THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 61
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His military background makes him
anomalous in Hollywood; the days of
Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart leaving
pictures to fly combat missions are long
gone. Though his time in the Marine
Corps was formative—and gave rise to
a nonprofit organization he founded,
Arts in the Armed Forces, which fos-
ters art appreciation among the troops—
it came to a disappointing end. After
more than two years of training, Driver
was preparing to ship out to Iraq. At the
time, he wasn’t thinking about the pol-
itics of the Iraq War, he said, just about
his loyalty to his guys. One morning, he
and his friend Garcia went mountain
biking in Pendleton’s Camp Horno. On
the way down, Driver hit a ditch. The
handlebars slammed into his chest, and
he dislocated his sternum.
Driver’s first sergeant told him that
he was too injured for the deployment.
Attempting to prove otherwise, he loaded
up on hydrocodone and worked out in
the gym, but he made the damage worse.
He was honorably discharged, while his
former platoon shipped out to the south-
east tip of Iraq, to run security missions
on the Iranian border. It was early in
the war, and the unit returned safely.
But Driver was devastated. “They had
gone and done the thing that we trained
to do together,” he said. “And I felt like
a piece of shit.”
Driver’s platoon commander, Ed
Hinman, had always found him more
“pensive” than the others. “There was
something more going on, I could tell,
between his ears,” he told me. Hinman
said that life after the Marines can be
tough under any circumstances. “You
go from being in a family to being on
your own, without an identity and with-
out a mission. And, if you know it’s com-
ing, that’s one thing. But if you don’t,
like Adam, that can be pretty scary.”
Humiliated, Driver drove back to
Indiana in a Ford F-150 he’d bought
from an officer and enrolled at the
University of Indianapolis, where he
acted in Beckett’s “Endgame” and in
the musical “Pippin.” He applied to
be a policeman but was turned down,
because he was under twenty-one—
“Which was ironic to me, because I
was a SAW gunner, and suddenly I can’t
handle a Glock?”—so he got a job as
a security guard. But he felt adrift, his
mission unfulfilled. Then, remember-
ing his brush-with-death vow to be a
professional actor, he went back to Chi-
cago and re-auditioned for Juilliard.
Richard Feldman, a Juilliard teacher,
recalled, “This very interesting young
man walked in the room—big, tall, lanky,
with hair partially flopping over his
face.” Driver performed the opening
lines from “Richard III,” a contemporary
monologue he’d found at a Barnes &
Noble, and, for his musical selection,
“Happy Birthday to You.” His acting
wasn’t polished, but, to Feldman, he ra-
diated something genuine. Driver was
guarding a Target distribution ware-
house when he got the call that he’d
been accepted. “I ran up and down the
truck area, jumping around,” he said. “I
was fucking elated.”
In the summer of 2005, he moved
into a closet at an uncle’s house, in Hobo-
ken. He got a job at Aix, a French restau-
rant on the Upper West Side, where heserved asparagus to Tony Kushner. He
was as good at waiting tables as he was
at selling vacuums. “I’d never heard of
broccoli rabe,” he said ruefully. Juilliard
was a shock. He’d gone from firing mor-
tars to pretending to be a penguin in
improv exercises. He was disdainful of
civilian life, sneering at classmates who
wore their shirts untucked or arrived
late to class. One time, he snapped so
sharply at a student who had used his
yoga mat that he reduced the guy to
tears. “I was, like, I gotta be better at
communicating,” he said. He holed up
at the performing-arts library and read
plays by David Mamet and John Pat-
rick Shanley, and found that drama
helped him express his roiling emotions.
His classmates were mystified by the
hulking ex-marine. Gabriel Ebert, who
later won a Tony Award for his role in
“Matilda the Musical,” recalled their
9 a.m. movement classes: “I probably