Johnny on the Shot

by Vic Williams

These Days, Entourage Funnyman Kevin "Drama" Dillon Draws Attention Wherever He Goes ... Even on Trump Turf

The shouts came from within a white stretch Excursion limo outside Trump National Golf Club.

“Drrrrraaaaammmmaaaaa!”

Kevin Dillon stood a few feet away, posing for photos. Atop the fountain behind him was a stone figure of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea — and the name of the big-budget summer remake in which Dillon camped it up for a cameo as a cocky sleazeball named Lucky Larry, who somewhat resembles Dillon’s hilarious role as Johnny “Drama” Chase on HBO’s bling-and-babe-soaked buddy series, Entourage.

And somewhere on the front nine, just to keep things interesting, was Donald Trump himself, following around a sizable Golf Channel crew as they taped the finals of The Big Break VI, which airs this fall.

Got that? Good. ’Cause this is Hollywood — not to mention the new Trump frontier — and it’s tough to keep up sometimes.

Back at the limo, the door opened and out jumped a half dozen guys in sleek black suits, ready to rock the National for an oceanfront afternoon wedding on the Palos Verdes cliffs. The first groomsman to emerge looked at Dillon, then did a double take. “Check it out — it’s Johnny Drama!”

“Drrrrraaaaammmmaaaaa!” repeated the original voice, owned by a graying fortysomething guy who tumbled third out of the limo.

“So are you an Entourage fan?” someone asked.

“Oh, yeah, big fan,” the guy answered, as he and the rest of the monkey-suited mob rushed toward Dillon, pocket digitals in hand. “Hey man, can we get our picture with you?”

“Sure, guys,” Dillon said, amused at the television-as-life parallels. “Step right up.”

A few clicks later it was all over. “Have a great time, boys,” Dillon said as they made their way inside, laughs and backslaps and high-fives all around. Then he looked back at the parked limo. “Now that’s a perfect Entourage scene,” he quipped in his thick New York accent, hopping into the car’s doorway for some impromptu photo-mugging, six-iron in hand, as if he’d just wrapped a day’s work and was booking out to the links to work out the acting kinks.

If only that were the truth. If only he hadn’t broken his left wrist on the Entourage set while playing basketball with his co-stars — Adrian Grenier (movie star Vince Chase), Kevin Connolly (Vince’s personal manager, Eric), Jerry Ferrara (designated driver and loyal homeboy Turtle) and Jeremy Piven (manic, cell-phone addicted agent Ari Gold). “I went up for a rebound, came down wrong and landed right on the wrist. It snapped immediately and my hand was hanging sideways. The entire crew heard it.”

So this avowed golf addict hadn’t had a fix in way too long. “It’s been brutal, especially with me watching all those great players on TV,” he said over a mid-afternoon cup of coffee between longing looks at the epic Trump-meets-Pacific landscape just outside the clubhouse windows. “I’m dying to get out there. I can hit short shots OK, but the follow-through on longer shots hurts. The doc says I need four months to heal, but it’s been two. I think that’s enough.”

A while later, he took to Trump’s picturesque 10th tee and 11th green — the most viscerally luscious and scenic upscale public course in Southern California — to swing a few times, knock around some chips and putts and dawdle in a bunker. “This place is spectacular,” he said. “We’ve got to tape a scene of Entourage out here.” When told it may well happen — we hear HBO has contacted the course’s management — his eyes widened. “I hadn’t heard about that, but it would be awesome. I’ll have to ask around and find out what’s going on.”

Dillon jumped into the broad white abyss of an eight-foot-deep bunker flanking the green’s right side. “This is like The Foot,” he marveled, referring to fabled Winged Foot Country Club in his native Mamaroneck, NY, which he joined a few years ago in the footsteps of his father, and where he and the rest of the golf world watched the Mickelson Meltdown at this year’s U.S. Open. “The sand is beautiful.”

