A Man Among Girls: Adam Driver
by Edith Zimmerman
“Did you know that he used to be a Marine?” I whispered to Mike, the editor of this magazine, near the snack table at Adam Driver’s photo shoot. “Yes,” he whispered back.
“Do you know that he used to be…” I would start saying to every person I ran into while working on this story. “Yes,” they usually said. I hadn’t until I started researching, though it made sense considering what I did know of him: that he’s the most interesting character on a show, Girls, that has gone in some questionable directions, and that he’s evolved more believably than almost anyone else on it. He’s also having something of a moment, with a recent New York Times Styles story (“Adam Driver, an Unlikely Face on TV or in Fashion,” in which he was called “ugly-handsome”); a featured slot in Gap’s “Back to Blue” campaign; parts in the critically acclaimed movies Lincoln, Inside Llewyn Davis and Frances Ha; and roles in the upcoming While We’re Young (Noah Baumbach), Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols), and Silence (Martin Scorsese). I have a theory that would explain his success, beyond his being handsome and a good actor, but I’ll get to that later. (I think he looks like a manlier Josh Hartnett or like a cousin of Eric Balfour from Six Feet Under and 24.)
I first met Driver, 30, at the photo shoot, by the snack table, where we small-talked for a couple minutes. He’d requested only a turkey sandwich. At 6’3” he towered over the dozen or so other people in the room, but in a polite, bashful way. He asked me where I was from and where in Brooklyn I lived, so I told him, and because I’d already known where he was from and where he lived (born in San Diego, raised in Indiana, and has lived for three years in Brooklyn Heights), I asked him about an upcoming movie-related trip to Italy I’d just read that he’d be taking. He told me, but as soon as he finished, he laughed apologetically and said, “I just bored myself with that story.” Then he asked me if I’d gone home for the holidays. I told him I had. “Was it good?” he asked. Before I could answer, he got pulled away to have his hair and makeup done for the next part of the shoot. But as he walked away, he turned around, began to walk backward and repeated, “Was it good?” He was smiling, again apologetically. “Yes, it was.” I laughed.
(Wait, no, the first time we met was actually a half-hour before that, when he’d taken a break from the photo shoot to come over and say hello and was carrying this metal… staff or something that he’d been posing with, and while saying hello, a piece of metal came off into his finger, but when he noticed, he just pulled it out—NBD!—and kind of laughed and playfully responded to some tetanus jokes. That’s so Adam [Sackler] of him, I thought. He also held doors open, held elevators, and was otherwise unfailingly polite.)
So, I’m just gonna go stream-of-consciousness on what it is I think is so appealing about him, in this particular cultural moment. It’s something to do with masculinity. Rawness. Unfussiness. And, this is maybe a little too out there, but I think there’s something to it: there’s something about the way his back curves. Yeah, his back. Primal, masculine, huge. Something about it seems to say, “I’m sorry I’m so huge!” which is both tender and really hot? It’s this back curl. You see it in Girls when he’s bending down, to kiss people or to fuck them, or to pick up wood for his carpentry or whatever it is—this guileless hunching in his back, like he’s an ogre bending down to cradle something. As if to say I don’t care about the shape my own huge strong body makes as long as I can take care of this tiny thing I’m picking up or leaning down to access, be it woman or building material. It’s almost an apologetic back curl. I think it’s because at a time when a lot of other guys on TV and in movies are too pretty, people who look like and seem like men, not boys, are appealing. Someone big and strong who might be able to protect you or hunt you food.
Which is why the real-life stint in the Marines fits so satisfyingly with this concept of his fictional TV character. (He served for two years and eight months before being medically discharged after a biking accident.) It’s a little ridiculous, but it’s a welcome difference from all the actors who play tough guys on TV or in movies but are then reported in gossip columns as staying out all night or being photographed in ridiculous fedoras or otherwise dandyish duds. I dunno. It’s funny when people say he’s unconventionally attractive, because he seems pretty regularly attractive to me. Although I also wonder what he’d look like with different hair.
