An Entourage meta-celebrity. A Seattle microbrewer. A drummer for a goofy sweatshorts-clad pop band. Adrian Grenier is all these things, but he's something else too: a secret whale enthusiast. The actor is about to embark on an expedition in search of the world's loneliest whale — if his Kickstarter project gets funded, that is.

The world's loneliest whale was first discovered in 1992 at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Puget Sound. As Leslie Jamison points out in her essay 52 Blue, researchers heard the whale's strange call through a network of hydrophones planted along the ocean floor. The call came in at 52 hertz, hence the whale's nickname "52." The frequency is extraordinarily high for blue whales, whose calls usually fall somewhere between 15 and 20 hertz. As scientists studied the whale, they found he was always alone — crushingly, disappointingly alone. Like the plot of a down-and-out country song, no other whales were responding to Lonely Whale's strange, falsetto calls.

He's the Tiny Tim of whales

While on the journey, Grenier and Zeman will shoot a documentary about how ocean noise pollution (mostly from humans) is disrupting whales' ability to communicate with each other. "Much like the plight of the Lonely Whale," the Kickstarter story reads, "we too are struggling to be heard above the endless chatter of our plugged-in lives."

In an interview with Origin, Grenier said, "Lonely whales have the ability to bring people in," noting that the whale "reflects a humanness, something that’s within all of us."

Adrian Grenier's own Moby Dick