In 2005, Liev Schreiber was at the Met Gala in New York, a glamorous event where he felt, characteristically, out of place. He was there with the actor Elijah Wood, who was starring in Everything Is Illuminated, a movie Schreiber had just written and directed.

Years earlier, in a hotel lobby in Toronto, Schreiber had met the actress Naomi Watts. It was a cursory meeting; mutual friends had since been trying to set them up. When he saw her again that night in Manhattan, in the midst of his social tumult, he says she was "a ray of light."

"She said, 'What are you doing later on—you want to go dancing?' And I was like, yeah. So I went down to this club that she told me to meet her at, and of course she was there with Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, and I'm kind of standing around like a bump on a log, waiting for my turn. I think I was nervous, and I felt very embarrassed being there, and self-conscious, because all these movie stars were hovering, and I felt … awkward and out of my element. And I wasn't going to make a good impression. So I said, 'I'm sorry, but I gotta go home.'"

What happened next Schreiber calls very ballsy: "She chased me outside and said, 'Don't you want my digits?'"

"It was the first thing that came to me," Watts recalls. "I've never said those words before in my life and never since."

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The following day, they went out for cupcakes. "It was very silly—very romantic. And we had a kiss—not a big kiss, but it was a kiss that was like, ooh. Then she went back to L. A. and I wrote her all the time. Lots of emails. I think that was it—seduced by email."

The meeting was a time he can point to when his life changed. "I decided I was going to make a family with this person. For better or for worse, I stepped into a partnership with somebody. We were gonna bring kids into this world and try to love and respect each other."

He willed it to happen, because the opposite of isolation is connection.

Today Schreiber's life is at a crossroads. As necessary as family and love are for a feeling of belonging, he is thwarted by residue from his childhood. He is the son of a single and eccentric mother who chose to leave her husband for the life of a struggling artist on New York's Lower East Side. While his mother drove taxis and mixed vats of broccoli and tahini at the local yoga studio, Schreiber learned to adapt to adversity and isolation. It is a script he did not write but that has stayed with him and left its mark on his psyche. He has hung on to it because it defines him, explains his solitude, drives his behavior, and now informs his character on his television show, Ray Donovan.

"It's a great source of material," he says. But one that's heavy with consequences.

Schreiber is forty-eight years old and at the peak of his career: He's starred in films from The Manchurian Candidate and X-Men Origins: Wolverine to Spotlight, and been celebrated for his stage performances in Shakespeare's most powerful roles; he's the star of a Showtime hit that began its fourth season in June, and will return to Broadway this fall as Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He is paid well for what he loves to do; he is successful and respected. He has a beautiful home, a caring partner in Watts, and two sons whom he adores. And yet he's searching for clarity. Trying to find a way to shift the perspective, the paradigm, so that his focus is not on what's missing while he's missing out on what's in front of him.

Often when Schreiber speaks about himself, he will switch tenses. It is a way of connecting but also distancing, as if he's excavating himself from memory. His childhood was imprinted with chaos and crisis, and that path is familiar. Now he is choosing another path.

"If I'm so good at seeing the other side of things as an actor, how come I can't start to see the other side of things in my life?"

He is trying to answer that question.

The first time I meet Liev Schreiber, he tells me that he had unsuccessfully suggested another writer for this story. It is 8:00 P.M. on a Friday and we are standing outside his trailer in a parking lot on the set of Ray Donovan, both of us gripping paper cups filled with Turkish coffee as the Los Angeles dusk dissolves into night. At six foot three, he is more than a foot taller than I am. I stare at him and ask incredulously, "What?"

Just then it occurs to him what he's said and the effect it has had. His embarrassment is genuine. "I apologize," he says, laughing at his lack of discretion. It's a disarming laugh that conveys an unexpected vulnerability, because what gets him into trouble—brutal honesty—is also what makes him endearing.

He admits he has never had good impulse control—"it's the worst thing an actor can have"—but that he is attempting to develop it outside of work.

