Cruising Entourage Memory Lane With Jerry Ferrara

In Entourage, HBO’s mid-aughts fantasia of bro wish fulfillment, the Queens quartet’s splashy Hollywood lifestyle is powered by the movie-star visage (actual acting skill: debatable) of pretty boy Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier.) But the first face we actually see in the pilot belongs to Turtle, Vince’s preening best friend, perennially maneuvering for ways to leverage Vince’s fame into perks big and small. The part was Jerry Ferrara's first major role; compared to Grenier and his equally-seasoned co-stars Kevin Dillon and Kevin Connolly, Ferrara was a newcomer to the industry. He's described his time on the series as the college experience that he eschewed to pursue acting.

So it's to be expected that Ferrara was feeling sentimental a couple of weeks ago on July 18, the day of the Entourage pilot’s 20th anniversary, as we literally drove down memory lane for the better part of an hour, cruising around the West Hollywood and Beverly Hills blocks that served as Vince & co.’s stomping grounds during the show’s seven-year run, in a brand new 2025 model of the same squad-friendly, movie-premiere-appropriate Cadillac Escalade that Turtle drove the gang around in two decades ago. It was a fitting setting for Ferrara to reminisce: on paper, Turtle’s official “job” was being Vince’s driver, and countless Entourage scenes took place in the Escalade or the equally iconic yellow Hummer, always with Turtle behind the wheel.

Ferrara, a New York native who moved out west to pursue acting at 20, joked that he practically learned how to truly drive on the job. “I just hadn't driven a lot at that point. And this was by far the nicest car I'd ever been in. The tricky thing is acting while driving,” Ferrara recalled of the early season 1 days. “There'd be times where I'd miss a turn because I'm remembering the dialogue. Or times you forget dialogue because you're trying to hit the right turn.”

This was Ferrara’s first time back in Los Angeles in some time since moving away to start a family, but his muscle memory for navigating the gang’s “home base” had hardly atrophied. The afternoon felt like an Entourage bus tour. Here's the Pacific Design Center on San Vicente, where the gang got the good news about James Cameron’s Aquaman, a seminal stepping stone in the Vincent Chase filmography. There’s the legendary Viper Room, where Ferrara’s name appears in the show’s billboard-themed opening credits. On our right on Sunset Boulevard is Gil Turner’s, the LA liquor store staple, where the boys bought wine to bring to Jessica Alba’s house party in episode 2, one of their very first walk-and-talk scenes.

The walk-and-talk, Kevin Dillon once suggested to me, was the “hallmark shot” of Entourage—which is ironic, since the show took place in an infamously pedestrian-unfriendly city. Banter, plot exposition, reminiscing on their “first time”—as they do in that walk to Gil Turner’s—typically happened with the foursome on foot, strolling Sunset or some street nearby. The first one that comes to Ferrara’s mind? Season 5’s final scene, when they actually shot at magic hour, as the episode closed on the high of Vince landing a Scorsese movie and finally ending a season-long career drought.

“I think maybe in the beginning [the walk-and-talks] were meant to be time-saving [for production]," Ferrara says. “But also if you really get into the cinematography of Entourage, we never did closeups. Everything was always very loose. A lot of five-page, one-take shots, all four of us in a frame, and it gave it that real feeling"—so much so, Ferrara notes, that some viewers mistook the show for an unscripted reality series early on.

“That was the style that [series creator] Doug Ellin and [executive producers] Stephen Levinson, Julian Farino and Mark Wahlberg were aiming for," Ferrara says. "It becomes almost like a play. You got four pages, no cuts. You're going to do it all in one take. If we could get it in three takes before sundown, we were set.”

The far side of Sunset Boulevard offered more walk-and-talk memories: “Right there, the 9,000 [Sunset] building, used to be a billboard for HBO,” Ferrara said pointing to a gigantic slab of space on the building’s west-facing side, currently occupied by an ad for Godzilla x Kong. “They're still advertising because that's a Max thing. But HBO used to put all the billboards for the new shows they were really excited about on that big space. So if you made it on that billboard, you did something awesome.”

Billboard real-estate hierarchy—that’s the kind of casual, hyper-Hollywood-specific detail that made Entourage more intriguing than just the male fantasy it’s often crudely reduced to. (Real heads can imagine Drama wistfully bringing up the time he almost scored that placement until his show got canceled, or they wrote his character out.) Of course, once the show's popularity really took off around season three, Ferrara and the rest of the gang made it onto the coveted 9000 building slot for all of West Hollywood to see—which meant their Sunset walk-and-talks had to be more carefully blocked, to keep an Entourage billboard from showing up on Entourage.

