On a summery afternoon in late September, I arranged to meet Adam Driver near his home in Brooklyn Heights. He beat me to the restaurant and, for a second or two, as I stood on the sidewalk looking through the large plate-glass windows, I gawked at him unobserved. He was sitting alone in full sun at a table by the window facing out, a thirty-four-year-old guy in a plain dark T-shirt with a bright flop of black hair, a conversation-piece nose, and deep-red, complicated lips, his features scattered across a big and—perhaps because of the openness of its acreage—friendly-seeming face. Unselfconscious in this New York storefront, Driver was looking at his phone as if Disney’s marketing millions had somehow failed in their mission to transform him into one of the most recognizable faces in the world. He had, as we all know, been chosen: to play Kylo Ren in Episode VII: The Force Awakens and, on December 15, in Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, of the Star Wars franchise. Driver had landed as huge a part in a Hollywood movie as an actor could—the son of Han and Leia, the nephew of Luke, and, moreover, the grandson of Darth Vader, the most iconic bad guy in movie history—a role that would change Driver’s life and career and—



He looked up from his phone; saw me; laughed; waved me in. Before we began to talk, I felt duty-bound to offer him a disclaimer-as-preamble, to tell him that I had modest expectations for what our allotted hours together were going to yield. For one thing, we didn’t have time to ride a submersible to the bottom of the Mariana Trench or even hit Equinox to whale on our pecs—whatever stunt would have made it seem as though we’d hung out all bro-y cool. For another, I’d read all the press on him since his film career began, a metric ton that includes local-paper stories that chase down his dad, Joe, or stepdad, Rodney, or high school teacher, Ed—“He was a popular guy among his peers”—as well as pieces that metastasized as soon as he debuted on Lena Dunham’s show, Girls, in 2012, when the world did a collective Who Is That? I’d been struck by the unusual uniformity, even within the uniform genre of celebrity profiles, of what he says, witty and charming and humble and genuine though it always is, and I could not bear to read, let alone write, one more piece that talked about his unconventional looks and how not-in-the-mold-of-Traditional-Leading-Man he is, given that—are we being honest here?—any reasonable person who searches Google Images for Driver and skips past the Good Lord Those Are Some Serious Jug Ears pictures and the Gosh He Sure Does Have a Dorky Smile pictures will swiftly arrive at the larger glut of Holy Fuck pictures that sufficiently establish Driver as one uncommonly sublime- looking dude. If my girlfriend or boyfriend left me for him, sure, the wound to my ego would suppurate for all time, but it would also be an eternal badge of honor. I made a number of confessions in this vein, all of them supporting the idea that this transaction—showing up with my questions and expecting, in a restaurant, with a stranger, a meaningful exchange—was doomed by design.

T-shirt and trousers by Save Khaki United; sneakers by Converse; watch worn throughout, Driver’s own. Norman Jean Roy

“That,” Driver said, laughing, “is the best preamble I’ve ever heard.” Driver, too, would confess his own modest expectations: “I had this interviewer a couple weeks ago who was like, ‘Tell me all the things that people ask you about in interviews and I’ll try to avoid them.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, you’re inevitably going to say something about how I look, and that it’s so strange, and a question about Star Wars.’ He went on this long story, and then at the very end, he was like, ‘Please just give me anything about Star Wars.’ And it’s like, why? Even though it’ll be fine, you know, why put another fucking fine thing out in the world? What a completely mediocre thing to just fill up a world with more fucking shit that is going to be reduced to something that’s two sentences anyway—that’s going be about, you know, that I made meatloaf or something like that? Something funny that people can just digest and move on from. What the fuck is the point? What are we doing? You know? It’s all with a wink. You know what this is. I know what this is. I’m going to pretend to adjust my hair in a picture, and do the article, and so long as you don’t say anything offensive, maybe that averages out to something or maybe it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with what it is we’re actually doing”—doing on a set, he meant, doing when he makes a movie—“which is hopefully creating something.”

