A Man Among Girls: Adam Driver
I asked him if he keeps in touch with his friends from the military, and although he does, he says they all have very different lives. “One’s like a bounty hunter in Montana, and one went into finance. One just disappeared from the face of the Earth, and I haven’t heard from him in a while. But yeah, as much as we can keep in contact, we do.” He’s not sure if they watch the show. “I don’t know—I don’t know that they do. I think that they do?”
I also asked him about the controversy that was unfolding that week, involving Lena Dunham, Vogue and the website Jezebel. The women’s site had offered $10,000 to anyone who would anonymously send them unretouched pictures from Dunham’s photo shoot for Vogue’s February cover, ostensibly to expose how much retouching goes into the covers of glossy magazines and how false and unattainable an ideal they perpetuate. But it fell a little short and felt a little off, since Jezebel had done this a few years earlier, with Faith Hill for Redbook, when the extent of cover-retouching was relatively unknown or at least underexposed, at which point the whole thing felt kind of triumphant and fascinating and cool, and definitely more like sticking it to Redbook (and the magazine industry) than to Faith Hill, who looked beautiful in both versions—albeit ridiculously airbrushed, etc., in the retouched one. Whereas with the Lena thing, everyone already knows what she looks like without makeup or airbrushing if they watch the show, so it felt a little less like feminism than a mean-girl-type faux-best intentions/faux-feminist jab at Lena, i.e., “Let’s show the world how you really looked in a fancy magazine,” even though it turned out they hadn’t airbrushed much at all.
“I heard about it but didn’t see it,” he said. “Did they ever find the pictures?”
I told him they had. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “What is wrong with people?”
I tried to make a joke about how we could sell unretouched photos of him from this shoot, not that they would be retouched, I didn’t think (?), but it was less a joke than a stupid observation or proposed non-humorous hypothetical situation, and it fell flat. He kind of laughed, politely, and a few minutes later his publicist showed up to take him to his next stop at HBO.
To end on a more-fun note, though: my favorite interaction with him came at the end of the photo shoot when he was sitting in a makeup chair by a vanity mirror as a man did something with his hair. From across the room I couldn’t tell if it was a really slow and subtle haircut, or an elaborate and intense hair-combing and styling. When I went over to say goodbye, Driver made a sort of sheepish face in the mirror, and we orchestrated a handshake, also in the mirror at first, him trying to place the reflection of his huge hand somewhere in the vicinity of mine while maintaining mirror-eye-contact—essentially shaking hands with someone behind you—but then he broke a little, disregarding whatever was happening with his hair, and turned his broad shoulders fully around, taking my hand, and smiling in a way that communicated something along the lines of, “I’m sorry. I know this is ridiculous.” And it was. But it was sweet.•
Photographer’s Assistants: Rocky Luten and Andrew Boyle
Stylist: Danielle Nachmani
Stylist’s Assistant: Eliza Yerry
Location: Colony Studios, Greenpoint