We move inside his pristine trailer. The only personal items are framed photos. One of him and Naomi in the bedroom; three black-and-white portraits of his sons, Sasha, nine, and Kai, seven; and a cheerful drawing that Kai made of a rainbow-colored umbrella with a bright-pink handle and blue raindrops.

Soon he will start shooting a scene in a dusty abandoned nightclub. It will go awry; the script has gaps in logic. He'll take the writer aside and firmly say, "You wrote this episode—take control," and then the following day he'll explain that he regrets doing that in front of the crew. This is a frequent conflict: needing it to be right but also being mindful of people's feelings. He will keep shooting the scene until the early hours of the next day.

Schreiber's manner is shy, but his presence is dominant. He is often the tallest one in the room, and his voice is punctuated by a New Yorker's sense of time. As in, there is none to waste.

But Schreiber is tired. And when he's tired, the world is seen through a prism of despair. The character of Ray Donovan is one he loves, but it's one of extremes: a "fixer" in Hollywood who makes problems disappear, in some ways a throwback to a man from an era when the biological imperative to take care of things wasn't hampered by ethics or political correctness.

He is also a producer on the show, which means he reads every script and is involved in a multitude of decisions. He directs, shapes scenes, consults writers, talks with editors, puts in sixteen-hour days, all for a character who separates him from his own children. And then there's the overwhelming compulsion to get it right.

"It's so nice when your kid jumps up on you and you feel his breath on your cheek."

As he waits to be called to the set, he changes into his character's clothing, searches for an ashtray, and flops down in a chair. "I underestimated in the past how hard this show is to do. This season—not having my family with me—has really made me feel the isolation of Ray a little bit more."

Home is New York but the series shoots in Los Angeles, and he's now at the end of four months without his family. "I need intimacy," he says. "Part of the thing about being famous, being on a television show, is that there's this weird sort of film between you and everybody else. And it's so nice when your kid jumps up on you and you feel his breath on your cheek."

For some, distance is a matter of location and logistics, a geographic obstacle that is not significant and does not disrupt harmony. For others, like Schreiber, it does the opposite: It resurrects a void.

Heather Schreiber was a defining force, a singularly independent mother bringing up her son alone. A left-wing Jewish intellectual, she eschewed any sort of material comforts while the other members of the fractured family, Schreiber's three older half brothers (from his mother's previous relationship), lived more affluently in the same city, with their biological father.

Schreiber's father, Tell, who now lives near Seattle, describes his ex as an exciting woman with a nonconformist spirit, a mother who was uncompromising in her beliefs and decisions. "When I met Heather, she was an artist," he says. "I loved her wholeheartedly. Heather has always been a Greenwich Village communist. She could whistle Mozart and paint; she was the most interesting woman I'd ever met."

When Tell moved to a small farm in Canada, Heather decamped with five-year-old Liev to Manhattan. Tell did not see him again until he was ten.

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Heather still calls her son Huggy, his childhood nickname. "Because as an infant he would reach out to grab you," she says. "He was very introverted as a kid. Precocious. A very attractive child. And athletic. Independent and fearless." They lived in a cold-water flat that was exceedingly spare. Heather was never interested in money, never had any aspirations for it.

"At the time," Schreiber explains, "I thought not having money was a drag. That's why I wanted to make money. I think I associated hard work with poverty. Now I know better. My mom was an artist. That's why she worked so hard. She painted and she drew. She loved books more than anybody I've ever met in my life. She taught me nothing matters but the moment of discovery and everything else is bullshit. Which isn't true… ."

He pauses, thinking this through as he speaks.

"I may have been a little brainwashed by my mom as a kid into thinking that money was bad. I don't believe that, but I think there's some residual guilt. I knew that I didn't want to live the way my mom wanted to live. We didn't share that spirit. I wanted to take care of her and I wanted to have things. I really wanted material things as a kid."

