54 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
PROFILES
ORIGINAL MAN
Why do so many directors want to work with Adam Driver?BY MICHAEL SCHULMAN
W
hen white phosphorus
touches skin, it can burn
through to the bone. As the
particles ignite, they emit a garlic-like
odor and melt everything in their path.
Adam Driver, Marine lance corporal,
1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment,
Weapons Company, 81st Platoon, was
aware of these effects when he looked
up at the California sky, during a drill
exercise, one day in 2003, and saw a cloud
of white phosphorus exploding above
his head. The only thing to do was run.
Driver had joined the Marine Corps
the previous year, when he was eigh-
teen. After high school, he’d been rent-
ing a room in the back of his family’s
house, in Mishawaka, Indiana, and
mowing the grass at a 4-H fairgrounds.
He had vague ambitions of being an
actor and had auditioned for Juilliard,
in Manhattan, because he knew that it
didn’t check grades. When he was re-
jected, he decided to go to Los Ange-
les and try to make it in the movies. He
packed up his 1990 Lincoln Town Car
with his minifridge, his microwave, and
everything else he owned, and said good-
bye to his girlfriend. “It was a whole
event,” he recalled recently. “Like, ‘I
don’t know when we’ll see each other
again. Our love will find a way.’ And
then: ‘Bon voyage, small town! Holly-
wood, here I come!’ ”
His car broke down outside Ama-
rillo, Texas, and he spent nearly all his
money fixing it. When he got to L.A.,
he stayed at a hostel for two nights and
paid a real-estate agent to help him find
an apartment (“A total fucking scam”).
He walked around the beach in Santa
Monica, calculated that the two hun-
dred dollars he had left was enough for
gas money, and drove back to Misha-
waka, where he got his job with the 4-H
back. He’d been gone a week. “It was
all just embarrassing,” he said. “I felt like
a fucking loser.”
After 9/11, he found himself filled
with a desire for retribution, although
he wasn’t sure against what or whom.
“It wasn’t against Muslims,” he said. “It
was: We were attacked. I want to fight
for my country against whoever that is.”
His stepfather, a Baptist minister, had
given him a brochure for the Marines,
which he’d thrown in the trash. But now
he reconsidered. He craved a physical
challenge, and the marines were tough.
“They kind of got me with their whole
‘We don’t give you signing bonuses.
We’re the hardest branch of the armed
forces. You’re not going to get all this
cushy shit that the Navy or the Army
gives you. It’s going to be hard.’ ” His
decision to enlist was so abrupt that a
military recruiter asked if he was run-
ning from the law.
He was sent to a processing center
in Indianapolis for a physical exam, then
to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in
San Diego, for boot camp. The first night,
the recruits lined up to get their heads
shaved. A guy four spots ahead of Driver
had a mole on his scalp which got shaved
off, leaving him bleeding and scream-
ing. Driver was six feet three and lanky,
with squinty eyes, a beaky nose, and ears
that stuck straight out. Another recruit,
Martinez, also had big ears, and he and
Driver were nicknamed Ears No. 1 and
Ears No. 2. Basic training was as gruel-
ling as it was in the movies. “I was al-
lowed one call, and my parents weren’t
home,” Driver recalled, “so I didn’t talk
to anybody for a long time.”
After two and a half months, he was
sent to Camp Pendleton, in Southern
California, where he trained as a mor-
tarman. In one exercise, he and another
trainee had to pound a nerve on each
other’s thigh until it was numb. “That’s
kind of what the Marine Corps is like,”
Driver said. “They’ll just keep hitting
it until it’s numb. Until you conform.”
During a simulated battle scenario,
the mortarmen were to drive Humvees
into a valley and fire mortars at a dis-tant target, to be designated by a white-
phosphorus explosion. In a screwup, the
phosphorus exploded not over the tar-
get but over the men. Driver heard a
boom overhead. Luckily, the wind was
blowing, so the toxic plumes wafted a
bit, and the marines sprinted to safety.
Later, as Driver was collecting him-
self at the barracks, he thought about
the two things that he really wanted
to do in life, and he vowed to do them.
One was to smoke cigarettes. The other
was to be an actor.D
river, who is thirty-five, was tell-
ing me this story one morning in
June, at an industrial-chic trattoria in
Dumbo, over a lemon herbal tea. To
help me picture the scene, he positioned
a saltshaker to represent the target. His
phone was the panicked mortarmen.
A tattooed waiter came by for our
order, and Driver, who lives nearby,
in Brooklyn Heights, chose scrambled
eggs with spinach. He said that he
smoked cigarettes for a few years after
the white-phosphorus incident but quit,
more or less, in his twenties. The act-
ing thing stuck. In 2012, he got his big
break on HBO’s “Girls,” playing Adam
Sackler, a mysterious weirdo whom Lena
Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath,
visits for booty calls. The character, a
peripheral one at first, became central.
Adam Sackler was an odd specimen of
boy: as big as a tree trunk yet affected
in his tastes, particularly sexual ones. In
one episode, he masturbates as Han-
nah berates him, demanding money for
cab fare, pizza, and gum. It took seven
episodes before he appeared outside his
apartment. When Hannah spots him
at a party in Bushwick and announces,
“That’s Adam,” her friend Jessa dead-
pans, “He does sort of look like the
original man.”
The same year, Driver had a small
part in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” as
a telegraph operator. (He studied Morse