Background

Ethnicity: Adam Driver is of English, one eighth Dutch/Frisian, German, Irish, Scottish, Scots-Irish/Northern Irish, more distant Welsh, and remote Swedish ancestry.

Adam Driver was born on November 19, 1983, in San Diego, California, the United States, to Joe Douglas Driver and Nancy Wright (née Needham). His mother worked as a paralegal and divorced Adam’s father when Adam was a child. She then married Rodney G. Wright, a minister at a Baptist church.

The family left California when Adam was 7 years of age, and his mother took Adam and his sister to her home state, Indiana.

Education

Driver enrolled at the Mishawaka High School and did some plays during his school days, which laid the foundation of his future career in acting. By the time he graduated from high school in 2001, he had started trying to become a serious actor. He soon applied to the Juilliard School, the best acting school in New York. However, his application was rejected.

Facing a painful rejection did not make Adam lose hope, and he soon decided to move to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, his car broke down midway, forcing him to return to his house.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, prompted Driver to join the military, and he enlisted in the U.S. Marines and served for more than two years.

For the following two years, he enjoyed his stint at the military. However, an unfortunate mountain-bike accident ended his days in the army. He was honorably discharged and then joined the University of Indianapolis for a year. Bored of the university, he decided to give his old love, acting, another shot and applied to the Juilliard School yet again. His application was accepted this time around. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2009.

Career

Once he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Driver began acting in New York and became part of many Broadway and Off-Broadway productions. However, he did not get paid enough to make ends meet. This made him work part-time to earn enough to survive in New York. He once worked as a busboy and waiter while auditioning for TV and film stints. Around that time, he also did short films and pilots for TV shows. Driver landed his first role on the TV series The Unusuals (2009).

He followed that with appearances on the TV series Law & Order and in such TV movies as You Don’t Know Jack (2010) and The Wonderful Maladys (2010). Around this time Driver also began appearing in plays, notably making his Broadway debut in 2010 in a revival of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession.

In 2011, Driver landed the role that would take his career to the next level, that of Lena Dunham's on-and-off-again love interest Adam Sackler on the TV series Girls. The show became an instant hit after debuting in 2012, and Driver rode the wave of success to three consecutive Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.

Girls gave Driver’s movie career a big boost as well, and he soon appeared in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012) and the Coen brothers' acclaimed Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Following those high-profile films, Driver landed roles in other attention-grabbing movies, such as the comedy-drama This Is Where I Leave You (2014) and the much-anticipated Christmas 2015 release Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The actor followed with starring roles in Jim Jarmusch's Paterson and Martin Scorsese's Silence in 2016. In late 2017, after appearing in Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky, Driver reprised the role of budding Sith lord Kylo Ren for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which surged to a $220 million opening weekend in North America.

In 2018, Driver starred in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman in the Oscar-nominated role of Detective Flip Zimmerman, who goes undercover by joining the Ku Klux Klan. A busy 2019 brought roles in the political drama The Report, the zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die and the relationship saga Marriage Story, with Scarlett Johansson. At the end of the year, Driver was set to return to the dark side of the Force in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Driver returned to the Broadway stage to star as Pale, opposite Keri Russell, in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This at the Hudson Theatre from March 15 through to July 14, 2019, earning rave reviews for his performance, as well as his first Tony Award nomination in the category of Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play.

Achievements

• 

  For his role as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Driver received a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor, one Teen Choice Awards and an MTV Movie Award while for Jim Jarmusch's drama Paterson he received multiple nominations for Best Actor from critics associations, winning several. In 2018, Driver received several nominations for his performance in the film BlacKkKlansman including nominations for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • What If

    (What If is the story of medical school dropout Wallace (D...)

    2013
  • Paterson

    (Every day, Paterson adheres to a simple routine: he drive...)

    2016
  • This Is Where I Leave You

    (When their father passes away, four grown siblings bruise...)

    2014
  • Hungry Hearts

    (In this intense psycho-thriller, Adam Driver (Girls) is a...)

    2014
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi

    (The Star Wars saga continues in The Last Jedi as the hero...)

    2017
  • J. Edgar

    (As head of the FBI through eight presidents and three war...)

    2011
  • Logan Lucky

    (Trying to reverse a family curse, brothers Jimmy and Clyd...)

    2017
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens

    (As a new threat to the galaxy rises, Rey, a desert scaven...)

    2015
  • Bluebird

    (In the northern reaches of Maine, a local school bus driv...)

    2013
  • The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

    (Toby (Adam Driver) enters a world of time jumping fantasy...)

    2018
  • The Dead Don't Die

    (A sleepy town finds itself under attack by zombies with t...)

    2019
  • Silence

    (Martin Scorsese's Silence tells the story of two missiona...)

    2016
  • While We're Young

    (A funny cross-generational comedy about aging, ambition, ...)