He says he stole money from the yoga studio where his mother worked when he was twelve, but Heather swears he was much younger, age eight or nine.

"He was very imaginative," Heather recalls. "He climbed the drainpipe on the side of the building to get to where they kept the money, and he would take large sums. We were the only white people on the block. He wanted the kids to like him, so he would use the money to buy them all roller skates, and he took a bunch of kids from the neighborhood to Chinatown and bought them dinner."

What rescued him from a life of delinquency?

"Guilt," he says. "It hurt my mother when I got caught. She had to pay the money back. She had to work harder. I didn't realize what I was doing would hurt anyone."

After Schreiber went to college, Heather moved to a Hindu ashram in Virginia and stayed there for almost thirty years. Then he bought her a house across the street from the ashram. He worries about her living alone.

The following day, we meet at 10:00 A.M. in the editing room on the Sony lot. Even though he finished at 3:00 that morning, he is alert and motivated. He sits on the couch with his hands folded across his chest and observes meticulously with Harvey, the editor, who stands at the console. There is a giant monitor on which Schreiber watches himself as Ray, and then he gives instructions. Occasionally, he'll jump off the couch and point to the screen. "That dissolve is too Hitchcocky," he says pointedly. They try it again. And again. Until it's right.

"He often 'tests' people to make sure they are paying attention," says Watts. "He wants to always trust that their intentions are as pure as his."

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We take a break and step outside for a cigarette, returning to a previous conversation about complaining and curbing the instinct to do so. He is a man who loves to gripe and he does it well. Entertainingly. And with an anguished flair. "It's like singing! Complaining is my music," he says.

Later at lunch, he mocks his younger self, who justified his outspokenness as honesty and wore it as a badge of courage. He clearly battles being outspoken and unfettered, knowing he must censor himself in case he says something that will upset the people he cares about: family, friends, colleagues.

"I'm accustomed to speaking my mind and I always do. But I've been through this so many times now, where people are hurt or offended or insulted. I don't mean to hurt anybody. I never intend to hurt anyone's feelings."

"He often 'tests' people to make sure they are paying attention," says Watts. "He wants to always trust that their intentions are as pure as his. Otherwise, he doesn't want to waste his time with them. I think ultimately he is looking for authenticity—within others and himself."

His directness is drawn less from hubris than from the confidence that came with early success. After Schreiber graduated from the Yale School of Drama, The New York Times called his performance in Cymbeline "revelatory," and a year later he was playing the title role in Hamlet at the Public Theater. Soon he was being offered roles that he thought took a lifetime to get.

Schreiber gravitates toward characters who embody duality and rich moral ambiguity. In Defiance, a 2008 film about Jewish brothers fighting the Nazis, his character, Zus, raises the question of whether an eye for an eye is acceptable behavior. The struggle with how to absorb rage and not let it corrupt one's character fueled his performance. In a 2010 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, he played Eddie Carbone, a 1950s dockworker whose grief and sorrow somehow explain his impenetrable denial and explosive anger. And in his mesmerizingly restrained performance last year as Spotlight's Marty Baron, the outsider who galvanizes The Boston Globe's investigative team, his motives are blurry. Is he determined to expose the truth for the sake of commerce? Or is he propelled by a deeper moral obligation to justice?

Romantic leads have never done it for him. He lights a cigarette and leans back in his chair.

"They say how great Brando was in Streetcar. He ruined the fucking play."

He laughs.

"It became a play about a beautiful animal, a sexy beast. That's not what the play was about. But he's such a wonderful actor that it became a play about his sexuality."

Being sure of yourself elevates the propensity to offend. Having an opinion is risky.

"You can't denigrate Brando's work in that. He was stunning."

He exhales a line of smoke.

"But you miss the play."

