Minnie MAGIC

After three decades in the business, actor, singer and activist Minnie Driver still has an appetite for it all. She opens up to Ella Dove about ambition, empowerment and how she finally found true love

When Minnie Driver greets me on Zoom from her London home, she has a relaxed smile on her face. Her hair is still wet from the shower, she’s wearing minimal make-up and a simple purple T-shirt with a gold pendant necklace. She’s calm and contented, but as someone who has forged a stellar Hollywood career that’s lasted three decades (and counting), she strikes me as someone whose brain seldom takes a breather – and it turns out I’m right. ‘I have no intention of stopping!’ she exclaims. In her 51 years, she’s starred in films alongside the likes of Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, earned Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, and carved out a successful music career with three solo albums to her name. But her proudest achievement, she explains, is the fact that she’s still working. ‘I left drama school when I was 21. To have carried on making a living in this profession is a feat.’

Her success has come from continually growing and evolving. ‘I think you constantly have to interrogate your ambition,’ she says. ‘And for me, that’s about creativity.’ Her latest creative endeavour is a podcast,

Minnie Questions With Minnie Driver, in which she channels her reflective nature by asking high-profile guests seven existential questions. Interviewees include actor Viola Davis, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl and investigative journalist Ronan Farrow. ‘Asking specific questions can be a great springboard, as well as surprisingly revealing,’ Driver says. ‘By examining inflection points in our lives, we begin to make sense of moments of change.’

She’s also about to return to the big screen in Cinderella, which she recently finished filming in London. It’s a modern take on the classic fairy tale set to current pop music, and Driver plays Queen Beatrice alongside leading lady Camila Cabello (‘she’s a real Cinders for our times’), James Corden and Pierce Brosnan. ‘It feels very much like one of those post-war musicals that were made specifically to cheer people up. There’s singing, there’s dancing… it’s a reminder that pure, unadulterated enjoyment still exists for us all.’ Driver’s enthusiastic energy radiates, even through a laptop screen. As a child, she was ‘dynamic to the point of distraction for my parents. I couldn’t get enough of life.’ She and her older sister, Kate, spent a lot of their early childhood living in Barbados, ‘scrabbling around in mangroves, going fishing and diving for sand dollars, which we’d try to sell to sunburnt tourists. We were quite scrappy, feral little kids,’ she laughs. Her parents separated when she was six, and she went to boarding school in Hampshire. ‘Thankfully, my school taught me how to take all that constant unwieldy energy and focus it in a creative way.’

After a stint at drama school, she made her TV debut opposite Bill Paterson and Sinéad Cusack in the 1990 film God On The Rocks, and small parts in British shows including Casualty and Peak Practice followed. But her breakout role came in 1995, when she starred as Benny in the film adaptation of the Maeve Binchy novel Circle Of Friends. She then hit the big time, with roles in Goldeneye, Sleepers, Big Night and

Good Will Hunting, the latter landing her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

‘Arriving at the Oscars with my parents and sister was like a fantasy,’ she recalls. ‘The sheer number of people, the adrenaline. Growing up in England, I never even imagined that could happen. And Hollywood is perfect when you’re in your 20s. All you want to do is go to parties where you dress up, and there are gorgeous blokes. It’s incredibly fun, but it’s dangerous – you don’t have much to hang on to.’

Despite the success that followed, from playing Carlotta in The Phantom Of The Opera film to starring in popular TV series The Riches and About A Boy, Driver is frank about the fact that for a long time, ‘filmmaking was just utterly described by men’, and when the Me Too movement rocked Hollywood in 2017, she spoke honestly and openly about the challenges women have faced. ‘I hope women now feel that their voices will be heard more,’ she says. ‘It has been a steep learning curve, but we should be listening to one another and really understanding how we can learn and change, even when doors seem to be closed, to find creative ways of opening them. My mother is a great blueprint of that, of blazing your own trail.’

She breaks off and takes a long, deep breath. A few weeks before our interview, Driver’s mother, designer Gaynor Churchward, passed away – and her grief is clear. I offer my condolences. ‘It’s absolutely awful,’ she says quietly. ‘But I feel grateful that we got to be with her and have a proper funeral as so many people haven’t had that recently. She leaves a legacy of extreme inspiration and love.’

Just after her mum died, Driver tells me that she dived into the English sea. ‘It was eight degrees and absolutely freezing. But it also makes you feel as alive as you possibly can feel, which, when you’re grieving, is actually a really good thing. It connects you. My mum was a big swimmer. She would have loved that.’

Swimming, along with running, is how she takes care of both her physical and mental wellbeing. ‘I just

‘HOLLYWOOD IS PERFECT WHEN YOU’RE IN YOUR 20S’

move,’ she says. When she’s at her home in California, she swims in the Pacific ocean every day. For the past 21 years, she’s lived mostly at her ‘little place in Malibu. It’s in this mobile home park; it’s a bit like Cornwall. It’s not the Baywatch version of Malibu; it’s much more down-to-earth. It’s about dogs on the beach, family picnics, going for runs and hikes in the canyons. I’ve discovered the peaceful version of living in California.’

