Hard-looking actor Liev Schreiber does seem to favor boxing projects, but it was the work that came first -- he only started boxing to prepare for a movie.

He says he started doing it in the early 2000s to prepare to play the great boxer Chuck Wepner (the inspiration for the 1976 classic "Rocky"). But the Wepner film, which Schreiber co-wrote, didn't actually get made until 2016. In the interim, he took on all sorts of other boxing-themed projects.

Most notably for real boxing nerds, he was the narrator of HBO's longtime documentary series "24/7," which offered in-depth profiles of boxers training for fights before they aired.

And as you point out, there's a lot of boxing in "Ray Donovan," the role Schreiber is most famous for (he's the title character, after all, and a producer). Ray's brother is an ex-pugilist who owns a boxing gym where the Donovan family spends a lot of time.

But 2016's "Chuck" is Schreiber's love letter to the sport. Wepner was one of the sport's great characters, famous not for being good (he had 14 losses to his 35 wins), but for being persistent. And for once boxing a bear.

Schreiber clearly had a great time writing the film, and playing the man. But not only as an act of fantasy by a fan of the sport -- he found something deeper in Wepner, and in boxing, that he wanted to bring out.

"The prizefighter's journey is an existentialist ideogram for life," Schreiber said in an interview with The New Yorker before the film's release. "And the real fight, the real 15 rounds, occurs in the heart, at home."

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