Did Adam Driver start his own fight club?
When David Fincher’s Fight Club hit cinemas in October of 1999, Adam Driver was just a month away from his 16th birthday, so maybe it isn’t all that out of the ordinary for the future Academy Award nominee to take all of the wrong lessons from the movie.
Of course, he wouldn’t be the only one to misunderstand what the biting social satire and jet-black thriller was trying to say, and he was far from the only one to start gathering in numbers to start brawling, either. Driver was an instant fan, though, telling The Guardian that “the first time I saw it I felt kind of sick, it made me feel very strange,” not that it stopped him from watching it again “almost immediately”.
The Star Wars alumni’s teenage fight club has become an integral part of his backstory, with Conan O’Brien the latest to ask him if he really did start one. A reply of “Oh yeah, totally” answered that question before he shed a little more light on it: “There was a friend of mine who had a house behind an events space called Celebrations Unlimited,” he added, “And there was a field behind Celebrations Unlimited, and we would get together with our friends or people who were riding by on their bikes, and we would fight them.”
Telling a similar story to Rolling Stone, the regulations were fairly straightforward: “We would go out there in the middle of the night and beat the shit out of our neighbours.” Fortunately, there were rules in place, even if it extended exclusively to “no hitting in the balls, and I think that was pretty much it.”
As the son of a preacher who grew up with their mother marrying a Baptist minister following his parents’ divorce, Driver’s folks presumably weren’t impressed by his extra-curricular activities, especially when Fight Club had such an unexpected impact on certain corners of Christianity.
Some groups even created their own “fight clubs”, even though the definition was markedly different from what Fincher had put on-screen: “Fight clubs are small, simple groups of two to three men or women who meet regularly to help one another beat up the flesh and believe the gospel of grace.” It’s not exactly Project Mayhem, nor is it “beating the shit out of your neighbours,” but it does display just how far Fight Club permeated even the unlikeliest aspects of society.
Fortunately, Driver quickly grew out of this more violent phase of his formative years before segueing into acting via his time as a member of the United States Marine Corps, and it’s hopefully the case now that he can revisit Fight Club without longing for his younger days in a grassy field throwing fists against anyone brave enough to take up the challenge.