During our official interview, which took place a few days later in a small, windowless room in HBO’s midtown headquarters, I tried to ask him what he thought about this. I sort of rambled on in a marginally coherent monologue about masculinity and how he embodies something of a shift. Then I realized that it was kind of antithetical to the idea of masculinity to comment on one’s own masculinity, so I was like, well, I guess you can’t really answer this, but I just think there’s something about this hunger for a certain kind of masculinity that your character represents. And he said, “Well, it’s very nice, but I’m not sure I have an answer for you.” Which was fair, obviously. But I think it’s true anyway.
(Also, he was wearing a nondescript gray sweater/knit longsleeve top. No collar. Jeans. Black Ked-like sneakers that were not Keds. After our interview, he was going to have a Q&A session with people about his nonprofit military organization, Arts in the Armed Forces. He was minorly fidgety and uncomfortable, although that could have been my fault. He brought a coffee with him, but didn’t drink it. He has a nice face, great skin. He ran his hands through his hair a bunch, sweeping it back unself-consciously, shifting in his chair from time to time, crossing and uncrossing his legs.)
Earlier that week I’d read a profile of him in Rolling Stone which mentioned that when he was training to go to Iraq—he enlisted with the Marines after 9/11—a cloud of deadly white phosphorous accidentally approached the spot where he and other troops were training, and whether they survived was only a matter of which direction the wind blew. In the profile, he was quoted as saying that at that moment, he’d had two thoughts: that when he got out, he wanted to be an actor, and that he wanted to smoke cigarettes. Neither made much sense to me, so I asked him about it. I ended up getting us stupidly derailed on the cigarette thing—he no longer smokes, mostly because he runs, and “running and smoking aren’t really things that go hand in hand, and I’m more a fan of running than smoking”—before turning to acting.
“Why do you like acting?” I asked.
“Why do I like acting,” he said back to me. “I don’t know. Why… there’s lots of reasons why I like acting,” he said, and paused.
I then explained, probably unnecessarily, that sometimes I’d thought acting was silly (playing pretend, etc.), except that clearly it isn’t, because it’s part of something that brings people so much joy and brings so many people together. “I definitely have lots of days where I think acting is totally pointless,” he said. “But I’m mostly referring to the business aspect of being an actor, which seems completely—I mean, there’s no way to say this without sounding like a pretentious prick—but that it sounds so antithetical to acting. But it is a necessary part of it. It’s many things. But I guess the communal aspect of [acting] is the biggest thing for me. Starting conversations in a community that doesn’t normally have that kind of conversation.
“I remember one time I went to Qatar for a project. A friend of mine does readings of Greek plays, and he was reading in a medical facility in Qatar, and afterwards all of these Qatari students came up, and all they wanted to talk about was Girls. That idea of creating a conversation in a different country that couldn’t be more opposite than the United States, or Brooklyn specifically. Qatar? You know?”
I did, and I asked him what the Qatari kids had to say about Girls. “We didn’t get into specifics,” he said, “but they were just really excited about the show. It resonated with them.”
From there, he got deeper into what it is that drew him to the craft. The core of which is, unsurprisingly, his experience in the theater, where he’s had roles both on and off Broadway. “You know, in theater, there’s, like, a collective intelligence that happens in the room, where everyone kind of falls into sync and is experiencing everything at the same time. When people get in a room [to watch TV] and experience something that is so familiar, that is so, you know… that finds a way to acknowledge the shitty parts about being alive. I mean, to be a part of that? Or to become a spearhead in that conversation? Like, what could be more gratifying? Well, probably delivering a baby or saving someone on the battlefield. That’s pretty gratifying. But to get to be able to use that service, that’s really gratifying to me. And then sometimes in theater—I’m just gonna monologue here—theater can get a little ridiculous because it’s like, oh, it’s the same people that always come to the theater, it’s gonna be a certain audience, who’s going to be able to pay fucking $300 to see some play? That’s the great thing about television, then. It kind of finds its audience. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”
I told him I thought it was.
