Top 10 Cameos on ‘Entourage’

This week we saw the eighth and final season of Entourage arrive on DVD and Blu-Ray. Entourage was a great series. Dramatic, funny and clever. Every season box set we bought and rewatched. But seriously – fuck the eighth season. This was one of the cheapest cop-out finales of a dramatic series since almost ever. It was so bad that one of the very first articles on this website was a list of ten improved endings they could’ve gone with. Although I’m a a compulsive collector who must complete every set I have, but fuck the eighth season. It’s so crap it doesn’t deserve an article on my site. So instead we’re going to cast our gaze further back and look at the better moments in the shows history.

10. M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night appeared in a couple of scenes as a typically psychotic director and client of Ari’s who has the superstar agent under the hammer to finish reading a script while everything that could go wrong goes wrong. Ari first encounters the notoriously megalomaniac film-maker while lost in a cemetery where the intense character pushes a script on him. After going through hell and back to finish the script in time Ari is disheartened to find that Shyamalan had decided to rewrite the whole thing.

What makes this a memorable cameo is that M. Night Shyamalan didn’t get the joke. He reports that everyone thought he was parodying himself. He wasn’t.

9. Val Kilmer/Eric Roberts

I’m gonna bundle these boys together because their roles had quite a bit in common. Both are stars from the 1980s who don’t shine quite as brightly as they used to taking on comedy roles as drug growers. Val Kilmer plays the heavily bearded Sherper and Eric Roberts plays himself while he takes the boys on a mushroom fueled odyssey through Joshua Tree.

8. Chuck Liddell

Nothing is ever quite as entertaining as Johnny Drama shooting his mouth of and getting in trouble, and trouble doesn’t come much scarier than mixed martial arts champion Chuck Liddell. As Drama digs himself deeper and deeper into the ditch it’s only a matter of time before he’s going to push things to far.

7. Rainn Wilson

One of the very few cameos in which the actor doesn’t play them-selves. Instead he plays a very, very transparent and very harsh parody of internet movie critic/gossip Harry Knowles. Wilson plays Knowles (in everything but name) has a Grade-A douchebag, but it’s his final scene that makes things especially petty.

6. James Woods

Woods seems to have been propping up the B-List in Hollywood for a long time, and it’s strangely fitting that he would play the villain in Vince’s blockbuster hit Aquaman. Not that we ever see him in the part (as usual) but only his deranged response to Drama and Turtle taking one of his tickets for the premier. He is downright hilarious.

5. Vanessa Angel

Vanessa Angel may not be a household name, but most males watching crap television in the late 1990s will remember her. Like her Entourage counterpart she made her name with a lead part in a spin-off series – namely a cheap television knock-off from John Hughes film Weird Science. In a brilliant spoof of Hercules and Xena, Angel played the female counterpart to Drama’s Viking Quest in spin-off Angel Quest. This sadly only came up the once in the brilliant Comic-Con episode.

4. Bob Saget

Oh, Bob Saget. A patron saint of plain, safe, family entertainment. Being a prime-time regular in Full House he then took paid retirement duty hosting America’s Funniest Home Videos. These days he’s best known as the voice of future Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother. It’s because he always played the safe roles that his recreation as a drug fueled, whore mongering family man was so entertaining.

3. Peter Dinklage

Granted, this is more entertaining in hindsight since Dinklage took up the red and gold as a Lannister. Ari sucking up to him comes to a sudden end when he gives both Ari and Harvey a mouthful of bile. This results in one of the responses Ari could’ve mustered: “angry littler fucker, ain’t he!”

2. Gary Busey

This might’ve made #1 if he was actually was acting, but the lunatic really was ad-libbing. In his first appearance the behind the scenes stories are even more startling that his behaviour on screen. Kevin Connolly reports being chased down by Busey, pinned and tickled mercilessly. Others state that Busey brought a metal case that nobody else was allowed to go near. One could almost feel guilty for laughing at him.

1. James Cameron

Few people carry the level of star power as the double-record breaking director of Titanic and Avatar. For many years following the release of Titanic the man himself lay low – very low in fact, as he headed to the dark depths of the ocean with a documentary crew. When he turned up on Entourage it seemed like a pretty amazing surprise cameo – especially his assertion that he made Titanic because he wanted to make young girls cry. Then he kept turning up again and again as the director of Aquaman.

What makes it especially memorable is how much Aquaman seemed to predict the success of Avatar. The runaway success was met with skepticism during production only to blow expectations out of the water and reach a box office nobody could’ve thought possible. Even the fictional Aquaman didn’t make as much bank as Avatar eventually did.