Still, she admits that she does have a soft spot for Hollywood glamour. ‘I don’t think anything in life is “either-or”. I absolutely love it when Charlotte Tilbury does my make-up and I’m wearing the most incredible dress and they send you off to the ball. It’s rarefied and privileged and amazing. But maintaining that is unfathomable to me. I know actors who literally can’t leave the house without that being their reality. I need to be able to put my tracksuit on, go for a run, be sweaty, go and get milk and the papers, have breakfast and go about my day without needing to look a certain way.’

Driver, her son Henry, 12, from a previous relationship, and her partner, filmmaker Addison O’dea, moved to Driver’s London home at the start of 2020 to film Cinderella. ‘The plan was for Henry to do just a term at a local school here, but he’s fallen in love with England. I ask if he wants to go back to California and he’s like, “No Mum, I love the rain, I love the mud!”’ Her impression of a husky, Californian teenage boy is impressively accurate. ‘Even though he’s a born and bred California boy, he’s such an Englishman. So I don’t know what we’ll do. Like everyone, we’re taking it day by day.’

Surprisingly, Driver reveals that before the pandemic, she’d never lived with a significant other before. ‘It’s weird, I know; most people have lived with men for a long time by the time they’re my age. But my life has always been so nomadic. I don’t know that I like it that much,’ she smiles, ‘but I do know I really love Addison.’

She initially met Addison (or ‘Ads’, as she fondly refers to him) through a mutual friend, but it wasn’t until the California wildfires swept through her local area in 2018 that their connection deepened. The story, she tells me, is ‘a bloody good one’ and she’s right. With ‘the roads shot’ and her local area ‘burnt out’, she found herself stranded, unable to reach her house or indeed help her neighbours who had chosen to stay in their homes to battle the blaze. ‘I wanted to take them supplies,’ she says. ‘The only way to get over was by boat, but the Coast Guard had disallowed that because people were looting. So, I thought about who I knew who would risk arrest and dive in the ocean with me...’ She gives a rebellious grin.

‘I remembered this guy [Addison] who made documentaries in hard-to-reach places, so I called him up and he was like, “I’m in”. He showed up with a satellite phone, snacks and some high-vis binoculars, and I thought, “This is a good dude”. We hid and waited for the Coast Guard to move off, then we dived in with these paddle boards and paddled gasoline, water and chocolate over to my neighbours. He helped me clean up the ash in my house. I knew then what a good person he was.’

So good, in fact, that they quickly became more than friends. Their relationship, she says, is built on the shared values of ‘honesty, support and carving out time for each other and ourselves’. Driver is quick to describe herself as a romantic, too. ‘Oh yeah, yeah, definitely,’ she agrees. ‘Of course, there are practicalities about being in a relationship. But I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive to romance.’ Her love of love is what attracted her to another upcoming role, in the second series of Amazon Prime’s Modern Love, which is based on the popular New York Times column. ‘What I love most about it is that the stories are true,’ she says. ‘They remind us of connection, that love is the centrifuge around which all our lives are built.’

Having experienced a number of high-profile relationships and heartache, including breaking off a brief engagement with Josh Brolin when she was 31, and finding out Matt Damon had ended their romance when he announced he was single on The Oprah Winfrey Show, I wonder what Driver has learned from relationships that haven’t worked out. ‘I realised I always hit these same touchstone moments, but then I’d see how differently Addison reacted,’ she says. ‘I realised how I’d been with people who were completely inflexible. Addison, in comparison, is stable, honest, kind, and completely takes responsibility for his own shit. I think it’s almost impossible to be in a good relationship with someone who is not willing to do the work on themselves. And it means that you have to do that work on yourself, too.’

She says that she, Addison, Henry and her dog, Bob, ‘make a good community. I’ve loved having this time together recently; going outside, listening to the birds, looking at the trees. It was a kind of enforced meditation.’

As a mother, she describes herself as ‘laid-back, although I’m strict about certain things – being polite, kind and helpful. But if Henry feels like he wants to watch five episodes of Brooklyn Nine-nine once he’s finished his homework and helped me with dinner, then who am I to say no? I’m happy giving him the freedom to make his own decisions. He’s honestly my favourite person in the world. I would spend every single moment with him if I possibly could.’ She tails off and grins. ‘I’ve got to work on that…’

What are her hopes for the future, I ask. ‘I hope that as a society, we’re kinder. Losing my mum made me think about what survives of us, and what survived of her is about looking after others and offering a useful contribution to the world. That’s all I want from life.’

Cinderella is in cinemas from 16th July. Minnie Questions With Minnie Driver is available on all major podcast providers. Modern Love will be released on Amazon Prime later this year

‘LOVE IS THE CENTRIFUGE AROUND WHICH ALL OUR LIVES ARE BUILT’