DRIVER’S EDUCATION
Working with many of the planet’s greatest directors, Adam Driver has established himself as one of America’s most celebrated actors. And now he’s ramping it up with Marriage Story, The Report and The Rise Of Skywalker. Total Film meets the star who stil
Sunday, 11am, in London’s Ham Yard Hotel. Not the most palatable time to meet one of Hollywood’s finest, perhaps. But an audience with Adam Driver means fitting into an insanely demanding schedule. He’s just arrived in the city from Belgium, where he’s filming Annette, the new Sparksscored rock-opera musical from the brilliant, elusive French director Leos Carax. Last night he joined another Annette – Bening – on the London Film Festival red carpet for Scott Burns’ CIA exposé The Report; while today it’s the turn of Noah Baumbach’s exhilarating drama-of-the-heart Marriage Story, and an impending audience Q&A. “That sounds very scary,” he gulps.
With Episode IX of the Star Wars saga, The Rise Of Skywalker, also due before the year is out, it’s the sort of pressure that might flatten some. But Driver is resolute, relaxed. Dressed in jeans, black denim jacket and a lumberjack-check shirt – more high-street casual than designer label chic – he radiates blue-collar warmth.
Tall, gawky even, he sinks into the soft furnishings of his sofa, before pulling himself back up to remove the bottle of water on the table between us that’s currently obscuring our sight-lines. He wants to be seen.
No doubt, this is his time, particularly with Marriage Story. Ever since it premiered in Venice in late summer, the awards buzz has been building around Driver’s tour-de-force performance. He’s already been through it with Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman – Best Supporting Actor noms at the Oscars, Globes and BAFTAs – plus three consecutive Emmy nods for his breakout role in HBO show Girls as Lena Dunham’s unhinged boyfriend. But this feels more intense. Can he shut out the noise? “You try to,” he says, casually. “I have no control over that. It’s not something you can put a lot of energy into.”
What Driver does put his energy into are his characters. A troubled Jesuit priest in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. A soul-searching, poetryspouting bus driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. A folk singer in the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Arguably, there isn’t an actor from his generation – he turns 36 this month – with a more enviable CV. “In a sense, I don’t really have ownership over it,” he shrugs. “I always wanted to work with great directors – it’s a filmmakers’ medium. I can want that all I want; a lot of actors want that. But I was lucky in timing, of being available, when those people were doing things.”
He can be humble all he wants, but even in his first film – 2010’s TV movie You Don’t Know Jack – he was working with director Barry Levinson and co-star Al Pacino. In the following two years, he was cast by Clint Eastwood (J. Edgar) and Steven Spielberg (Lincoln). But he insists on the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time.
“I would be doing a huge disservice if I didn’t say that was a huge part of it.” And yet, all modesty aside, there’s something about Driver that seems to draw in directors, the camera captivated by his angular face – the full lips, intense eyes and prominent nose.
In the case of Noah Baumbach, he’s cast him four times – as a hipster in both Frances Ha and While We’re Young and, in a smaller role, as a client to Ben Stiller’s financier in
The Meyerowitz Stories. Now in Marriage Story, he’s Charlie, a New York theatre director going through a painful divorce with his actress wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). Baumbach writes so well for Driver, it seems. “I don’t know why, but I’ll take it!” he grins. “We’re also friends. We see each other socially all the time, and it always evolves into a ‘What do you want to work on next?’ kinda thing. But there is a familiarity that I have with Noah.”
With Marriage Story, it “started with a conversation that Noah and I had years ago” and blossomed into one of the best scripts Baumbach has ever written. Honest, personal, raw, Driver immediately related. “Not to get personal, but I’m a child of divorce,” he says. His parents, Nancy and Joe, split when Driver was seven, and he moved from San Diego to Indiana with his mother and older sister. “Getting used to the idea of two people that were in your life and then you can’t remember them being together… it’s just an incredibly heart-wrenching thing.”
Although his mother got remarried to a Baptist minister, Driver segued into a rebellious teen phase, the archetypical misfit. “I got grounded by my folks a lot because of bad grades,” he says. So the story goes, he even formed his own ‘Fight Club’ (he was 15 when David Fincher’s antiauthoritarian classic arrived). After school, he bounced between jobs – telemarketing, door-to-door salesman – before joining up to the U.S. Marines in the wake of 9/11. He’s “incredibly proud” of his time there, but an injury, following a mountain bike accident, saw him medically discharged from duty.
