How Adam Driver found his focus

Just as he was finishing the second season of Girls, Adam Driver got a call from his agent asking if he’d be interested in playing Kylo Ren in the reboot of the Star Wars franchise. For most actors, this would be a no-brainer. But Driver wasn’t sure. 

“Usually, I do things where they ask you to bring your own clothes to set because they don’t have a costume budget!” he said, when we met just before the release of The Force Awakens in 2015.

“Going from that to a production where we have 50 of everything is interesting. They call ‘cut’, and hundreds of people descend. One person is brushing leaves, and the other person’s vacuuming something.”

In the end, it was director JJ Abrahams’ emphasis on story and character that won him over.  

“It’s really about someone who’s in a small town and wants to get out of it. Luke [Skywalker] wanting to escape, that really resonates with people.”

It certainly resonated with Driver, who is from Mishawaka, a small town in Indiana where for fun, he and his friends invented their own version of Fight Club.  

“Films were our escape,” he says. “Mishawaka is many good things but cultural hub of the world it is not.  We didn’t travel, no one could afford to go to Europe. So Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and going to the movies were pretty much our only avenue out of this really kind of depressed, industrial town. There wasn’t much else to do, other than kick the shit out of each other.”

We met in a café near his home in Brooklyn, for breakfast. A man who seems to be constantly working, he had to leave at 10am to get to New Jersey, where he was shooting the Jim Jarmusch film, Paterson. 

This was the kind of project he was more used to: running to set up a shot before the autumn light fails, working quickly to a tight budget. 

It’s also where he seems most comfortable. When I ask if he misses his plush Star Wars trailer, he just laughs. 

“Jim Jarmusch, he’s a guy I never dreamed I’d get to work with!  I remember driving an hour and a half to see Coffee and Cigarettes in Indianapolis, and not really understanding it. But later remembering so many things from that movie. I’m very happy to be working with him.”

As the hype ramps up for the latest Star Wars film – with Driver featured again as Kylo Ren – here are a few insights into his creative life. As well as the lessons we can learn from him.

If at first you don’t succeed.. give up?

After school, Driver applied to study drama at Juilliard. He didn’t get in, so instead he set off to make it in Los Angeles, saying goodbye to all his friends and vowing never to return.

In fact, he never even got to LA. His car broke down and he ran out of money. So he just turned around, and came home.

“I probably should have been more embarrassed by it.  I’m embarrassed now!  Especially because I made such a production of telling people that I wasn’t coming back. 

“But there was no other option. So I just started working odd jobs and that was that, I thought.”

There’s nothing like a near-death experience to focus the mind.

After 9/11, Driver joined the Marines, and loved it. But after nearly getting killed during a training exercise, he decided that what he really wanted was to act.  

“I think you become very aware, probably more than average people your age, that we’re all going to die.  You’re just aware of your own mortality.

“So I wanted to do things that I was too scared to do before. Like becoming an actor. 

“You’re just more aware of how much you can accomplish in a day, I think.  And how time is precious, and you don’t want to waste it.”

And once you find that focus, pursue it. Relentlessly. 

After two years in the Marines, he broke his sternum in a serious bike accident. He was discharged, never having seen active service overseas. So he moved to New York and applied to study drama at Juilliard again, and this time succeeded. He moved to New York, and worked as a janitor to pay his way.

Determined to keep up the fitness he’d achieved in the military, he also devised a punishing workout routine that involved running between his apartment in Queens and school in Manhattan, every day.  

“I was determined to not fail. I was occupied with trying to do that, so I didn’t mind the solitude of it. But I definitely missed the camaraderie [of the Marines]. You miss the rigour, the discipline. 

“You look around you, and you don’t see where the skills that you were told were so valuable in the military apply to a civilian community.

“Then you start to hate civilians a bit, because they seem to be just doing whatever they want to do.  Eating whenever they want to eat.  And moving so slowly!”

Use negative emotions to push forward.

He was angry, he says, after the accident. But he channelled that into a determination to make good in his new career.

“Studying drama was a culture shock, after all I’d done. I needed to calm down, and I think a lot of people in my class maybe needed to grow up a little bit.  

“A lot of them were just right out of high school, and I’d had a bit more experience by then.  I was aggressively pursuing acting – and trying to make it as difficult as I could.

“It still bothers me that I didn’t finish what I started, in the Marines. I recently got in contact with all of my platoon, and we can joke up to a certain point.

“But then they start to joke about things that happened overseas. I missed that whole experience with those guys, and that’s hard.”

Hard work matters. Talent matters. But also luck.

“I started in theatre straight after Juilliard. And I’ve worked pretty much ever since. My goal was to just make a living. To work with the people that I’ve got to work with is beyond any game plan I had.

“I work really hard and I take it very seriously, but I also am very lucky.  I’m a straight, white male. And there are just more opportunities for me than there are for people who aren’t that. 

“I’ve known so many amazing actors and because they’re female, the parts that they audition for are painfully terrible. There’s not as many opportunities for them as there are for me.”

Don’t be intimidated by your heroes.

Driver worked with director Martin Scorsese on the 2016 film Silence. “When you’re working with someone like that,” he says, “your impulse is to be, ‘Just tell me what to do. I’ll do anything!’  

“But he doesn’t want that. He hired you for your opinions and your perspective. They actually want you to fight them and make it your own.  

“There are older actors and older directors who come from a world that’s so collaborative, they don’t know how to operate any other way. 

“Scorsese has managed to surround himself with people he trusts, and he wants their opinion. He challenges them, and they challenge him.  

“You would expect someone who’s accomplished as much as he has to come in with ideas and just dictate you to execute them.  But that’s not the way his DNA is.  And I find that so inspiring.

“I grew up watching his movies. But even though he’s accomplished so much he’s so full of this doubt of not knowing.

“He still hasn’t figured it out, and I find that is true about anybody who creates something great. You’re never satisfied.”

There are many ways to serve.

As his career as an actor took off, Driver and his wife Joanne Tucker launched Art In The Armed Forces, a non-profit that takes live theatre performances to the military, wherever they are stationed. It’s been hugely successful, involving a host of A-list actors.

“We’ve gone all over.  We just went to Kuwait, which was really fun.  It was the first time we’d been to the Middle East. We did monologues from contemporary American plays that are not military themed, at all. 

“People respond to them in a really great way. I think they naturally assume that theatre is Shakespeare and tights and language that’s beyond their comprehension.

“But it’s also about a shared humanity.  When you see it live onstage, it’s very powerful. Suddenly theatre is not some unattainable, weird, nerdy culture. It seems very accessible.”

Just showing up can be important.

“I did a small thing on this movie called You Don’t Know Jack for HBO. My first day was in a scene with Al Pacino, Susan Sarandon and John Goodman.  

“From that I felt like I had the balls enough to send her a presentation explaining Art In The Armed Forces, and she’s been so generous with us since then.  

“She’s on our advisory council and she’s amazing because she understands that just showing up is so powerful.  That’s something also I’ve learned from my wife, too.  She’s very good about showing up.”  

And the Force is always with you.

When I ask if he had any reservations about going to the Dark Side for Star Wars, Driver just laughs.

“I live in the Dark Side,” he says. “Constantly reminding myself that we’re all going to die soon.”

I interviewed Adam Driver for the Telegraph magazine. You can read that (much longer) feature here.