“I didn’t realize,” he said, shaking his head, “how 90 percent of the job was going to be talking about the thing—while you’re doing it, before you’re doing it, after you’re doing it—and interpreting it. And 10 percent is actually making the thing itself.”

Driver speaks energetically, tending toward self-interruption, clipping the heels of his own clauses as his thoughts parkour forward. His voice is the voice you’re familiar with. Emanating as much from his chest as from his head, a resonant low-end tenor, it also regularly leaps an octave on vowels, to a sweeter set of sounds. This gives an unusual, elastic quality to his conversation, not in the maybe-he’s-off-his-medication diction of Christopher Walken but in a way that suggests honest waverings of mind and real spikes in feeling.

“Actually, I hadn’t seen it,” Driver told me, with an air of amused confession, of Martin Scorsese’s Silence, from 2016. “It was on TV the other night, which I was surprised by. And I’m like, ‘Oh, I can watch that. I’m not in a lot of that movie.’ ” Driver costars in the film with Andrew Garfield and Liam Neeson, who all play seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit priests in Japan. The fifty pounds Driver lost for the role turned his face into a thing of contoured strangeness, a face out of Velázquez, radically sculpted as if by faith itself, and helped him exhibit the vulnerability of a creature in great distress. As such, despite his absence from too much of the film, Driver was the thing the viewer sought in every frame. In the metric ton of preexisting press, Driver, a former Marine, consistently calls Scorsese “the tip of the spear”—Special Ops-speak for “an unexpected onslaught of firepower and destruction that takes the enemy by surprise, scatters his resources, and fractures his morale,” an idiom that, when applied to a movie director, suggests a maker of images of such power that the viewer is rendered defenseless. Scorsese is the director whose movies (GoodFellas, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy) Driver rented at his Blockbuster in Mishawaka, Indiana, before buying them on VHS, replacing them on DVD, and then again on Blu-ray—movies that inspired a teenage Driver hitting his high school marks in Arsenic and Old Lace to want to act.

Sweatshirt and jeans by Gucci. Norman Jean Roy

Nevertheless, since Driver saw, and profoundly disliked, his performance in the pilot of Girls on Dunham’s laptop, he’s assiduously avoided watching his own work. It was no different when Silence aired on TV: Not three minutes went by before his own face popped up on his screen. “I couldn’t do it,” he told me with a slow shake of his head. “I changed the channel. But,” he added, leaning in with genuine wonder, “the little things that I had seen? I was like, ‘God, that’s beautiful.’ I didn’t realize all the things that were going on.”

That Driver can’t do it, that he can’t bear to watch himself onscreen to the extent that he’s willing to deny himself the beautiful things that are also going on in his movies, embodies an irony so pure that, in certain moods, it might seem like something out of O. Henry—the poor wife selling her long hair to buy her husband a watch chain for Christmas; the poor husband selling his watch to buy his wife a set of elegant hair combs for the same reason. The directors whose work inspired him the most have become the very directors he works for and whose movies he won’t—when he’s in them—watch. Since his fleeting first film appearance in 2011, as a gas-station attendant in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, Driver has worked with an unusual number of those inspirations. There’s been Scorsese, Spielberg (in Lincoln, where, as a young telegraph operator, his blinkless stare signals attention mixed with astonishment that Daniel Day-Lewis’s President Lincoln is sitting there in the telegraph room, speaking his mind), the Coen brothers (a funny turn as a downtown folk singer who howls along with Justin Timberlake, in Inside Llewyn Davis), Jim Jarmusch (in Paterson, starring as a bus driver who writes poetry, a restrained performance that conveys an inner life of complexity and nuance despite its silence), Steven Soderbergh (in Logan Lucky, as one of two not very bright brothers), Noah Baumbach (as an ambitious, charming, and morally repugnant young artist on the make, in While We’re Young), J. J. Abrams (as Kylo Ren in that wee art-house picture), and Terry Gilliam (in the pachydermically gestating but allegedly completed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, about which Driver told me: “Never will I wear a pair of crushed velvet pants on the back of a horse standing in a volcano in Spain somewhere, if not in a Terry Gilliam movie”). Not bad, this bucket list, for someone with a sixty-year career. Driver’s been at it for six.

