The movie scene Adam Driver hated being in: “”I just went totally cold”
Now cemented as one of his profession’s leading lights, the evolution of Adam Driver from the fifth-billed name on small screen comedy Girls to an in-demand movie star was rapid, but not without its professional obstacles.
Just five years after he’d captured his breakout role on Lena Dunham’s popular series, Driver had already worked with some of the biggest directors in the business, complete with a plum role in a major franchise. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, Martin Scorsese’s Silence, Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, and the part of the villainous Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens helped launch him into the stratosphere.
For Driver, though, he was never too keen on revisiting his performances. Speaking to The New Yorker, he admitted that it stretched all the way back to the first time he saw himself on-screen in Girls: “That’s when I was, like, I can’t watch myself in things. I certainly can’t watch this if we’re going to continue doing it.”
The following year, he made a memorable appearance in Inside Llewyn Davis, but singing backup vocals on ‘Please Mr. Kennedy’ chilled him to the bone. Offering a harsh summation of what he’d brought to the part, Driver could only say, “I hated what I did.” He tried to avoid himself altogether, but Disney didn’t leave him with much option during the premiere of The Force Awakens.
Of course, Driver was one of the few who knew he was about to murder an icon when Kylo Ren kills Han Solo, but he still wasn’t prepared for the reaction: “I just went totally cold, because I knew the scene was coming up where I had to kill Han Solo,” he said. “People were, like, hyperventilating when the title came up, and I felt like I had to puke.”
Despite his disdain for his small contribution to Inside Llewyn Davis, the good news for Driver is that he’s since relented and decided he’s comfortable re-watching his performances, as he revealed on Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?: “It’s painful watching a performance and seeing that knowing that it’s film and it’s forever and it’s permanent. And you see a mistake that you wish you could have done and you can’t. I drive everybody around me crazy asking them to explain my performance,” he elaborated. “But now in the last couple of years, I started watching everything. I just decided to do it because I don’t want to get stuck in a right way or a set way of doing anything.”
His reasoning is that he feels compelled to tell his side of the story: “I realised that you also have to defend your performance a little bit even when it’s coming together,” he noted. “At least the people that I’ve worked with have given me a lot of license to have an opinion about, you know, moments that I want to be in the movie.”
Driver hated himself in Inside Llewyn Davis, but the response to the blackly comic period piece would indicate that he’s definitely in the minority.