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The 405 freeway in Los Angeles is a stressful labyrinth of exit signs and motion, but Schreiber is a placid driver and the inside of the Mercedes SUV is a capsule of tranquility. He turns down BBC World News when he discovers we've been going in the wrong direction. He swiftly maneuvers through traffic and concentrates on following directions from the iPhone mounted on the dashboard.

There are times when Schreiber is able to transcend his past and embrace a feeling of calm and groundedness. It can come from surfing or cooking or meditation—times when he can get out of his head. Meditation in particular has been beneficial.

"I'm no Sufi master," he says. "But I try."

He finds relief in imagining the worst-case scenario and accepting it. A sense of dislocation that is a comfort—he says a skydiving trip he took exemplified this nihilistic freedom.

"I remember that profoundly. Being on the plane and edging toward the open door and thinking, 'What the hell am I doing?'—every instinct in my body saying 'Get away from this'—and then I said to myself, 'No, it's okay. I'm gonna die.' And then I jumped and it was the greatest thing I've ever done."

Two years ago he did a workshop on memory recall. "You talk about things that happened to you from the age of zero to seventeen," he says, flicking the blinker on and switching lanes. "I was feeling very self-conscious about it, but I decided to give over to it.

"And this amazing thing happened where the instructor said, 'Imagine the hospital you were born in.' And I was like, 'No fucking way, the hospital I was born in? I can't even remember what happened before I was sixteen.' And he said, 'Just imagine.'"

He describes conjuring a neonatal unit. "And the person running the exercise said, 'Find you.'"

For an instant, his eyes fill with tears. "To let go of whatever it is that made you feel unlovable and see yourself as available to goodness and available to change." It was an experience that freed him from being condemned by the past.

Schreiber is close to his half brothers, and last year he collaborated with Tell on building a playhouse for his sons. It was another seminal shift in his compass. Together they dug the house's foundation, poured concrete, and leveled the floor.

In the car he gets a phone call from Harvey the editor. His wife wants to have dinner, though he knows Schreiber wants to go back to work on the edit.

"No, go out to dinner. It's not worth an angry wife," Schreiber reassures him. Under his breath, he murmurs "Shit" when he hangs up. He's nervous about the edit but wants his editor to have a life.

He is aware more than ever of the compression of time. "I guess I'm feeling my age a little bit. Feeling like what's the point and that kind of stuff." And then he stops midsentence to remind himself "But this is great. I'm lucky."

As if by saying it out loud, it will sustain.

A few days after we've parted, a text arrives: "Something occurred to me." He calls to revisit the conversation we had about his juvenile transgressions and what it was that redirected him from a life of truancy—some of his friends from the neighborhood didn't fare so well. Our discussion has led him to a conclusion: He's put stock in adversity.

"Adversity can be a powerful learning tool. It is a beacon for some people," he says. "And that can be habitual. When you're in a bad situation, you're accustomed to growing through pain, so you're always willing to wade into the worst part, because that's how you learn."

He worries about his kids growing up sheltered by his success. That perhaps the insulated life they have, with wealth and privilege, isn't exposing them, as he was exposed, to hardship, and they will miss out on the tools necessary to grow from overcoming it.

"But I think adversity will find them. The best we can do is prepare them for the inevitability of that."

Schreiber, too, is a work in progress. With all of the good fortune he's earned, and all of the insights, the real challenge for him now is to implement change.

"I'm trying not to seek out the adversity just because it's of value," he says. "You asked what I need? To have patience with myself, and to be gentle with myself."

Navigating the obstacles of his past has been a fertile source of catharsis for Schreiber, but now, at last, he is learning to let it all go.

Lead Image: Sweater by Prada; trousers by Incotex; sneakers by Converse.

Look Two: Shirt by Burberry; sunglasses by Ray-Ban.

Look Three: Sweater by Prada; trousers by Incotex; sneakers by Converse; Portugieser chronograph by IWC.

Look Four: Jacket and T-shirt by Dolce & Gabbana; jeans by AG; sneakers by Converse.

Look Five: Jacket and shirt by Burberry.