Although a great many actors profess not to watch their own work, finding it excruciating to see the final yield of their takes, most do, a little, even Johnny Depp and Joaquin Phoenix, talented guys who say they never watch themselves but make exceptions to the rule. The only purists I’ve been able to track down, who seem to actually not watch their work, are Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s not the worst club in which to find oneself a member. Even so, I wondered how Driver could pass up watching movies by many of the filmmakers who inspired him to want to act. “I kind of want to protect,” Driver said. “I mean . . . a little bit . . .”

"Never will I wear a pair of crushed velvet pants on the back of a horse standing in a volcano in Spain."

Driver’s head was jittering; his eyes had gone out of focus. He seemed to be having a kind of mild seizure.

“Sorry. There’s, like, a scene playing out—outside.”

Indeed there was. As I turned to take in Driver’s view of the leafy Brooklyn street, I was witness to a collection of human beings, brightly clad, of different ages and sizes and, insofar as I could tell, genders and ethnicities, a group of human beings in sufficient physical proximity to suggest the heedless bovine state that infects groups of strangers and makes them drift, herdlike, upon sighting celebrities of almost any grade. Phones? Out they were, casual-like, everyone pretending to have just discovered a wonderful new recipe online, even though said phones were all aimed my—i.e., Driver’s—way, until they all started waving in frightening unison. Disney clearly having succeeded in its mission, variations on this scene would play out repeatedly during the next few hours, and Driver, for the most part, would smile and nod while continuing with what he was trying to say.

“I’m there when we’re making the movie,” he said, picking up the thread. “My favorite part is the doing of it. Seeing how they come up with shots or what their direction is or when I’m assuming they’ll say something and they don’t. For me, that’s the most interesting part. But then how it looks is kind of . . .” Driver made a slow shooing gesture with his hand. “I can’t just watch it objectively. I always hate it and then come back to, like, ‘Okay, that’s fine, it’s not about me. It’s the story.’ I can’t watch it once. I have to watch it five times, you know? The movie is over. It’s on film, so it’s permanent. But if I think about it more, it’s just an obsessive loop I keep playing in my mind that I can’t get caught up in because it’s totally self-destructive and not helpful moving forward. Because that’s happened to me before. I see myself, and then the next thing I’m thinking about is Fucking hell, my face is long or Why am I doing that thing!”

That kind of hyperconsciousness is what Driver wants to short-circuit in his performances. “I have things in my mind,” he said, “where I can make it clearer or it can always be better. That doesn’t necessarily mean it should come at a great cost, because something can start to get masturbatory. But when it’s nonactors, and you see them in movies, and they’re so good because you forget the artifice, you get really scared. Eavesdropping on someone is a really hard thing, and it’s one of the many things I aspire to: That you’re watching and you just happen to be there catching someone. That’s one of many things going on in my mind of how it can be better. That keeps it interesting for me. There is always another thought to have.”

I asked Driver if he has a similar obsessiveness while on set.

Jacket by Prada; trousers by Save Khaki United; T-shirt, Driver’s own. Norman Jean Roy

“There is a moment when it tips over into selfishness. You just are giving yourself an obstacle to overcome. You’re giving yourself an enemy because there is no enemy. Not that a film set is designed to help you, because nothing on a film set, other than the other actors, is designed to make it easy for you. There’s time in between takes, or somebody who just had lunch who’s operating a boom who’s getting sleepy, or people are burping or farting, or rain comes in, or the other actor is drunk, doesn’t know his lines, is not available. Everything is designed not to help you, so how do you pretend? How do you take it all in if it’s your ambition to make it the best you can, and to go as deep as you can? It maybe has to cost something.”

