These are good times for Adam Driver, who recently sat down for an interview for my video series The Actor’s Side. On Sunday, he was named Best Actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for the Jim Jarmusch film Paterson, a wonderfully quirky, meditative look at the life of a bus driver who also writes poetry. It’s a deceptively simple-looking performance by Driver in a movie that’s more profound and complex than you imagined. Driver began earning high praise for it coming out of the Cannes Film Festival, where Paterson premiered.
Driver will also be seen this season in Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating Silence in which he and Andrew Garfield play 17th century Jesuit priests who travel to Japan in search of their mentor. These are two roles that could not be different from each other, but represent the broad range of Driver’s talent, which has also been on display for six seasons as the needy love interest of star Lena Dunham in HBO’s Girls. That show wraps its run next summer. He will be continuing his role as Kylo Ren in yet another chapter of the Star Wars saga in Star Wars: Episode VIII due next December.
In our wide-ranging, and fun, interview we talk about all of this as well as the thing that drives Driver to act. Paramount will bow Silence on December 23 with expansions in early January. Meanwhile, Bleecker Street will release Amazon’s Paterson in New York and Los Angeles on December 28.
Check out our conversation above.
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