Rex Lee's trade is the reaction: the assistant who takes the abuse, waits half a beat, and hands it back with interest. On Entourage that half-beat was the best-written thing in the show. Elsewhere he has been given the loudness without the wait.
Fi1m perspective
Ari Gold has a phone in each hand and is shouting at his assistant. The assistant, Lloyd, does not flinch and does not hurry. He lets the insult finish, takes it in, and answers with something just as inventive and considerably calmer. That is Rex Lee's whole act on Entourage, and it is a good one. Jeremy Piven supplies the volume; Lee supplies the timing, and the two-handers between them are the best-written scenes the show ever managed. We laughed out loud at those exchanges, far more than at anything Vince and his friends got up to, because Lloyd is the only person in the building who is not impressed by Ari and the only one Ari cannot fire without losing.
Lee came to it late. He trained as a pianist at Oberlin, graduating in 1990, and switched to acting after a theatre class; there followed children's theatre, a spell as a casting assistant, and guest parts from the mid-1990s. Lloyd arrived in the second season of Entourage in 2005, became a regular from the third, and ran until 2011. Since then the parts have come steadily: the guidance counsellor Mr. Wolfe on Suburgatory (2011-2013), the publicist Elliot Park on Young & Hungry (2014-2018), and Lloyd again in the Entourage film of 2015. He has been cast, over and over, as the openly gay Asian-American colleague in an ensemble comedy, the professional who has to manage the people around him.
The limit shows on Suburgatory. Mr. Wolfe begins as a sharp sketch and is broadened, episode by episode, until he is a single tic played at volume. The show did the same to Ana Gasteyer, Chris Parnell and Alan Tudyk, so the fault is not Lee's alone, but it tells you what he needs. He is funny when he has something volatile to react to. Put him in a room where everyone is already broad and he becomes one more broad person in it, and the thing he does best, the pause before the answer, has nowhere to go.
He knows the shape of his own casting. Of one part he said he read the description and thought, "How is this not me?" He has also said he can play lines that are not written to him, and on the evidence of Entourage that is true; Lloyd's best moments are the ones where the words are Ari's and the joke is Lee's face while he waits for them to stop.
Watch the second and third seasons of Entourage for the assistant, not the film star. Then hope someone writes him another boss worth being quiet at.
Biography
Rex Lee is an American actor. He was born on 7 January 1969 in Warren, Ohio, and graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1990, where he initially studied piano before switching to theatre.
Lee is best known for playing Lloyd Lee, the assistant to Ari Gold, in the HBO series Entourage (2005–2011), a role he reprised in the 2015 film. He played Mr. Wolfe in the ABC sitcom Suburgatory (2011–2013) and Elliot Park in Young & Hungry (2014–2018). Other credits include appearances in Glee (2012), Castle (2014) and Fresh Off the Boat (2015).
He received the Asian Excellence Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Television Series in 2007 and 2008 for his work on Entourage.
