Liev Schreiber, a TV series regular for the first time, plays the title character.


Ray Donovan is a man of few words, and many complexities.

In Showtime's Ray Donovan (Sunday, 10 p.m. ET/PT), Liev Schreiber plays a South Boston native working as a Hollywood fixer who's an enforcer with a values system, and a man who loves his family but reviles his father.

"He says and does some horrible things, but seems to have a pretty intact moral epicenter, which is one of the things I find intriguing and likable about him," Schreiber says. " I think he's one of those people who has an instinct to protect, maybe sometimes to his detriment."

Ray toils in the darker corners of Hollywood, working for Ezra Goldman (Elliott Gould), one of the town's most powerful lawyers, with assistance from two subordinates, Avi (Steven Bauer) and Lena (Katherine Moennig).

He's resettled his family in Southern California, but tries to keep them at a distance from his work's seedy surroundings.

Ray retains a sensibility forged by his Boston, Irish-Catholic roots, Schreiber says. " It's a very tough community, (but) it's also a very loving and close-knit community. That old-fashioned morality that Ray seems to have is also a product of his upbringing."

Ray's world is shaken when his father Mickey (Jon Voight), a menacing Boston mobster, gets out of prison and comes to Hollywood, believing Ray set him up for the jail sentence.

"Mickey is a mess," Voight says. "He's dangerous and exciting and he can be very charming. He can have a lot of self-pity, a lot of self-righteousness."

And naturally, Ray and Mickey clash, as Ray threatens his father against going near his family. "It's intense," Schreiber says. "Ray's got a tremendous amount of anger and resentment."

Although Ray operates in contemporary Hollywood, helping a celebrity who wakes up next to a dead woman and exacting rough justice on a stalker, he is more a product of a bygone era.

"He's just an amalgam of things that interest me about men," Donovan creator Ann Biderman says. "I wanted an old-fashioned character. I wanted an iconic male hero who didn't have a certain vanity, who was rough and ready (like) all the men that I thought were interesting when I was a kid, those noir heroes like Robert Mitchum."

Schreiber, a stage and film actor in his first role as a series regular, wasn't looking to do a TV show, but Biderman's take on Ray drew his interest.

"I was intrigued by her laser-like sense of what it is to be a man and of what masculinity is, the whole notion that there's great vulnerability cloaked in violence and rough exteriors and how deep those issues are,," he says.

Biderman, who wrote for NYPD Blue and created Southland, saw Donovan as a chance to combine two disparate subjects that interested her: Hollywood, especially its shadowy side, and the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal.

"I didn't just want to do a show about Hollywood fixers," which would have been "much more of a procedural," she says. "I'm very interested in this family and very interested in themes of abuse and class and all of that. What it allowed me to do was attach it to deeper themes that I care about."

Biderman's netherworld of the Hollywood fixer has an authenticity, says executive producer Mark Gordon .

"I know characters, let's call them eccentric, whose behavior is outrageous in many ways. It's pretty accurate as far as some of the crazy (stuff) that goes on in this town."

The worlds may be different, but their criminal elements have similarities, Schreiber says.

"There's very much a Mob structure in Hollywood, and I think Ray is used to that from being in Southie," he says. "He knows how to work a Mob. He knows how to work a gang. He knows about blackmail (and) racketeering. That stuff happens in Hollywood."

Voight, who worked with Schreiber in The Manchurian Candidate, likes the clash of cultures.

"I think it's fun, having these kind of roughneck guys who grew up outside it but are impressed with Hollywood. They're a ragtag bunch and they're in with all the glitz and yet they're both very American products," he says. "The idea of glamour has a nice ring to it. It gives an opportunity for a lot of humor and suspense and drama."

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