The Times Magazine 27her that were the same but she had evolved...
I know Mum always felt sorry for certain
aspects, but I don’t think you can reach the
end of your life and not feel regretful about
choices you have made.”
Before she died, Driver’s mother read
the parts of the book dealing with childhood.
She loved them. She also read Yo u’ r e I t, the
chapter Driver dedicates to examining her
fame, her move to America and the fallout
from the break-up.
She says she chose to write about Damon
(as opposed to, say, Josh Brolin, to whom she
was briefly engaged) because it was a self-
contained story about the industry too. “It
was a game. We were kids, these little kids
playing with this huge beast [fame]... None of
us understood what it meant... It’s a f***ing
good story,” she says. “You accidently move to
New York [to see agents there] and your mum
knows you are not coming back and it ends
with you being nominated for an Academy
award like a few years later... That’s a f***ing
good story. That’s why it’s included. It wasn’t,
‘Oh, I have to re-examine my love [for Matt].’
F*** that! We had a great time. I loved, loved
Matt. We had a great time, it was really messy
and really public and really dramatic and that
is a really good f***ing story.
“It’s weird how money and fame somehow
seem like you still come out better in the deal.
It was a very young, inexperienced person
making that deal and not really realising what
it meant. I’m not sure, would I go back and...
It was so much fun too, being at the Oscars
[as a nominee]. Seeing your ex-boyfriend with
his new girlfriend was hideous but hilarious,
because I was there with my mum and dad
and Kate. It’s what Mummy said at the end of
her life and I have realised as I have got older.
It can be both, it is both, it’s a lot of things and
it just depends on what you put your focus on.
‘‘If you look at anybody’s life, you never
know what is going on. Nobody has it
good the whole time. Shit doesn’t work out,
repeatedly, in all our lives. Painful things
happen. People die, people leave you, people
cheat. They are part of the vicissitudes of life.
“You careen along and if you are lucky you
crash and burn and then you come up. I’m not
a drug addict. I don’t have an eating disorder.
I haven’t been married 100 times. I’m not
penniless. I survived this whole...” She laughs.
After we meet, it is announced that one of
those high-profile exes, Taylor Hawkins, the
Foo Fighters drummer, has been found dead
in a hotel room in Colombia with many drugs
in his system. Her words about survival feel
even more relevant. “We laughed, a lot. And
everybody loved you. That’s it. Sending love to
your family,” she posted on Instagram with a
sweet picture.
The Damon affair led to a series of
poor decisions. Driver ditched the brilliant-sounding (and revered) British agent who had
taken her on after she left drama school. “It is
one of my biggest regrets,” she tells me, “and
she has never forgiven me.” And she ditched
her American agent too, part of a pattern of
what she calls in the book “shedding parts of
myself”. The British media did not like it one
bit. “Too American, too ambitious.”
She jumped ship to join Matt Damon and
Ben Affleck’s agent. Her father had warned
her that the switch was a huge mistake. He
was right. “I thought I was being inducted
into a club and it’s a f***ing lie,” she says. “You
are not. You are adjacent to and subordinate
to that boys’ club, and the myth of so many
young women is believing that you have to fill
the shape of the cookie cutter that is shaped
like a dude as opposed to creating one that is
shaped like a woman and being that.”
When I call her outspoken, she looks
puzzled. “Outspoken? Isn’t it just spoken?’
On the movie Hard Rain (1998), for
example, she argued for better conditions
after spending too long in a tank of freezingwater, “and they wouldn’t give me a wetsuit
because you couldn’t see my nipples through
the T-shirt.
“That followed me for a really long time,
that whole idea of me being difficult. If you
stood up and said, ‘This is unacceptable,’
which I routinely did, you were vilified.”
She was an early voice of protest, but
Hollywood was not then ready to hear it. She
tells me that recently she was on set with an
intimacy coordinator. It blew her mind for
being so far removed from anything she had
experienced before.
“I will always be a champion on set.
I’d be like a lioness about anything that was
happening, to a male or female. If you see
that somebody is mistreating somebody else,
you have to say something. You will almost
certainly be punished for it on some level, but
I don’t think that is a reason not to speak up.”
She had her own run-in with Harvey
Weinstein. He had wanted her off Good Will
Hunting. “Nobody would want to f*** her,”
he told the casting director. Damon, also the
writer, and the producers insisted.
“But I remember feeling so devastated
until I realised, ‘Hold on, just consider the
source for a minute. That is an unutterable
pig – why on earth are you worried about this
f*** saying that you are not sexy?’ But there
are ramifications of that: that maybe I am not
going to be hired because people don’t think
I have the sexual quality that is required. How
awful to think that I was one of the luckyones [who escaped him] because he didn’t
think I was f***able. And how amazing and
wonderful that it has turned around and
young men and women in my industry
are not going to experience that.”The pivotal moment in Driver’s life – an
important distinction from her career – came
when she was the most terrified: pregnant,
alone, nearing 40, constantly worrying about
getting work. (“There have been moments in
my career that I have been really pretty skint
and then moments when I made more money.
It’s really feast or famine.”)
Motherhood reset the dial. “Once I had
Henry, it was, OK, all that churning and
yearning and seeking for something externally
to make me feel better? That’s done. So now
it’s, ‘Do your own work.’ ”
And she did. She was so terrified of how
to make it work alone as an actress in LA that
during her pregnancy she placed a chair in her
garden so that she had somewhere to sit when
3am anxiety set in.“At first I didn’t know how I was going to
do it. How was I going to take care of this
baby, be a good parent and also work and be
in movies that require you to look a certain
way? How was it all going to work?
Somehow she made it work, maybe by
lowering her expectations – managing them,
as she says.
When Henry reached school age she
did network TV so she wouldn’t be away on
location. “My actor friends said, ‘Really?’ and
I was, ‘You bet I am. You f***ing bet.’ There
is no dude who is co-financing this life. The
studio was ten minutes from my house. My
agents had a joke: ‘The show Minnie wants to
be in is called Shoots in LA.’
“And Henry is what I’m proudest of. I have
done a good job. He’s very tolerant of the fact
that I want to hang out with him all the time.
And Addison adores him. Having him was the
greatest, the kindest, the sweetest experience
of my life. From the moment he was born,
I just knew this was the greatest thing.
“I never thought I’d leave Los Angeles.
I never thought I’d move back here partially,
but I cannot sit back on my laurels. I am
constantly keeping the plates in the air, but
I try not to plan too far ahead now.
“I know there is no arrival point [any
more]. There is no ‘there’ there.” nMinnie Driver will be in conversation with
Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson for Times+
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