He tried digging the ball out with a lob wedge, to no avail. “Man, that hurts,” he admitted, grimacing after the blast. “This probably isn’t the place to test the wrist.” Just as quickly, he expressed his need to get his swing back in shape — a natural draw that, he says, “can easily turn into a nasty hook.” He’d already planned an outing with his Entourage pals, with whom he’d taped a scene the day before in which they all take their swats in a Full Swing simulator.

“Connolly had a hole-in-one in front of the whole crew, a 150-yard shot,” Dillon said in mock disgust. “He holed it out and the place went nuts. Supposedly it’s as rare on this machine as it is in real life. It was pretty amazing.”

What’s better is that Connolly’s virtual ace got TV’s favorite posse fired up to play.

“All the guys have the bug now,” Dillon laughs. “They don’t play a lot, but on Monday we’re thinking about playing a little 9-hole, par-3 golf course in Studio City, a fun little course. Jerry’s a golfer. His uncle was a golfer, so he’s been playing since he was a kid. Kevin Connolly’s got a good swing — he’s dabbled in it through the years. Adrian’s still really new at it, but he’s making some good contact with the ball. We’ll have a good time out there.”

Johnny Drama is the show’s resident hacker, and Dillon says the writers manage to work a little golf into the script each season. It’s never enough, though. “Yeah, the foursome is there, isn’t it?” he says. “I’d like to see them get some more golf into it. Every year we put a little bit in there. In the first season, we were hitting balls off the roof into other celebrities’ houses.” (Which, by the way, makes for one of the more entertaining golf games on the ’Net, at www.hbo.com.)

Dillon, who turns 41 on Aug. 19, took up the game in his late 20s and joined Winged Foot along with three of his four brothers. “My dad’s also a member at Wykagyl [in nearby New Rochelle]. It’s a really great golf course. They have one of the ladies’ tournaments there — the JAL Big Apple Classic [won by Lorena Ochoa this year, Paula Creamer last year and Annika Sorenstam in 1998 and 2000]. Then my dad got the chance to join Winged Foot, and I got in on the legacy. Thank God — it kept the price of the dues down.”

The only Dillon son who doesn’t play is fellow actor Matt, who, like Grenier’s Vince to Dillon’s Drama, seems to get the juicier roles — including an Oscar-nominated turn as a racist cop in last year’s Best Picture, Crash. “He’s a lefty, and my dad tried to teach him as a righty, ’cause that’s kind of an old school way of doing it,” Dillon says. “So he just struggled. He’s got so many other hobbies, and he’s been so busy, he never got a chance to take it up. But he’s got a little interest now. He might be a late bloomer.”

That pretty much goes for all of the Dillon clan, despite their dad’s efforts to get them into the game early. “We loved going to the range, but we never looked at it as a real sport. When you’re a kid, you don’t realize how great and intense an athletic deal it is. We were all about basketball, football, baseball. I wish I’d played when I was younger — I’d be scratch.” And how does he stack up against his other siblings? “We’re all pretty even, but if I’m getting more practice time, I’ll take ’em down. My brother Paul didn’t start playing until he was in his 30s, but he’s whuppin’ me now. It just depends on our schedules.”

These days the family gets together for some spirited Winged Foot competition whenever they can, especially the holidays. “It’s cold around Christmas time, but we still get out there, every Thanksgiving and Christmas. And usually on Father’s Day we’ll have a little match. One time my brother Brian and I took down my dad and my brother Tim; we rub it in and call it the Father’s Day Massacre. Dad’s pretty good; he’s a bit older, but he shot a 78 recently on a really nice course. He’s still playing good golf; he can still beat me on any given day.”

The golf gene even goes beyond blood. Dillon’s new bride, with whom he has a 3-month-old daughter named Ava, hails from the Scottish highlands. “She’s a pretty good player, but her brother is a plus-two,” he said. “He’s always club champion somewhere. His short game is sick.”