The other irony illuminated by Ferrara’s tour was that, for a series set in the land of closed-set studios and soundstages, roughly 90% of it was shot on location—figures in stark contrast to virtually everything else that films in the city. That Coffee Bean where Vince’s high-powered agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) and his assistant Lloyd (Rex Lee) hole up after Ari’s unceremonious firing in season 2? Ferrara points that out too. And for anyone who wasn’t on the LA party scene in the early aughts, club Prey—where Vince and the gang pull up as they await news of his thriller Head On’s box office performance—was exactly the kind of WeHo hot spot where a real-life B-plus-lister like Vince might have been spotted. (The space is now occupied by another, different nightclub; they can't all survive like the Viper Room.)

Ellin, Ferrara said, “was adamant about [using] real locations. LA is a great place to shoot, but if you really look back at the history of it, how many TV shows actually filmed in LA on location? The lots of course were always filled and everyone was doing studio stuff. We only had one stage throughout the whole run, and that was Ari's office.”

Of course, an Entourage tour would not be complete without one specific location, the spot at which Ferrara estimates they must have filmed “at least 25 scenes.” A bro show wouldn’t be true to life without regular scenes at breakfast, any self-respecting squad’s most important meal of the day, where the night’s previous festivities are hashed out and hangovers are defused. The show’s very first scene finds the guys finishing a meal at a spot next to Fred Segal (an iconic L.A. clothing boutique whose Melrose and Malibu locations closed their doors last week.) But their Cheers, their Central Perk, was unquestionably the Melrose location of Urth Cafe.

“It's kind of synonymous with us," Ferrara says. “We did so many scenes in an Escalade driving on [Melrose] and then they would park right in front of Urth Cafe.” In full tour-guide mode, Ferrara gestured to the two-mile-an-hour congestion atypical of the area. “See this traffic right now? We used to cause this traffic, because people would be lined up on the other side of the street just watching us work. It was like a basketball game or something."

“In a way,” Ferrara said, "the show ruined Urth Cafe for us. At one point I kind of asked for trouble [by] getting a black Escalade of my own. And I would come here because I like their coffee, but here I am pulling up in the same car, and people would be like, ‘What scene is this?’ I'm like, "I'm just here for an iced coffee." (There is no Entourage special at this Urth location, not even a Turtle Frappe. Clearly someone on HBO’s branding side fell asleep at the wheel.)

Ferrara could reminisce for hours if he wanted, in a much wider geographical range—like the Studio City 7-11 parking lot he sat in, decompressing from a nervous final audition round when he got a call that he had indeed landed the part. Or we could go to Malibu, one of the show’s first instances of straying from home base and one of the first times a real actor did more than just cameo, when Turtle ran afoul of Gary Busey—and Busey improvised pouring beach water on Ferrara’s head during a take. (He improvised everything, Ferrara noted: “He said, ‘I love the script. The lines are great, but no one can write Gary Busey like Gary Busey. So I'm going to give you your words, but mine.’ To this day, if I still see Gary, I get a little nervous.”)

But when he's asked to name his favorite of the many landmarks he's been afforded access to by his Entourage fame, diehard Knicks fan Ferrara can't help but name a location on a different coast, placing courtside Garden seats above all else.

With all the reminiscing that a milestone anniversary like the 20th engenders, the conversation inevitably turned to musings about what a would-be revival would look like. Ferrara’s pitch would have the guys navigating domesticity—the 2015 Entourage movie ends with the birth of Eric's first child—and Vince on a quixotic Last Movie Star journey to get asses in actual theater seats instead of making content for a streamer or a TV network, as most real-life Vinny Chase types from the early '00s are doing now.

“I do think you have to knock the guys back down a little bit,” says Ferrara, who co-wrote a couple of episodes late in the series' run. “Because I always enjoyed the show most when the guys were on the hunt for a goal. I think it's such a challenge to get anyone to watch anything these days, let alone go to the movies. I would almost like to see Vince trying to still do a big time, [traditional] blockbuster, after not making a movie in a while. And then the challenge is in promoting it. How are we going to get people to [care]? Do we have to do something crazy? Do we have to do something viral?”

Vincent Chase trying to recapture marquee glory, E being in over his head on what sells a movie in 2024, and Turtle and Drama orchestrating thinly-veiled viral stunts to get Vince trending? Get the band back together—we have the makings of a strong season 9. In the meantime, Ferrara has his own version of life coming at you fast to look forward to this week: He's taking the family to Disneyland.