How Adam Driver was lured into the worst movie he’s ever made: “It seems like a unique thing to do”
An actor has to make a lot of choices when deciding whether or not to take on a movie: is the premise any good, is the script decent, will it enhance my career, how much will they pay me, can Jared Leto not be in it, that kind of thing. Given all those choices, it’s therefore sometimes mystifying how they sign up to some of the stuff they do, like Adam Driver and the 2023 film 65.
Even though he did Star Wars, 65 just does not feel like an Adam Driver film in any way whatsoever. You only have to consider the movie’s subject matter to know that, because it’s a movie about a man flying to a planet 65million years ago, crashing, meeting a young girl who needs help, and there’s some dinosaurs or something. It sounds rubbish. And it is rubbish. So why did nobody tell him it would be terrible?
At what point while making a film, does an actor realise, ‘Oh shit, this is going to suck, isn’t it’? – presumably, there is a bedding-in period and then the penny drops, but of course, by that point, contracts have been signed, and they’re stuck in a film about a space pilot trying to shoot T-Rexes in the face. Adam Driver is not an action hero. Sorry, he just isn’t.
What he is is a very, very good character actor, someone who has often been compared to the greats of previous generations, most often Robert De Niro. Indeed, Driver will be following in his footsteps when he appears in Michael Mann’s Heat 2 as a younger version of De Niro’s character in the original 1995 movie, Neil McCauley.
But back to 65, and Driver’s decision to take the movie on, when surely he’d have been better off giving it a swerve. Asked by Collider what it was about the script that pushed him in the direction of saying yes, Driver explained, “Well, it was so unique, and it was a big blend of a lot of different things. It was dinosaurs and laser guns and spaceships crashing, and it didn’t seem somewhat rare to get asked to do that, but that also is kind of ancillary to it being a movie that is really kind of a father-daughter movie.”
That seems like quite a clever way of explaining away a $3million salary, but we’ll let him have that, given he has a daughter himself, and everyone lost their minds a bit during Covid-19, something that he drew parallels with in taking it on.
He added, “I got it in the first thrust of Covid, and as I’m sure many people did, were obviously making the connections of what was going on in the world.”
Driver continued that he felt the film was about people of very different backgrounds facing an unusual threat (except it was massive dinosaurs, not an exaggerated virus) and that he felt like “it seems like a unique thing to do in a big-scale movie like this”. Unique it may well have been, but it wasn’t very good, unfortunately, and when it was released, it struggled to make its money back, with critics not being particularly kind.
Meanwhile, before we get Heat 2, Driver will be seen alongside Anne Hathaway in Alone at Dawn, a war epic directed by Ron Howard about a Medal of Honour winner’s struggle in the war in Afghanistan.