And so Driver finds it hard to watch himself act. And so he does not. When he goes to a premiere, after he walks the red carpet with his wife—actor Joanne Tucker—and the pregame is done, and she goes to their seats, he slips away. She watches the movie. Driver goes to the greenroom and waits, or leaves, or has dinner. He comes back, does the talk-back onstage, goes to the party. Or, as he did in October for the premiere of The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), the Noah Baumbach movie in which he has a single scene, he sits there with Tucker, and when his scene looms, he “put my head down and closed my eyes.”

Driver has, however, violated his no-watch rule.

“The Force Awakens,” he told me, “is the only movie I’ve sat with an audience and watched.” Once, at J. J. Abrams’s offices, he saw it with an audience of three other organic life-forms—Carrie Fisher and her dog, Gary, and Daisy Ridley, who stars as Rey—and two more times, in London and L. A., with premiere audiences. In L. A., he was with Tucker and some family members. “Joanne hadn’t seen it. I didn’t tell her anything about it. I didn’t tell her I kill Han Solo.” Guests of Lupita Nyong’o, who plays Maz Kanata, were sitting behind him and Tucker. “Credits started, the whole scroll at the beginning, and they start screaming, ‘Oh my God! It’s happening.’ And I flash-forward to where I killed Han, and I got really sick, and went really cold, waiting for when it was over, you know. . . .”

What did he think of his performance?

"I flash-forward to where I killed Han, and I got really sick."

“I . . . I have lots of thoughts. There’s things that I want to change. I’ll see it and I’m like, ‘That’s not coming across.’ So then I’ll talk to Joanne about it afterward and she’ll be like, ‘What I got from it is this.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, that is what’s coming across. Good. Because that’s not what I got from what it is I saw.’ I just obsessively cycle it over in my mind.” “Just as there are directors who can take up a lot of air and space,” J. J. Abrams told me by phone, “there are actors who can do the same. I could imagine a version of an actor whose process is about getting attention, or about being more the subject of the process than a sherpa to get us all there. But none of what Adam does has anything to do with anything other than doing his best work.” Abrams continued, “You think, Well, isn’t that what actors should do? Shouldn’t they be mesmerizing? Shouldn’t they bring a magic? Shouldn’t they bring a profundity and a complexity and a depth and an authenticity? Of course, that’s what you hope for. But you don’t always get the person that has the emotional or intellectual depth to make something better, or to make something more interesting, or deeper, or surprising. Adam does, almost as a rule. The gift of working with him, the fun of it—while it is very serious business for him—is seeing what that business results in. It’s that sort of alchemy of having an incredible face, an incredible understanding of the human condition, a great awareness of what the text and subtext of the scene may be, and a willingness to explore it.”

“The thing with Star Wars,” Driver told me, “is that they’re like, ‘Trust us, there is space behind you.’ Or ‘Trust us, your lightsaber will work.’ So a part of the impulse in wanting to see it is because there is so much visual shit going on that I didn’t know what was happening. You know what’s happening in While We’re Young, you know? I did it. We’re in a bike shop. With Star Wars, it’s like, ‘This is . . . where you meet Snoke.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s kind of like a cave. I get it.’ Or ‘Oh, that looks like Andy Serkis. I can’t tell.’ ”

Has he seen the new one?

“No, I have not.”

Will he?

“Undecided.”

Undecided?

“Undecided.”

Very political.

“They’ve trained me well,” Driver laughed. “No, honestly, I know about this one. I know that the lightsaber is working now. I know what it looks like.”

Another maybe-seizure began, this time more acute.

“Yeah, sorry, this fucking dude outside is driving me nuts.”

The fellow outside looked like the guy who’s been standing in front of the pet store staring at kittens way too long.

“He’s been trying for five minutes, and then he just decided to go for it. That’s when I moved like a fucking crazy person, because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. The thing that drives me the most crazy is when they think they’re being subtle. It’s so obvious. I duck behind trees. Not that you’re a tree.”

T-shirt and trousers by Save Khaki United; sneakers by Converse; watch worn throughout, Driver’s own. Norman Jean Roy

I tell him I’ve been called worse.

