60 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
movies. “It was, like, John Woo ripoffs,
where we’d take plastic guns and paint
them black and wear long trenchcoats,”
Driver said. “They had no plots. They
were just action movies.” The friends
also started their own fight club, in the
field behind an event space called Cel-
ebrations Unlimited. The one rule was:
“Don’t hit in the balls.” Driver doesn’t
believe that he was expressing latent
anger. “I think it was something that
scared me, getting hit, and the chal-
lenge in yourself to just turn the vol-
ume down on things.” The club dis-
solved after neighbors called the cops.
By then, Driver had developed an in-
terest in stage acting. In his father’s
church, in San Diego, he played Pon-
tius Pilate’s water boy in an Easter can-
tata. In middle school, he auditioned
for a play and didn’t get cast, so he op-
erated the curtain. Then he landed a
one-line part in “Oklahoma!” (The line
was “Check his heart,” spoken by a cow-
boy as Jud lay dying.) In his sophomore
year, a new drama teacher cast him as
a lead in “Arsenic and Old Lace.” His
teachers urged him to audition for Juil-
liard, so he drove to Chicago for regional
tryouts. “I didn’t get in, I think, because
I wanted to please,” he said. “I had no
opinion about what I was saying.”
Instead, he bummed around Indi-
ana, doing odd jobs. His stepfather had
him wheel their lawnmower around to
neighbors’ houses and offer to mow
their lawns, which he found humiliat-
ing. He made telemarket-
ing calls for a basement-
waterproofing company.
He sold Kirby vacuums,
or tried to—he doesn’t re-
member selling a single
vacuum. At one point, he
was driving around Chi-
cago in the three-piece suit
he wore for church, hawk-
ing stress balls and National
Geographic videos about
whales. “I was basically peddling shit,”
he said. He convinced himself that he
could use his acting skills to entice peo-
ple. During one telemarketing call,
he asked a woman if her husband was
home. “There was a long pause, and
she says, ‘My husband’s dead!’ and
started crying and hung up the phone.
I felt terrible.”
Joining the Marines gave Driver a
sense of purpose and some distance
from his conservative religious up-
bringing. “The nice way of saying it is,
it’s not part of my life anymore,” he
said of the church, though he empha-
sized that he considers faith and reli-
gion to be two separate things. He is
wary of discussing his parents or reli-
gion. In 2014, his stepfather told the
South Bend Tribune, “I don’t agree
with everything that he does, but I
agree with his work ethic.” His mother
didn’t know that he was on “Girls” until
the second season, when she found out
from a co-worker.
The pull between faith and apos-
tasy has interlaced his movie roles. In
“Silence,” he based his character, Fa-
ther Garupe, on St. Peter. “He’s the
only one that’s questioning, and I find
that is healthier,” Driver said. “Doubt
is part of being committed to some-
thing, I think. They’re very hand in
hand, and that seemed more human to
me. Garupe, in that story, he’s commit-
ted, and then at a certain point he’s,
like, ‘This is fucking bullshit.’ I feel that
with religion. I feel that with acting. I
feel that with marriage. I feel that with
being a parent. I’m constantly filled
with doubt, regardless of what I’ve ac-
complished. It doesn’t mean anything.
You still don’t know how to do any-
thing, really.” He described Kylo Ren,
in “Star Wars,” as “the son of these two
religious zealots”—meaning Han Solo
and Leia—who “can be conceived as
being committed to this re-
ligion above all else, above
family.” Part of him still
feels blindsided, as if he’d
missed a class and hadn’t
yet caught up on the wider
world. While discussing
“Fight Club,” he asked what
I thought of the movie.
I said that I hadn’t seen
it in years but wondered
how it would play in an era
when people are hyperaware of toxic
masculinity.
“What do you mean, ‘toxic masculin-
ity’?” he asked.
I suggested that male aggression is
seen as less purifying now than it may
have been portrayed as being in “Fight
Club.” “I’d have to think about it,”
Driver said. “I mean, I haven’t heard
much about toxic masculinity.” Hechuckled. “Maybe because I’m part of
the problem!”
Hours later, in his dressing room,
he was talking about how his suspicion
of dogma shaped him as an actor. “For
a lot of times in my life, I was told there
was a right answer,” he said. “And then,
when I got older, I was, like, ‘That’s
fucking total bullshit.’ I feel that very
much with acting, too. If you knew how
to do it, you would do it perfectly every
time.” He added, “So anytime anyone
tells me, ‘This is the right answer,’ or
‘There’s something called toxic mas-
culinity,’ I’m, like, What? What are you
talking about? I’m skeptical of it, be-
cause I feel like I was duped for sev-
enteen years of my life.”I
n early October, Driver was at Lin-
coln Center, where “Marriage Story”
was the centerpiece of the New York
Film Festival. He had flown in from
Brussels, where he was filming “An-
nette,” with the French director Leos
Carax, and landed at 3:30 a.m. That
evening, there was a red-carpet première,
and at midnight he would fly to En-
gland, for the London Film Festival.
Baumbach said that when he was
writing “Marriage Story” he had long
phone conversations with Driver in
which they discussed such classic mov-
ies as “The Red Shoes” and “To Be or
Not to Be.” One of their abandoned
ideas, a film version of Stephen Sond-
heim’s musical “Company,” found its
way into the script in the form of two
musical numbers. (Baumbach told me
that Driver had recently sent him a
photograph of the Mets pitcher Noah
Syndergaard, who has a blond, Thor-
like mane, with the message “This
would be good for something.”)
At noon, Driver was clutching a cup
of coffee in a greenroom at the Walter
Reade Theatre, before a press confer-
ence. The cast trickled in: Laura Dern,
Alan Alda, Ray Liotta. ( Johansson was
stuck in traffic.) Liotta, who plays a di-
vorce lawyer, approached Driver. “Hey!”
he said in greeting, then struck a rev-
erent tone. “Did you serve?”
“Yes,” Driver said shyly, standing to
shake his hand.
“Wow,” Liotta said. “Thank you for
your service. Seriously. My trainer was
a marine.”
Driver quickly changed the subject.