Adam Driver has been notorious for avoiding his own onscreen performances. The “Girls” and “Star Wars” alum infamously told The New Yorker in 2019 that he vowed to never watch his work again after singing in “Inside Llewyn Davis.” At the time, Driver had not watched his Oscar-nominated turns in “Marriage Story” or “BlacKKKlansman.”
Now, the “Ferrari” star revealed during Max talk show “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” that he has viewed his projects from the “last couple of years” in an effort to not “get stuck” in a particular acting style, as well as “defend” his performances when needed.
“It’s painful watching a performance and seeing that knowing that it’s film and it’s forever and it’s permanent. And you see a mistake that you wish you could have done [differently] and you can’t. I drive everybody around me crazy asking them to explain my performance,” Driver said of his past aversion to watching his films. “But now in the last couple of years, I started watching everything. I just decided to do it because I don’t want to get stuck in a right way or a set way of doing anything.”
Driver continued, “And I realized that you also have to defend your performance a little bit even when it’s coming together. At least the people that I’ve worked with have given me a lot of license to have an opinion about, you know, moments that I want to be in the movie.”
However, Driver admitted that he still can “wish” he acted differently in certain scenes that made it into the final cut.
“I always think if it could be just a little bit like ‘this word can be a little bit clearer.’ I don’t know anybody who doesn’t do that. I mean, do you watch your interviews?” he asked host Wallace.
Driver spoke about his approach to acting as a whole, saying, “Acting, in a way, to me is like going to a different country and adjusting to the time you’re [in], which is similar to theatre, I find. And I feel the same way about playing a character 12 hours a day.”
For Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” Driver said, “This shooting schedule is pretty intense, sometimes 17 to 20 hours a day. Because of the prosthetics, eventually your biology just kind of changes and you, without even trying to do anything Method-y, you just start to take on the characteristics of the character subconsciously. It probably starts conscious then becomes subconscious.”
He added that his “favorite part” of acting is the “forced empathy” with characters. “You have to examine a life that’s not yours for a concentrated amount of time without any judgment,” he said.
Driver is next starring in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” which he called one of the “best shooting experiences” of his career.
