On screen Kevin Connolly is the friend who says no, the one in the group who reads the contract. It is a useful part and a thankless one, and Entourage rarely gave him more. His directing is the other career, and the harder one to vouch for.
Fi1m perspective
Watch any stretch of Entourage (2004) and you can pick out Eric Murphy by what he is not doing. He is not eating, not driving, not auditioning. He is standing slightly to one side of Vince, frowning at whatever has just been proposed, and he will turn out to be right about it. Connolly plays this without fuss: a small, alert, sensible man among people who are none of those things.
The trouble is that being right is not a joke. Ari Gold gets the tirades, Drama gets the wounded pride, Turtle gets the food, and Eric gets the conscience, which in a comedy is the part with the fewest lines anyone remembers. We liked him, and across eight seasons we kept waiting for the writers to notice they had a straight man and do something with the straightness. They mostly did not. Connolly is good enough to make that a shame rather than a shrug; when Vince walks away from sound advice, Connolly registers it, and the show has already cut to the car.
That has been his lot as an actor. He started early, in commercials at six, then a small part in Rocky V (1990), then a hundred episodes of the sitcom Unhappily Ever After (1995–1999) as Ryan Malloy. He tends to be cast as the loyal one, the manager, the grounded friend in an ensemble, and he plays it well. It is not a part that gets a man noticed, and he has not been, much.
The other career is directing, and it started almost as soon as the acting did: six episodes of Unhappily Ever After, two of Entourage, then features, Gardener of Eden (2007), Dear Eleanor (2016) and Gotti (2018). We have not reviewed any of them, so we will not judge them here. We can say that Gotti was met with something close to unanimous hostility from critics, for its script and its direction, and that a director whose one high-profile feature is remembered that way has a long road back. Connolly has said of directing Robert Downey Jr and Tim Roth in a short film that "they made me want to quit acting". It is a gracious thing to say, and it sounds like a man happier watching actors than being one.
If you want to know what he does, watch Eric tell Vince no and be proved right by the end of the episode. If you want to know whether he can direct, we cannot yet tell you, and on the reviews so far the answer may take a while.
Biography
Kevin Connolly is an American actor and director. He was born on 5 March 1974 in Patchogue, Long Island, New York.
Connolly began his career at the age of six in television commercials. His first film role was as Chickie in Rocky V (1990). He is best known for playing Eric Murphy in the HBO series Entourage (2004–2011), in which he also directed two episodes, and for his role as Ryan Malloy in the sitcom Unhappily Ever After (1995–1999). He reprised the role of Eric in the 2015 Entourage film. Connolly has appeared in films including The Notebook (2004), John Q (2002), He's Just Not That Into You (2009) and Secretariat (2010).
As a director, his feature films include Gardener of Eden (2007) and Gotti (2018). He received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy for Entourage.
