THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 57
Then there’s the “Star Wars” reboot,
in which Driver plays Kylo Ren, an in-
terplanetary warlord who can’t seem to
live up to the infamy of his grandfa-
ther Darth Vader. During the course
of the trilogy, which wraps up with
“The Rise of Skywalker,” in December,
Driver has managed to transpose the
wounded virility of his twenty-first-
century characters to the saga’s galac-
tic scale. (The comedian Josh Gondel-
man recently said that he empathized
with Kylo Ren, “the only ‘Star Wars’
villain who can correctly rank all the
best Death Cab for Cutie albums.”)
Kylo Ren is the J. Alfred Prufrock of
space: a self-conscious poseur, needled
by his own insecurities. J. J. Abrams,
who cast Driver in the role, said, “Kylo
Ren feels like he hasn’t arrived. Even
as he becomes supreme leader, he is
wanting. It’s like anyone you know who
thinks that, when he arrives where he’s
going, he will feel fulfilled. For Kylo,
the hole only gets bigger.”
Baumbach, who has directed Driver
in four films, once heard him call act-
ing a “benign rebellion.” He told me,
“It does accurately describe what he
does so beautifully, because he’s both
serving the role and the story and the
director, and at the same time always
looking for other things and pushing
back.” Baumbach first cast Driver in a
small role, in “Frances Ha,” as a hipster
in a porkpie hat. One of his lines was:
“Amazing.” “The way Adam says it is
like a song: ‘Ah-ma-zinnggg,’ ” Baum-
bach said. “I always think of that word
that way now.”
W
hen I asked Driver about “be-
nign rebellion,” he said, “Some-
times you have to shock yourself out
of your rhythm.” I first met him one
evening this summer, in his dressing
room at the Hudson Theatre, where
he was starring in a Broadway revival
of Lanford Wilson’s 1987 drama “Burn
This.” He was playing Pale, a boorish,
coke-addled restaurant manager who
bursts into the apartment of his late
brother, Robbie, and begins an unlikely
affair with the brother’s dancer room-
mate, played by Keri Russell. “This
supposedly was Ethel Barrymore’s
dressing room at some point,” Driver
said, wearing a Naval Base Coronado
hat. “But I can’t prove that.”
On the table was a poetry collec-
tion by Sharon Olds, which his wife,
the actor Joanne Tucker, had given him
as an opening-night gift. He showed
me a few favorite lines, in which Olds
envisages her parents as college stu-
dents and yearns to stop them from
making the mistake of their marriage,
but relents: “I want to live. I/ take them
up like the male and fe-
male/ paper dolls and
bang them together/ at
the hips, like chips of flint,
as if to/ strike sparks from
them, I say,/ Do what you
are going to do, and I will
tell about it.”
“The language is so
great,” Driver said, as he
shovelled down a burrito
bowl. “Striking sparks be-
tween two things—it’s kind of similar
to plays. That’s it, right? You have an
experience and then you go tell about
it in your work.” “Burn This” was more
taxing than he had anticipated. Unlike
with “Angels in America,” in which
Driver appeared Off Broadway, in 2011,
he couldn’t let the language take him
where he needed to go: “It’s very much
about everything that they’re not talking
about, which is the death of Robbie
and the grief, you know?”
Driver is protective of his process
and of the enigmas of acting, but he
agreed to let me watch his preshow
routine, of which the burrito bowl was
the first step. When he finished eating,
he went into the bathroom and put
his head under a running faucet, while
we talked about movies. “Have you
ever seen ‘The Miracle Worker’?” he
said mid-dunk. “There’s a scene with
Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke where
they’re just beating the hell out of each
other. Fucking one of the best scenes in
film. That’s a non sequitur.” He squirted
gel into his hand and smeared it into
his shaggy black hair. “With this play,
I’ve been really going to town on this
shit. I think you’re only supposed to
use a handful, but I fucking plow this
stuff on.”
As he blow-dried his hair, he talked
about his taste for Danish-modern
chairs; he and Tucker have a knockoff
Hans Wegner, and he joked that if he
weren’t an actor he might have been a
furniture-maker. He sat in front of amirror and wound a bandage around
his right hand. (When Pale first ap-
pears, he’s been hurt in a bar fight.)
“This bandage for some reason is the
part that gives me the most anxiety,”
Driver said. “There’s a lot of trial and
error over what is the right amount of
blood. And the bandage cuts off circu-
lation, so by the time I’m done my fingers
are purple.” He drew a red
trickle on his knuckle with
a marker. Then he traced
over it in brown. “It’s not
a fresh wound,” he rea-
soned. “It’s, like, an hour
or two hours old.”
He stood up. “Now I’ll
brush my teeth, because
I have to kiss Keri,” he
said. On the couch was a
piece of fan art he had re-
ceived at the stage door. During “Girls,”
strangers would often share details
about their sex lives with him. (One guy
stopped him in the subway and said, “I
love that scene where you pee on her
in the shower,” then turned to his girl-
friend and said, fondly, “I pee on her
all the time.”) But “Star Wars” has made
him uncomfortably famous. “This one
woman who has been harassing my
wife came to the show and gave me a
creepy wood carving that she made of
my dog,” he said. He and Tucker have
a young son, whose birth they kept
hidden from the press for two years, in
what Driver called “a military opera-
tion.” Last fall, after Tucker’s sister, who
was launching a peacoat business, ac-
cidentally made her Instagram account
public and someone noticed the back
of his son’s head in one picture, the
news wound up on Page Six. Driver
stretched his foot on a foam roller and
lamented his loss of privacy. “My job
is to be a spy—to be in public and live
life and have experience. But, when you
feel like you’re the focus, it’s really hard
to do that.”
He lay down on the roller and mas-
saged his back; his body seemed to take
up the entire room. His physique is
sometimes regarded as a riddle of na-
ture. When the play opened, the style
blog The Cut convened four writers to
discuss the question “How Big Is Adam
Driver in Burn This?” (“I was so flustered
by his quads that at one point I spilled
all of the contents of my purse on the