A Man Among Girls: Adam Driver
During our official interview, which took place a few days later in a small, windowless room in HBO’s midtown headquarters, I tried to ask him what he thought about this. I sort of rambled on in a marginally coherent monologue about masculinity and how he embodies something of a shift. Then I realized that it was kind of antithetical to the idea of masculinity to comment on one’s own masculinity, so I was like, well, I guess you can’t really answer this, but I just think there’s something about this hunger for a certain kind of masculinity that your character represents. And he said, “Well, it’s very nice, but I’m not sure I have an answer for you.” Which was fair, obviously. But I think it’s true anyway.
(Also, he was wearing a nondescript gray sweater/knit longsleeve top. No collar. Jeans. Black Ked-like sneakers that were not Keds. After our interview, he was going to have a Q&A session with people about his nonprofit military organization, Arts in the Armed Forces. He was minorly fidgety and uncomfortable, although that could have been my fault. He brought a coffee with him, but didn’t drink it. He has a nice face, great skin. He ran his hands through his hair a bunch, sweeping it back unself-consciously, shifting in his chair from time to time, crossing and uncrossing
his legs.)
“Why do you like acting?” I asked.
“Why do I like acting,” he said back to me. “I don’t know. Why… there’s lots of reasons why I like acting,” he said, and paused.
I then explained, probably unnecessarily, that sometimes I’d thought acting was silly (playing pretend, etc.), except that clearly it isn’t, because it’s part of something that brings people so much joy and brings so many people together. “I definitely have lots of days where I think acting is totally pointless,” he said. “But I’m mostly referring to the business aspect of being an actor, which seems completely—I mean, there’s no way to say this without sounding like a pretentious prick—but that it sounds so antithetical to acting. But it is a necessary part of it. It’s many things. But I guess the communal aspect of [acting] is the biggest thing for me. Starting conversations in a community that doesn’t normally have that kind of conversation.
“I remember one time I went to Qatar for a project. A friend of mine does readings of Greek plays, and he was reading in a medical facility in Qatar, and afterwards all of these Qatari students came up, and all they wanted to talk about was Girls. That idea of creating a conversation in a different country that couldn’t be more opposite than the United States, or Brooklyn specifically. Qatar? You know?”
I did, and I asked him what the Qatari kids had to say about Girls. “We didn’t get into specifics,” he said, “but they were just really excited about the show. It resonated with them.”