Actor Adam Driver — who stars in three films all releasing within weeks of each other, including “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” — reportedly walked out of a recent interview with NPR over what one journalist has described as a “reluctance that amounts to a phobia.”
As reported by The Daily Beast Tuesday, Driver’s interview earlier this month with NPR’s “Fresh Air” was derailed when host Terry Gross cut to a clip of Driver singing “Being Alive” from the musical “Company” in his much-lauded new Netflix film “Marriage Story,” co-starring Scarlett Johansson.
Gross’s production team knew in advance that Driver strongly prefers not to see or hear himself perform, so they encouraged the actor to remove his headphones. Driver did — but then he also took it a step further, by walking out of the interview altogether, leaving the production team flummoxed.
“Danny Miller, Fresh Air’s executive producer, confirmed that Driver left during a break in the interview ‘while we were playing back a clip from the film,'” The Daily Beast reports. “The star actor recorded his end of the interview from NPR’s New York studios, while Gross was in Fresh Air’s base at WHYY-FM in Philadelphia.”
“We don’t really understand why he left,” Miller told the outlet in an email. “We were looking forward to the interview — Terry thinks he’s a terrific actor, he was a great guest when he was on [Fresh Air] in 2015 — so we were disappointed that we didn’t have a new interview to share with our listeners about Marriage Story.”
Though Driver reportedly recorded in New York, the disruption resulted in the whole interview being dropped. Driver’s walkout ended up causing NPR a bit of headache as they’d announced the big interview in advance and were forced to rerun another interview in its place.
As Daily Beast notes, Driver has made clear in the past, including to “Fresh Air” back in 2015, that he “hates” to see or hear himself performing because he has “a tendency to try to make things better or drive myself and the other people around me crazy with the things I wanted to change or I wish I could change.”
In a profile piece on Driver for The New Yorker published in October, Michael Schulman describes Driver’s “phobia” about watching or hearing himself perform:
The first time Driver saw himself in “Girls,” on Dunham’s laptop, he was mortified. “That’s when I was, like, I can’t watch myself in things. I certainly can’t watch this if we’re going to continue doing it,” he said. Many actors decline to watch themselves, but for Driver that reluctance amounts to a phobia. In 2013, he watched the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” in which he has one scene, singing backup on a folk song called “Please Mr. Kennedy”: “I hated what I did.” He swore off his own movies, until he was obliged to sit through the première of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” in 2015. “I just went totally cold,” he recalled, “because I knew the scene was coming up where I had to kill Han Solo, and people were, like, hyperventilating when the title came up, and I felt like I had to puke.”
The directors I spoke to sympathized with Driver’s aversion. “I think he’s rightly concerned that he would become conscious of himself in a way that would be harmful to his acting,” Soderbergh said. When I spoke to Baumbach, he was still “in a discussion” with Driver about watching “Marriage Story.” Spike Lee told me that Driver did see “BlacKkKlansman,” at Cannes (“It was very, very happy”), but Driver corrected the record: he had hidden out in a greenroom and returned for the closing bow.
While Driver’s “Marriage Story” is getting almost universal praise from critics, currently enjoying a 95% on the Tomatometer, the early reports on “The Rise of Skywalker” are a little less enthusiastic, as expressed by USA Today’s Brian Truitt.
“[‘The Rise of Skywalker’] definitely tries to wrap up nine movies — a LOT happens — and does so in often funny, sometimes surprising, emotional and bombastic fashion. Not the best [‘Star Wars’] but one with great new characters, cool twists and a fantastic group dynamic,” he wrote on Twitter.
Related: Is ‘Rise Of Skywalker’ Any Good? Here Are The Early Reactions.