At the end of the eighties, I worked at a Manhattan restaurant frequented by every major film actor you could name, along with celebrities from other realms and the lieutenants and occasional bosses of New York crime families. “Cement,” one of the restaurant’s managers would chin-nod, meaningfully, as two brothers in extraordinary suits sat at an A-table, and maybe Harvey Keitel would join them; Robert De Niro and a companion would already be at an adjoining four-top with Scorsese and a friend; Sean Penn, jacked for Casualties of War, and Madonna, fresh off the boards from David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, would come late. Later still, Bruce Willis, in a green trench coat in August, beside Demi Moore, in tiny shorts, would insist on occupying the restaurant’s only booth, where, earlier in the night, John Gotti and eleven of his associates had all ordered some variation on Cutty and water—soda, kid; twist, kid; lemon, kid; no ice, kid—each of them in succession making a sober show of rejecting the Cutty set before them—that’s not for me, it’s for him; no, that’s for him—breaking balls until the table exploded with laughter. Bruce Springsteen and Little Steven would come in early, order surf and turf, and, disappointed with the portions, order second surf and turfs before weaving their way through the limos double-parked out front, to hail cabs. Christian Slater, off Heathers, would wobble between tables, accidentally burning a waiter’s hand with his cigarette and apologizing in his best Jack Nicholson (“Y’aright, pal?”). And at 3:00 a.m. on his first night—on my first night, that is—the young waiter I was might have shorted a hammered Harry Dean Stanton one dollar of change, Stanton screaming, “THIEF! THIEF!” and Eric Roberts telling Stanton, gently: “The kid made a mistake, Harry. The Kid. Made. A mistake.”

The stars themselves had their allure, of course, but equally interesting were the little planets in their orbit—those waiters and bartenders, aspiring actors all, with whom I worked. The servers were at different stages in their careers, some starting up, others bottoming out, but all were at points along the path to certain failure. The all-but-inevitable pain of that failure was a troubling, moving thing to be near. Glancing back at my decade working in restaurants densely planted with young actors, I can’t begin to compile the complete catalog of all the handsome and gifted Steves and gorgeous and talented Samanthas whom, for reasons that will remain forever unclear, I saw make their way encouragingly forward and then not get any further. It wasn’t that anything happened; it’s just that nothing happened. Something happened for Driver, though, and if you read through the aforementioned press horde, you will discover a series of details, falling in the same order and with little variation, that purport to tell you the what and how and why of the Adam Driver story: the minister’s son born in California who, by age seven, was a child of divorce growing up in Mishawaka with his sister, their paralegal mom, and a Baptist-preacher stepdad; the Sundays singing in his stepfather’s choir; the teenage years climbing radio towers and watching Fight Club with friends and starting a fight club with friends; and the acting in school plays (Guys and Dolls, Into the Woods). You will learn about his failed Juilliard audition at seventeen; his attempt to start an acting career that other, storied way (driving to L. A., where he lasted two days before tail-between-legsing it home); the dead-end jobs (door-to-door vacuum salesman, telemarketer) he worked until a screaming came across the sky, on 9/11, and a screaming match unfolded with his stepfather (“Join the Marines!”), and sure enough Driver joined the Marines, in full get-the-bastards mode. You will hear about his two years in the Corps, which he fucking loved—loved for the discipline, the effort, the order, the work, the friendship, but not for the eventual heartbreak of it. And you will hear how, on the eve of his deployment to Iraq with his platoon, a stupid accident on a stupid Target mountain bike left his one-day-to-have-its-own-Twitter-page chest with a broken sternum, an injury that meant he could only be rehabbed to the point that he could be medically and honorably discharged from the Marines.

