Liev Schreiber + Jesse Prinz

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Actor Liev Schreiber looks for happiness in the characters he has played – from Hamlet to Sabretooth – with the help of philosopher Jesse Prinz.
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About the Speakers

The dynamic Liev Schreiber won the Drama League Award for distinguished performance for his portrayal of shock jock “Barry Champlain” in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio on Broadway, and received Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations for the role. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley called his performance “the most lacerating portrait of a human meltdown this side of a Francis Bacon painting.” He is lauded for his Shakespearean roles: his “revelatory” (NY Times) work in Cymbeline 1998, playing the title roles in Hamlet (1999, Public Theater); Macbeth (2006, Public Theater NYSF, opposite Jennifer Ehle ); and Henry V (2003, Public Theater NYSF). His portrayal of Henry V in particular caused The New Yorker’s John Lahr to expound: “He has a swiftness of mind which convinces the audience that language is being coined in the moment. His speech, unlike that of the merely adequate supporting cast, feels lived rather than learned.” Other than his long-running role in the Scream franchise, Schreiber’s first cinematic break was as the young Orson Welles in the HBO original movie RKO 281, for which he was nominated for Emmy and Golden Globe Awards. The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, was another major film for the actor, but it was his portrayal of Sabretooth in the X-Men franchise that has brought him the greatest visibility. He is currently to be seen in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Jesse Prinz is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. His research focuses on the perceptual, emotional, and cultural foundations of human psychology. He is author of Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perception Basis (MIT, 2002), Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford, 2004), The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford), Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives (Penguin/Norton, 2011), and The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford, in press), with another title, Works of Wonder: The Psychology and Ontology of Art (Oxford), in progress. This is his second appearance at the Rubin.