    2014
  • Tracks

    (Remarkable true story of Robyn Davidson, a young woman wh...)

    2013
  • Midnight Special

    (A little boy with very special powers inspires a cult fol...)

    2016
  • Not Waving, But Drowning

    ("Not Waving But Drowning" is a chronological look at grow...)

    2012
  • Frances Ha

    (Frances Ha is a modern comic fable that explores New York...)

    2012
  • Gayby

    ("Gayby" is an irreverent comedy about friendship, growing...)

    2012
  • Inside Llewyn Davis

    (An aspiring singer-songwriter navigates the 1960s folk-mu...)

    2013
  • Blackkklansman

    (From visionary filmmaker, Spike Lee comes the incredible ...)

    2018
  • Lincoln

    (An inspiring drama that focuses on Lincoln's final four m...)

    2012
  • The Report

    (In select theaters November 15. Included with Prime Novem...)

    2019

• TV series

  • Girls

    (A young woman and her three friends struggle through thei...)

    2012

Religion

Driver was raised Baptist; he had a religious upbringing and sang in the choir at church.

Views

Adam is a great admirer of the armed forces, as he learned to appreciate them during his years in the army. Driver is the co-founder of Arts in the Armed Forces, a non-profit that brings high-quality arts programming to active-duty service members, veterans, military support staff and their families around the world free of charge. He founded the organization with his wife Joanne Tucker in 2006.

Their mission is to bring “high-quality arts programming to active duty service members, veterans, military support staff, and their families around the world free of charge.” Based on his own experiences, Driver believes that theater communities can be a beneficial resource for soldiers and veterans who might have a tough time expressing what they’re going through transitioning back to normal life.

Quotations: "In the military, you learn the essence of people. You see so many examples of self-sacrifice and moral courage. In the rest of life, you don't get that many opportunities to be sure of your friends."

"I auditioned in Chicago for Juilliard and didn't get in. I was basically living in a back room of my parents' house, paying rent and not doing anything with my life. I'd like to say it was patriotic to join the Marines, but it was also that I was doing nothing honorable with my life, and spending too much time at McDonald's."

"The deadly thing in my job is to attach too much meaning to everything. You have to have a sense of humor about yourself...I'm definitely trying to figure this all out as I go along, how to craft a career. As things get bigger, I have days of depression, sitting in the house and wondering 'What are you doing? Is it even relevant?'"

"Just the service aspect of running a nonprofit is so gratifying because it takes the attention off yourself. I'm not an acting monk or anything. I'm not, like, the most well-adjusted actor. But it's really designed to focus on yourself, or it can be. So it's good to have something else to focus on that reminds you that it's not always about you. Something I learned in the Marine Corps that I've applied to acting is, one, taking direction, and then working with a group of people to accomplish a mission and knowing your role within that team."

Personality

Adam Driver does not watch his own performances onscreen and even declines to listen to audio clips of himself while being interviewed on the radio. Driver broke his long tradition by attending the premiere for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but it’s almost shocking how much it took out of Driver to go see himself on screen. According to Driver himself, the fact that he was masked through most of it helped a great deal, but the experience was still so “disconcerting”.

Driver has barely any social media in his life, as he finds himself unable to understand technology to the point where he’s “very scared of it.”

When asked what he loved most about being in the Marine Corps, Driver gushed on the isolation of military life, the precise routine, and the Spartan lifestyle expected of him. Driver also appreciated the fact that he was made aware of his own mortality, though this might have been tested a bit too far. In one instance, Driver and his group were nearly exposed to deadly white phosphorous during training.

In 1999, David Fincher released the film Fight Club, which became a cult hit almost overnight. Driver was one of many teenagers who was inspired by the film, but he was inspired more than most - he actually began his own fight club among his friends after school. According to Driver, the first rule of his fight club, rather than not talking about said fight club, was “no hitting in the balls.”

Interests

• playing the piano

• Artists

  Edward Hopper, Joel David Coen, Ethan Jesse Coen, Jim Jarmush

• Sport & Clubs

  Football

Connections

Adam Driver dated Joanne Tucker for almost a decade before eventually marrying her in 2013. They have a son, whose birth they kept hidden from the press for two years. They live together in Brooklyn Heights with their dog Moose, a Rottweiler-Pitbull mix.

Father:

Joe Douglas Driver

Mother:

Nancy Wright

Spouse:

Joanne Tucker

stepfather:

Rodney G. Wright

colleague:

Leonardo DiCaprio

colleague:

Naomi Watts

colleague:

Amanda Seyfried

colleague:

Mark Hamill

colleague:

Harrison Ford

colleague:

Lupita Nyong'o

colleague:

Sebastian Stan

colleague:

Katie Holmes

colleague:

Hilary Swank

colleague:

Benicio del Toro

colleague:

Jon Hamm

colleague:

Danny Glover

colleague:

Selena Gomez

colleague:

Alec Baldwin