And then, after the chaos of a sudden reentry into the civilian world with no plan B, came a second Juilliard audition—surely doomed, but in fact successful. And you will read about Driver’s uneasy assimilation into life as an acting student while his friends were taking fire; how the rage he brought into his classrooms could make his fellow student actors cry, and not in a good way; how he would run to class in Manhattan, each day, from Queens, to make the work more intense; how there would be whole chickens implicated in his routine, which he was said to “prepare and consume” daily. (“I’ve never prepared a chicken,” he told me.) You will be told how he began to evolve as an actor, learning to find words to express feelings that a Marine and a tight-lipped midwestern man hadn’t managed to have before; how he met Tucker at Juilliard, who has said of her husband’s time there, “I think his military training prepared him better for his career as an actor than anything else could have” and “he will never show up unprepared. He will never show up late.” And, finally, you will hear how, as someone who self-identified as a theater actor—someone he charmingly characterized, after the fact, as a snob—he went reluctantly to an HBO audition, not wanting to do TV crap, and how the show’s creator realized immediately that he was perfect for the part and that her plan to use his character only in that episode was lunacy: Driver’s audition made it clear that he was the male heart of the show, and his performance as Adam Sackler, aspiring actor, on six seasons of Girls, saw Driver become the most sought-after young actor of his generation.

Jacket, shirt, and jeans, Saint Laurent By Anthony Vaccarello; boots from Early Halloween, Vintage Clothing, N. Y. C. Norman Jean Roy

That’s one version of the story, anyway, a tumble from one circumstance to the next, which is reinforced by an unilluminating claim Driver makes from interview to interview: his “I don’t have a plan” trope, as if to suggest that, somehow, he’s navigating his remarkable career without some degree of centralizing control.

But while Driver cops to the idea that he’s a total control freak in his granular practice as an actor—he overthinks everything, and obsesses over everything—the idea that the rigor the Marines provided would not carry over to a larger plan for himself seemed like nonsense, just something you say during the 90 percent of your worktime spent on the mandated self-mythologizing that comes with the deliciously vague contractual obligation to do “a reasonable amount of press.” In such a situation, there would be little value in stating the obvious, because who wants to hear the boring truth? Who wants to be told that the difference between Driver and all the Steves and Samanthas would be a matter of his having, at a cellular level, worked harder—in large measure because he has a permanent example of what he has to live up to.

“Of anybody in my life,” Driver told me, ardently, “Joanne has taught me more about having a process or being a better actor than anyone I’ve met. She was a brilliant fucking actor from the minute I met her at school. I’ve never been moved more by someone who lives this idea that I pose for. I talk in these interviews about the idea of how I want to live my life as a creative person—it’s really ‘the idea,’ because I don’t do any of it—but she does. She doesn’t overthink it. It’s completely instinctual. I try to do that all the time, and mostly I’m not successful in the way that she is.”

Driver said more about this and, in doing so, transitioned into an off-the-record mode. He wasn’t doing a job now; he was just talking. It’s not that he was suddenly a different person. His press face isn’t an act. The partial view it offers is perfectly suited to a profile—it shows a side of him clearly, in a certain light. But his contractually mandated reasonableness doesn’t keep him from turning on a dime when the moment calls for it, to face you.

“Which is to say,” I said, as I tried to collate public and private, “you have a plan.”

Driver laughed.

“Your plan is to work with every great director alive,” I said. “Because why wouldn’t you work to get to that point?”

“Yeah . . . no one has challenged me on that,” Driver said. “To go across the world for two or three months to be alone in a hotel room—fourteen hours a day, on a mountainside, whatever the fuck—it has to be worth it. I’m trying not to fall on platitudes. But I fucking grew up watching movies. I don’t take it for granted that I get to be in films that have a potential to have this long shelf life. I think it’s more than just man’s need to piss on something. Those things I was inspired by reached me in Indiana through Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. So why hold back and not be as open as possible?”

"I think that the best version of the story is the first time we read it."

And this is the thing that, it seems to me, Driver is open to: the possibility that he still has something to learn. There is a fundamental operational humility at the heart of what he does, a willingness to surround himself with people who he knows know more than he does, and his trust that if he works with such people he just might make something he one day could bear to watch.

