Few actors could be said to have dominated a year as much as Adam Driver. The 36-year-old began 2019 with a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for BlacKkKlansman and will end it as the star of three of the year’s most talked-about movies – The Report, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Marriage Story.

In the months between, he has won rave reviews for his performance in Burn This on Broadway, earning a Tony nomination (he missed out to Bryan Cranston), and been the focus of a series of adoring profiles. An article in the New Yorker alluding to Girls, the TV show that made Driver’s name, branded him the “Original Man”.

But none of this has happened by chance. Over the past six years, Driver, who has been compared to the great actors of the 70s from Robert De Niro to Dustin Hoffman, has been sought out by some of the world’s most celebrated directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, the Coen brothers, Jim Jarmusch, Noah Baumbach and Spike Lee. Scorsese called him “one of the finest, if not the finest [actor] of his generation”. Lee kept it simpler still, saying he cast Driver in BlacKkKlansman because “game respects game”.

Adam Driver on set with director Spike Lee and Topher Grace for BlacKkKlansman. Photograph: Alamy

Nor does it hurt that those glowing magazine profiles have a propensity for shooting him with his shirt off. An infamous Annie Leibovitz shoot for Vogue in 2013 saw him topless with a goat draped around his neck, his pecs appeal is regularly debated online while a writer on US website the Cut became “so flustered by his quads [in Burn This] that … I spilled all of the contents of my purse on the floor”. No wonder then that he is increasingly hailed as Hollywood’s latest, if most unlikely, heartthrob.

Not that Driver sees it that way. Instead, he has repeatedly stressed he has no interest in being a sex symbol, has no social media awareness and had no desire to court the kind of celebrity that a rapid rise to the Hollywood A-list brings.

He has described himself as a very “New York actor”, lives a low-key life in Brooklyn with his wife of six years, Joanne Tucker, and their son, and is increasingly picky about the work he accepts. “The stakes are different. It really has to be worth it, because you have to be gone a lot,” he told Rolling Stone this month.

That’s true to an extent. But, as with most things involving Driver, there is an interesting ambiguity at play. Thus he might not wish to be seen as a heartthrob but he has never shied away from those close-ups of the hyper-buff, 6ft 2in body he first honed as a young man in the US Marines.

That earlier career intrigues too. Driver has talked openly of the fact that he signed up to serve in the military after 9/11. admitting that “I was not thinking of politics at all. That enemy was faceless in my mind … I put my faith in institutions. I wasn’t until later in life that I had perspective.”

Adam Driver is Kylo Ren in Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker. Photograph: Lucasfilm Ltd.

Born in San Diego, Driver’s family moved to Mishawaka, Indiana, following his parent’s divorce, a difficult experience which the actor has admitted he drew on for his performance in Marriage Story if only because that film’s protagonist, Charlie, behaves in the opposite way to his own father, fighting for custody and making every effort to stay in his young son’s life.

His mother’s second marriage to a Baptist preacher saw the young Driver increasingly rebelling against his upbringing. He chafed against the restrictions of the church, dreamed vaguely of becoming an actor and hung out with a similarly bored group of friends making camcorder action movies.

Throughout all the teenage ennui, he watched movies made by the likes of Scorsese, Jarmusch and David Fincher, which told stories that challenged him and suggested that there was another world. “The first time I saw it I felt kind of sick,” he would later say of Fincher’s Fight Club. “It made me feel very strange. But then I watched it again almost immediately.”

Having repeatedly bristled against the authority of religion, he embraced the discipline of the marines, only for his career to end in an early discharge following an injury sustained while off-duty. At a loose end again, he decided to take another chance on those acting dreams (an early audition at 17 had come to nothing), trying out for the prestigious Julliard school in New York. He was accepted – and became notorious for five-mile runs to college and endless push-ups in the hallways. And there was no holding back his talent.

Adam Driver with Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story. Photograph: Wilson Webb/AP

In Girls, his Adam Sackler could have been the archetypal bad boyfriend, a man with a propensity for pushing sexual boundaries while avoiding commitment. Yet Driver gave him a desperate yearning that transformed the character into something far more interesting. Similarly in Jarmusch’s Paterson, his titular character commands the screen while barely uttering a word, his stillness creating an almost claustrophobic intimacy.

Alongside the intriguing vulnerability that drives his best performances is an impressive versatility. He has convinced as a doubting Jesuit priest in Scorsese’s Silence, as a goofy Jewish police officer in BlacKkKlansman and as the needy Kylo Ren in the Star Wars saga, a bravura turn which leaves you pitying a villain as much as despising him.

In Marriage Story, an updated Kramer vs Kramer which follows playwright Charlie and his actor wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) as their marriage disintegrates, he delivers a performance both incredibly precise and beautifully loose, his heartbreaking performance of Stephen Sondheim’s Being Alive arguably the cinematic moment of the year.

Far more than a pretty chest then, even if Driver remains agnostic about his success: “Doubt is part of being committed to something,” he told the New Yorker. “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 accomplished … You still don’t know anything really.”