Star Wars actor can’t stand his own films
Adam Driver’s new role is far, far away from his evil Jedi in ‘The Force Awakens’. But, he tells Tim Robey, he wouldn’t pay to see either
Adam Driver, the American actor who shot to fame with his memorably intense, creepy performance as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, has said that he finds it almost impossible to watch himself on screen.
Driver, who takes the lead role in Jim Jarmusch’s new film, Paterson, was forced to watch the Star Wars film at a premiere, but said the experience made him feel “sick to my stomach” so that he was “almost vomiting in the theatre”.
Adam Driver, nobody’s favourite anything five years ago, has become a new fixture in the stratosphere, thanks to his darkly dazzling turn as Kylo Ren, a new generation’s Darth Vader, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He’d shown considerable talent to get it, but there’s no denying what a career-maker this sensational role was, and how fervently Driver committed to it. Credit the casting nous of director J J Abrams, who managed to bring Star Trek back from the dead in 2009, but tripled this feat with Star Wars and knocked us all sideways. The film has so far earned more than $2 billion, making every actor in it a sudden and enormous deal – perhaps Driver most of all.
The one person who categorically hates watching him on screen? Driver himself. Talking at a cinema in the West End, following a screening of his latest film, the actor’s 6ft 3in frame seems to squirm and contort at the very thought. The story goes that Lena Dunham showed her co-star the completed pilot of Girls – her muchballyhooed earthy, Zeitgeisty comedy drama series from HBO that got him noticed – on her laptop back in 2012, and that was it. He couldn’t face his own face.
Everyone talks about what an unusual face it is, especially in that breathtaking moment when Kylo Ren’s mask came off. It’s long and sloping, with preternaturally pained eyes and a mouth that looks like it’s anticipating a mishap. There are jug-eared rescue cats that look more like Adam Driver than most leading men do.
Driver’s used to all this. He was given the nickname “Ears Two” during his pre-thespian days training in the US Marine Corps (some other unfortunate called Martinez was “Ears One”). This alone might tend to inculcate a certain bashfulness, but it’s more a ceaseless, borderline-neurotic perfectionism that keeps him running away from his own performances.
“I can’t help noticing all the mistakes,” he sighs. “I can’t change anything because it’s film, and film is forever – I want to have control over something that you can’t. I’m more attracted to things that are ugly and messy, that aren’t so perfect.”
So we turn to Paterson, the beautiful, bittersweet ode from the revered indie maverick Jim Jarmusch (director of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) and 2005’s Broken Flowers). This showcases Driver’s best and subtlest work to date as a bus driver laconically muddling through life with poetry in his head.
“I haven’t seen it,” he admits, on stage, after the packed-out screening. “I hear it’s good?” The warmth towards him is palpable in the room, in part because he seems so much the antithesis of the groomed luvvie with pre-rehearsed things to say. He seems real.
Most of what Driver says, like his career as a performer, tumbles out by mistake. After a childhood spent getting rid of his aggression in school “fight clubs” in Indiana, he joined the military, prompted by 9/11. He was forced to quit after injuring his sternum in a bike accident, retrained at the Juilliard School, and got that part in Girls. He didn’t tell his devout Baptist parents about his new job until the second season, fearing they wouldn’t approve of the many sex scenes. Driver has said he still finds it difficult to talk to them about his work, although he knows they’re proud of him: “They have their life; I have mine.”
His growing stardom since Girls feels startlingly fortuitous – for us, not just for him.
“I guess I don’t think of things in terms of the scale, or size, how big they are,” he reflects. “Nothing’s going to change me, just because of working on a big movie. Nothing says, ‘OK, now you have to be a different person’.
“I remember calling J J [Abrams] before Star Wars started and expressing that sense of being overwhelmed, hoping to feel comfortable. I guess it’s different with Paterson, where it feels like a series of long conversations, rather than it being five people’s job to, like, vacuum off aliens when they call ‘cut’. But the process of working on them is the same. You can’t skip steps.”
Paterson, at least, must have felt like a less disjointed experience. The film chronicles a week in the highly ritualised life of the title character: he wakes, leaves his wife (Golshifteh Farahani) beavering away at home, does the rounds of Paterson, New Jersey, behind the wheel. The film is pure Jarmusch minaturism – so modest, but magically attuned to the poetry of the mundane.
He’d never met Jarmusch before the script was sent to him. “But it was Jim, so it was a formality. I would have said yes to whatever, you know, Colgate commercial he was directing. I was like, ‘Send it to me, and I’ll flip the pages so you see I bent them, and then I’ll say yes to it’.”
Was it his idea to train as a bus driver before the shoot began?
“I decided to do it, on my own. It seemed like his physical life was very important. He has this very well-worn groove of a daily routine, so I didn’t want to be thinking about what button or handle to be using to drive a bus.”
“I took a three-month course in New York, which is complicated, to parallel park, you know…” There’s mischief creeping into his tone. “In Queens, the bus instructor got very angry. He’s like, ‘There are STUPID KIDS, they’re STUPID, because they’re IGNORANT, they haven’t DEVELOPED yet.”
Driver’s air of detatched amusement came to the fore repeatedly in Girls. His film roles so far have depended, too, on how naturally funny he is, from a scene-stealing cameo as a novelty-song crooner in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) to a dauntingly hipsterish Brooklyn filmmaker in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young (2014). But he’s clearly decided, at 32, that it’s time to get serious – not only with Kylo Ren and Paterson, but his forthcoming role as one of a pair of tormented Jesuit priests in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar favourite Silence. The shoot was a lengthy ordeal in Taiwan, during which he lost well over 30lbs and craved peanut butter like mad. He’s also just finished a heist comedy, Logan Lucky, with Steven Soderbergh.
But will he see any of these films? When pressed, he admits he made himself sit through The Force Awakens. “But it took a long time. I remember being sick to my stomach and almost vomiting in the theatre at the premiere. My involvement in it does sour it a little.”