“It was one of the most amazing things”: the five greatest acting performances Adam Driver has ever seen
Leonardo DiCaprio is arguably the biggest star of his generation, and Timothée Chalamet has become the most popular, but when it comes to pure talent as an actor, Adam Driver is peerless.
He has been on a rather unprecedented run of working with great directors, all while giving one of the best performances in Star Wars history as Kylo Ren. Pretty much anything that he is in is guaranteed to at least have a great performance, which is why he’s gained so much affection from his peers.
One of the reasons that Driver has felt so unique is that he feels like a very old-fashioned actor; he doesn’t have social media, rarely talks about his own performances, and feels like somewhat of a mystery, even if he’s widely admired. Although he has remained fairly modest in accepting praise, he has made it a point to praise the work of his fellow actors, even of the ones with whom he hasn’t personally worked.
Driver admitted to growing up as a film buff, as it was only in the next two overs that he was able to experience the magic of live theatre, and while he revealed that, as a child, he had been obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger action films like Predator and Total Recall, he came to have a more mature perception of what great acting looked like when he started to gain more experience.
He praised the performance by Bill Irwin in the acclaimed 2005 production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which won him the Tony Award for ‘Best Actor in a Play’, and even though the beloved 1966 film of the same name had Richard Burton in the role of George, and is regarded as one of his best performances, Driver felt that Irwin made the part his own.
The actor also mentioned being a fan of Fionna Shaw’s performance in the two-act play Happy Days, which he had seen at BAM. Although Happy Days has been performed since 1961, few actors have made the role of Winnie their own quite like Shaw did. While they never appeared together, Shaw and Driver both have made appearances in the Star Wars franchise, with the former earning some of the best reviews of her entire career for her performance as Maarva in the first season of Andor.
Driver also references Judd Hirsch’s performance in Ordinary People, which is slightly underrated when considering how much attention Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and Timothy Hutton get for the same film. He also extended his praise to the entire cast of Kramer vs Kramer, including Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, and while it has been seen as the definitive divorce film for decades, its status may have been challenged by Marriage Story, which featured arguably the best performance Driver has ever had on film.
Driver has always had a sly sense of humour, and revealed a personal anecdote about getting to participate in and listen to Paul Giamatti read Philoctetes by Sophocles at a friend’s apartment, which must be something of an acting buff’s dream. He recalled, “It was just Paul Giamatti, my friend, and myself in this apartment. And it was one of the most amazing things. He has a foot that’s wounded and he’s begging Neoptolemus, my character, to cut it off. And I forgot to come in because in watching him, I actually believed that he was suffering and had been on this island for a long time.”
Driver and Giamatti have yet to appear in a film together, but the possibility alone is an exciting one.