He eventually found his way to acting (there had been “a couple of plays” during high school) and was accepted into Juilliard. It’s here that he met his future wife, actress Joanne Tucker (they married in 2013, and live in Brooklyn with – reputedly – a toddler son they don’t discuss with the press). While Baumbach has been through divorce (to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh), Driver remains happily married. So did making Marriage Story change his opinions about the age-old institution? “Well, I don’t want to get divorced if I can avoid it!” he chuckles.
Tucker briefly features in The Report, which casts Driver as Daniel Jones, a real-life United States Senate investigator who spent seven years pouring over a staggering 6.3 million pages relating to the CIA using torture – ‘Enhanced
‘I THINK I CAN GET TUNNEL VISION WHEN IT COMES TO SHOOTING SOMETHING. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO IT ANOTHER WAY – YOU HAVE TO BE OBSESSED BY IT’
Interrogation Techniques’ – in the wake of 9/11. But Driver denies it was his own time in the military that spurred him to take the role. “You’re not going to find a bigger group of people that find torture is not an effective way of getting information than the military – that’s a well-documented fact,” he says. “The military is not [an] advocate of torture.”
Rather, Driver liked Jones’ character – “the decorum of being a Senate staffer… having to do your job and take emotion out of it, and compartmentalise your feelings”. Driver and Jones have something in common, too. “Scott said, ‘You guys both have an obsessive quality,’” smiles the actor, nodding his agreement. “I think I can get tunnel vision when it comes to shooting something. I don’t know how to do it another way – you have to be obsessed by it, while you’re working on it.”
The idea lingers and, later on, after losing his train of thought, Driver returns to the theme. “To be clear… ‘obsessive’ might be an extreme word,” he cautions.
“I feel like I try to have a work ethic… I try to be focused, not so much obsessive. Maybe someone else would describe it as obsessive but you have a limited time when you’re making a movie. Why not take advantage of the time you have to hopefully make it better? The best version you can within the resources that you have.”
For sure, it’s this laser-focus that explains why Driver’s performances are so finely honed. On Silence, he famously entered a Jesuit retreat in Wales, spending seven days without uttering a word. But nerves still take hold, that glittering CV meaningless in the moment. “I don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, because I worked with this person, that means I know what I’m doing!’ The opposite!” he exclaims. “You never figure it out. You have to figure out a way over a course of time – which you never will – of being comfortable with being dissatisfied.”
When it comes to the Star Wars saga, it feels like an anomaly in his back catalogue, vastly different to, say, Marriage Story. “In a way, Star Wars is a big blockbuster, which you would think would be maybe devoid of those conversations [about character]. But I haven’t found the process very dissimilar. You try to make Star Wars personal as much as anything else, and because J.J. [Abrams] was the director and because Rian Johnson was the director, it all came down to similar [things]… taking moments and breaking them into pieces and making sure you’re truthful.”
Driver’s on a roll now. “The obvious difference is the rhythm of a set. A Star Wars set, there are 50 people all doing individual jobs, whether it be special effects or brushing a leaf or vacuuming something. There are just so many more moving pieces that finding your footing in the rhythm of that set… it’s just longer.” The fandom has also taken some getting used to. He recalls someone dressing up as Kylo Ren, stalking him in a hotel. “They were asking people in the elevator if they’d seen me! That makes you a little nervous.”
While The Rise Of Skywalker sees him reunite with Abrams for a second time, after 2015’s The Force Awakens, Driver is under strict instructions not to reveal anything about the fate of his dark side-cleaving character Kylo Ren, last seen being duped by Luke Skywalker. But how does it feel coming to the end of such a big three-film arc? “That’s hard to describe,” he says, tensing up, perhaps for fear that a probe droid might pop out and zap him. “I would just say ‘good’ but that would be too general.”
Fortunately, Driver is more willing to talk the Leos Carax film, Annette, in which he co-stars with Marion Cotillard. “I’m really excited about it,” he says. “I can’t believe that someone is paying for us to do it. I really feel like we’re getting away with something.” Yes, Driver will be belting out tunes, though he also sings in Marriage Story,a heartbreaking Stephen Sondheim number. And to be clear: “I find singing terrifying. Let me sing an Elvis song for you now… that would be terrifying.” But that’s Driver for you: willing to go places that scare him.
MARRIAGE STORY IS IN CINEMAS FROM 15 NOVEMBER AND ON NETFLIX FROM 6 DECEMBER. THE REPORT IS IN CINEMAS NOW. STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER OPENS ON 19 DECEMBER.