Driver shares his Brooklyn Heights home with his wife, Joanne Tucker, who is also an actor (they met at Juilliard and both had parts in 2012’s Gayby). The two married last year, and although I briefly asked him about it—“So you got married last year”—and he replied—“Mmm”—I also figured that he probably didn’t talk about his personal life, which was true.
I’d also wanted to ask him more about the show, but he doesn’t watch it and never has.
You don’t watch the show.
I don’t watch the show, no.
Which is crazy to me, though.
Why?
I mean, I kind of get it. But you’ve never been tempted?
No. No, no. I mean, I’m there when it’s happening—
But don’t you feel like you’re missing out on the whole?
I do feel that. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing. But it instinctually doesn’t feel right to watch something while we’re in the middle of doing it. Like, even things that I just have a smaller part in, or when the focus on the movie doesn’t rest on my shoulders, I still can’t.
But like if it were a movie and it was done, you still wouldn’t watch it?
No.
Because I can see that with a TV show where you’re going to continue shooting, if you saw it, it might inform your view. You feel good about how it’s going, but then if you watch it, it might derailthings entirely?
Well, I mean, I drive myself crazy with it afterward, thinking of all the things that I wanted to do differently. But the things that I’m naturally attracted to are things that are really ugly and messy and not perfect. But since I’m more prone to trying to make it better, I feel like I have to stop myself from getting involved with it.
I asked him if he keeps in touch with his friends from the military, and although he does, he says they all have very different lives. “One’s like a bounty hunter in Montana, and one went into finance. One just disappeared from the face of the Earth, and I haven’t heard from him in a while. But yeah, as much as we can keep in contact, we do.” He’s not sure if they watch the show. “I don’t know—I don’t know that they do. I think that they do?”
I also asked him about the controversy that was unfolding that week, involving Lena Dunham, Vogue and the website Jezebel. The women’s site had offered $10,000 to anyone who would anonymously send them unretouched pictures from Dunham’s photo shoot for Vogue’s February cover, ostensibly to expose how much retouching goes into the covers of glossy magazines and how false and unattainable an ideal they perpetuate. But it fell a little short and felt a little off, since Jezebel had done this a few years earlier, with Faith Hill for Redbook, when the extent of cover-retouching was relatively unknown or at least underexposed, at which point the whole thing felt kind of triumphant and fascinating and cool, and definitely more like sticking it to Redbook (and the magazine industry) than to Faith Hill, who looked beautiful in both versions—albeit ridiculously airbrushed, etc., in the retouched one. Whereas with the Lena thing, everyone already knows what she looks like without makeup or airbrushing if they watch the show, so it felt a little less like feminism than a mean-girl-type faux-best intentions/faux-feminist jab at Lena, i.e., “Let’s show the world how you really looked in a fancy magazine,” even though it turned out they hadn’t airbrushed much at all.
“I heard about it but didn’t see it,” he said. “Did they ever find the pictures?”
I told him they had. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “What is wrong with people?”
I tried to make a joke about how we could sell unretouched photos of him from this shoot, not that they would be retouched, I didn’t think (?), but it was less a joke than a stupid observation or proposed non-humorous hypothetical situation, and it fell flat. He kind of laughed, politely, and a few minutes later his publicist showed up to take him to his next stop at HBO.
To end on a more-fun note, though: my favorite interaction with him came at the end of the photo shoot when he was sitting in a makeup chair by a vanity mirror as a man did something with his hair. From across the room I couldn’t tell if it was a really slow and subtle haircut, or an elaborate and intense hair-combing and styling. When I went over to say goodbye, Driver made a sort of sheepish face in the mirror, and we orchestrated a handshake, also in the mirror at first, him trying to place the reflection of his huge hand somewhere in the vicinity of mine while maintaining mirror-eye-contact—essentially shaking hands with someone behind you—but then he broke a little, disregarding whatever was happening with his hair, and turned his broad shoulders fully around, taking my hand, and smiling in a way that communicated something along the lines of, “I’m sorry. I know this is ridiculous.” And it was. But it was sweet.
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i know this will turn into a hate post but i just really like him, he's a great actor and i think this article is amazing