Side apartment on Hester Street, a location that was once a symbol of the immigrant work ethic. At a restaurant a friend introduces Ben and Cam to the designer John Varvatos, and over drinks they wheedle a consultation. Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein were Bronx kids who hustled to apprentice to designers and manufacturers; Ben and Cam hustle to avoid being apprentices.
“Everybody has ideas, but nobody wants to put in the work,” the rich father of a friend tells Cam after Cam tries to sell him on a new venture that he describes as “Cold Stone Creamery, but for doughnuts.”
The series has great music (the theme song is Aloe Blacc’s “I Need a Dollar”) and there are some snarky asides about hipster New York. A female friend tries to get Ben interested in a new girl, Jane, saying, “Oh, she’s cute, she has short hair and she writes for Nylon, and she will definitely sleep with you.”
The series takes off when secondary characters fill in the blank spots. Mr. Guzman is poker-faced and quite funny as a small-time mobster in a Dominican neighborhood who buys into a franchise for an energy drink, Rasta Monsta. Ben finds a potential backer when he runs into a high school classmate, David (Eddie Kaye Thomas), a nerd who has reaped a hedge-fund fortune. David, who looks a little like the goofy heir played by Tommy Noonan in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” is worth millions, but he can’t get past the bouncer at a hot downtown club, Avenue. Ben, who plays basketball with the bouncer, can, and that is a quid pro quo he can take to the bank.
Rachel dumped Ben, but she still isn’t completely over him, even though she has a handsome new boyfriend, Darren (Jason Pendergraft), a hotelier, and a promising job with an interior designer. Her boss, Edie (Martha Plimpton), perks Rachel up when Rachel returns morose and insecure from a lunch with a college friend who is combating the spread of AIDS in Africa.
“Any ambitious do-gooder with airfare can feel like they are making a difference in Africa,” Edie says airily, waving a joint. “It’s Africa.” She assures her protégée that the true heroes are the ones helping hard-working New Yorkers make the most out of tiny apartments. “I still want you to go to Africa and help out,” she says. “Just do it on your Christmas break.”
When Ben shakes his hangdog complacency and gives the jeans project his full attention, “How to Make It in America” finds its stride — not the “Entourage” strut but a garment-district shuffle.
Any movement is better than idleness. Hard work may not pay off anymore in real life, but it is still the stuff of fiction.
Welcome to Bryan Greenberg Fan @ Bryan-Greenberg.com. Bryan Greenberg is a talented actor and musican. Bryan maybe best known for his role on the hit dramas One Tree Hill or October Road
or from the movies The Perfect Score & PRIME. Bryan's music has been featured on both OTH and Ocotober Road. He will be featured in the new HBO original show How to Make it in America.
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