He means that in a good way, of course — the brother-in-law has all the shots. Dillon is sick, too — with potential, charisma and budding star power. Being Johnny Drama has meant gaining a whole new family, which extends to the public. The wedding party got the lovefest started at Trump National, and it continued through his three-hour foray there, which he called “one of more fun photo shoots I’ve ever been involved in,” thanks mostly to his own willingness to get right into it, changing outfits, mugging for the camera and BS-ing with anyone who came along.

“Love the show … you’re doing a great job,” said one golfer who’d just finished his round and spotted Dillon near the clubhouse. Another guy in a cart stopped him behind the 11th green and asked him if he knew a certain director. “Yeah, he’s done a couple of episodes of Entourage,” Dillon responded. “Well, he’s a good friend of mine,” the golfer said, reveling in that whole two-degrees-of-separation deal. “Cool,” Dillon replied. “We all think he’s great, and he’ll definitely be back to do some more shows. Tell him I said hello.”

Suddenly Matt’s shadow doesn’t seem as long; the little brother has gone big time, thanks to a pay TV show that, in its third season, continues to redefine the feel and fun quotient of the 30-minute form. “Everyone gets their moment,” Dillon said. It starts with this guy Doug Ellin, the creator and head writer. He’s brilliant, just keeps writing hilarious stuff. And a guy who directs half the episodes, Julian Farino, is kind of creating energy for the show. There’s so much dialog. We’re kind of cramming an hour show into a half hour by making it snappy and fast. There’s a lot of walk and talk. Everything’s on the move, it just flows. That half hour probably feels like 15 minutes. It really goes by quick.”

It’s the perfect rapid-fire recipe for an ensemble cast who owned their characters lock, stock and script from the start, giving them the collective confidence to translate their very real friendship to the screen and into America’s Sunday-night living rooms. “I pretty much brought everything to it,” Dillon said of his streetwise-yet-vulnerable, gourmet cooking, please-love-me take on Drama. “They wrote great lines for me, and I threw in the cockiness, a little Fonzie cool, and made him a quirky character. And I’m not too protective of him. I like his flaws. Often actors get protective — ‘my character wouldn’t do that’ — and it actually limits them. But that’s the fun thing about Johnny Drama. He gets himself into all kinds of jams. And he loves the guys. The four of them are tight. And we’re like that in real life. Jeremy [Piven] as well, but particularly the four of us. We’ll go hang out together.”

And that includes some late nights wrapping up each episode’s seven-day shoot. “We don’t work weekends, thank God. But it’s more grueling than doing a movie. Our page count is a lot higher. With a movie you do maybe two pages a day, but with Entourage we’ll do seven or eight a day. It’s more fun in a way, cause you’re not sitting around as much. With movies there’s a lot of sitting around in a trailer, playing cards.”

As the season progresses, preparation time for each episode dwindles. “In the beginning, we get probably eight scripts in a row. Toward the end, the writers are scrambling — we start catching up to them. We’ll do a table reading to see what works and doesn’t work, what gets a laugh, what’s too serious. We try to keep the show light, although it gets a little hairy occasionally. Even when things are rough, the guys keep a positive attitude and keep the show funny.”

The night before Dillon’s Trumpland visit, the Entourage crew worked until 2 a.m. wrapping the golf simulator episode, which put them at the season’s halfway point. Dillon went home to find Ava awake and hungry, so he took the next feeding. “Then she woke up at 6 a.m., and of course I couldn’t get back to sleep,” he said as a makeup artist worked him over. “Then I had to get up and drive my other daughter, Amy, who’s 15, to the airport. She and my mom and my sister Kate came into town to see the baby for the first time, so I had to see them off. I’m pretty shot.”