For all of Driver’s self-confessed obsessiveness, he’s lately begun to sense that there’s another route to where he’s going. “Sometimes,” he told me, “I think that the best version of the story is the first time we read it. The first time everyone does a table read”—when the actors all sit together with their scripts and say their lines—“it’s alive. It’s a sort of theater. You’re not overthinking. Then you memorize the lines and every impulse is overthought. Whereas before, you’re not caring about moments not working; you just want to make sure you read all the right lines. There’s something amazing about that, and amazing in the art or the films that I like. It’s not so figured out. It’s more abstract. Like Robert Motherwell, or Cassavetes’s movies, or Altman. There’s a messiness to it.”

A recent experience with Soderbergh on Logan Lucky suggests that this possibility is actually within reach. In other movies, he said, “you get greedy and you’re like, ‘I’ve been thinking about this for six months. I’ve been working on this accent for three months.’ You want to get there and actually do it. You want to exhaust every option and feel like, ‘Okay, I’m sated. I did everything.’ ” But even in those cases, he told me, “I go back home and I keep replaying the scenes in my mind. Like: ‘Fuck! It’s not clear enough. I need to make it clearer.’ And you just keep playing it out.”

Not with Logan Lucky. “Soderbergh is operating the camera, because he’s directing,” Driver said. “He’s lighting it with practical things. There’s not a lot of time wasted. You do the scene. He’ll stop when he wants to. He’ll pick up the camera, say, ‘I’m ready.’ So the energy and pace of scenes you can maintain—easily. No one is going back to their trailers. Everyone’s following him like he’s a fish, or a fisherman. And he’ll just stop and say, ‘This is where it is.’ There’s an unpreciousness to it.”

Jacket, shirt, and jeans, Saint Laurent By Anthony Vaccarello; boots from Early Halloween, Vintage Clothing, N. Y. C. Norman Jean Roy

“Adam’s got a very good combination of innate ability and the intelligence to protect it,” Soderbergh told me by phone. “To eliminate or at least mute the ridiculous aspects of the job that can interfere with that. I think he’s taken real pains to protect parts of himself that are important, and sincere.”

With Soderbergh, Driver said, there’s no time to be precious. “You’re just one or two takes, that’s it. I had to drive a car through a window of, like, a convenience store. It’s one take, that’s it. ‘Do you want to do it?’ ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then we do it and I had to adjust, to let it go. Obviously, I take a job for the director because it’s his movie. But often you give yourself things to work on within it. And for him, my work was to not ask him anything. I’m not going to ask him how it was. I’m not going to ask for another take unless it’s absolutely necessary. I think I maybe asked once.”

“I could tell from Adam,” Soderbergh explained, “that he’d had a lot of experiences that were unremittingly serious. So I hoped when he hooked into our way of doing things that he would allow himself to play. We started with a couple of big scenes, and once he got through those, I think he said, ‘Yeah, this can be fun. You can laugh. I don’t need to make it harder than it needs to be.’ ”

“At the end of the day,” Driver said with lingering amazement, “everyone goes to the bar and he edits it right there on a laptop, and you can watch him edit it. And after two weeks, he had thirty minutes of the movie—done. Scored and everything. There’s something to the ‘How can I do things with as few shots as possible?’ I thought, Oh—that’s what’s to strive for. How can I make the character clear with as little on top as possible? Nothing overthought. It’s first impulse and then be comfortable to walk away and let it go.”

A bit later, after Driver and I said our goodbyes and he went outside to unlock his bike, I stared at him through the window. There were a few people on the sidewalk watching him as he camoed up—trucker hat, big shades, hoodie drawn tightly around his face. Now on the other side of the plate glass, now just one more guy staring in the pet-store window a beat too long, I did the brand scan that the magazine reader has been taught to want—Adam Driver in throwback Stan Smiths, Rag & Bone jeans—but the rest was a merciful blur. In a second or two, Driver was gone. He was trying to get somewhere.

Norman Jean Roy

This appears in the December/January '17 issue of Esquire.

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