Could’ve fooled us. Like most creative types (he went to art school in New York City before turning to acting in his mid-20s), Dillon is loaded with energy and can’t wait for the next big thing. For him that means another movie, the medium in which he found his first acting success, including memorable turns in two Oliver Stone films — as trigger-happy Bunny in 1986’s Platoon  and drummer John Densmore in 1991’s The Doors —  and a solid performance as a soldier in the underrated, well-cast 1992 war movie A Midnight Clear. His character bit the dust in a couple of those roles, as did Lucky Larry in Poseidon, in spectacular fashion. “That was a fun character. My death scene was pretty awesome — probably my all-time favorite death of all the movies I’ve done. Although in Platoon I put on a nice death.”

Now he’s back among the living as far as the big screen goes. Once Entourage wraps in September, Dillon will look forward to the premiere of a flick he shot in Canada called The Foursome. Its subject? Need we ask?

“It’s golf, it’s fun and most of it is on the golf course,” he says. “I got a late call on it. They sent the script over and said I had to read it immediately, ‘it’s shooting, you’ll have to fly to Vancouver in two days.’ I read it and loved it. I guess Christian Slater pulled out of it or something.”

Dillon laughs. “There was tons of dialog, so I was just learning it as I went along. It never snows that time of year up there, everyone says, but of course it snowed on us. We were shoveling the fairways and greens. It was freezing cold, absolutely brutal. We shot it all in a couple weeks.”

Dillon credits director William Dear (Harry and the Hendersons) for pulling the flick off with a tight schedule and even tighter budget. But he couldn’t fix Dillon’s rusty move on the course. “My only regret is looking at my swing on film,” he says. “I never even got to the range, never got to play one round during the filming. I hadn’t played in a long time before that, so my swing wasn’t really refined. I was lifting up my head on my backswing, which is a flaw that creeps in a lot, and it crept in for the whole filming of that movie.”

Hence his midsummer jones for the links and his par-3 outing with the Entourage boys — and many rounds to follow, even as fatherhood and career swallow up the hours. “I’m playing public golf out here, so it’s tough sometimes. I’ll go up to Camarillo, pretty much show up and get on the list. I’ll go to Empire Lakes. I’ll drive an hour to play golf because anything in town is a six-hour round. Sterling Hills, Moorpark — that’s real nice, a treat. I’ve played Lost Canyons, but not in a while. There’s a lot of three-putts out there, lots of mounding.”

No doubt Dillon will also get in a round or two with Entourage executive producer Mark Wahlberg, who’s also a friend of Trump, playing in his group at this year’s AT&T and various other events. “We play all the time. He’s real good,” Dillon admits. “We used to be even, but he hits some bombs, a long ball. Still, last time I played him at his home track, Wilshire Country Club, I took him down!”

On the rare occasion it’s raining in Los Angeles, Dillon is like thousands of other golf addicts, fleeing inland toward Vegas. “Sometimes you say, ‘Hey, if we drive a couple hours into the desert, maybe we can get away from this rain.’ I’ve played Vegas a bunch of times. Mark just did his charity tournament at Shadow Creek. Pretty spectacular, really beautiful. And I really enjoyed Royal Links. The day I went out it was cold and the wind was blowing. It really felt like Scotland.”

That got him thinking about sneaking across the pond to his bride’s homeland. “I haven’t played a lot of golf over there. A little bit — at Moray Golf Club, one of the beautiful old tracks. But I’m dying to play St. Andrews. I got to play it on the simulator yesterday, a couple of holes. And I did play Pebble [for real], which is kind of the American version.”

Then again, if he needs a dose of history with his golf, he can always head home for another go at Winged Foot with his dad, who not only swings a mean stick but wields a wicked paintbrush as well. Just check out his portrait portfolio.

“He’s done a lot of the top golfers,” Dillon says. “Phil, Arnie, Jack, Gary Player, Greg Norman. Just about everyone. So I’ve met a bunch of these guys. Norman does a charity event at Winged Foot. Pretty much every time you go there, you see somebody famous — a basketball player, some athlete.”

And let’s not forget actors. “The Foot” has seen its share of drama over the years, but the next time native son Kevin Dillon shows up on the first tee, we’re talking a whole new kind of Drama. The Hollywood kind. FG