Adam Douglas Driver (November 19, 1983, San Diego, California, USA) is an American actor. Recognized for his collaborations with auteur filmmakers, he is the recipient of various accolades, including nominations for two Academy Awards, four Primetime Emmy Awards and a Tony Award.
Driver made his Broadway debut in Mrs. Warren's Profession (2010) and subsequently appeared in Man and Boy (2011). He rose to prominence with a supporting role in the HBO series Girls (2012–2017), for which he received three consecutive Primetime Emmy nominations. He began his film career in supporting roles in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha (2012), and the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). He won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for a leading role in Hungry Hearts (2014).
Driver gained wider recognition for playing Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy (2015–2019). He played a poet in Jim Jarmusch's Paterson (2016), and had supporting roles in Martin Scorsese's religious epic Silence (2016) and Steven Soderbergh's heist comedy Logan Lucky (2017). In 2019, he returned to the stage in the Broadway revival of Burn This, for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. He garnered consecutive Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actor for Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Best Actor for Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story (2019). He has since starred in Ridley Scott's period films, The Last Duel and House of Gucci (both 2021), and Baumbach's satire White Noise (2022).
Driver is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He is also the founder of Arts in the Armed Forces, a non-profit that provides free arts programming to American active-duty service members, veterans, military support staff, and their families worldwide.
Driver was born on November 19, 1983, in San Diego, California, the son of Nancy Wright (née Needham), a paralegal, and Joe Douglas Driver. He has Dutch, English, German, Irish and Scottish ancestry.[better source needed] His father's family is from Arkansas and his mother's family is from Indiana. His stepfather, Rodney G. Wright, is a minister at a Baptist church. When Driver was seven years old, he moved with his older sister and mother to his mother's hometown Mishawaka, Indiana, where he graduated from Mishawaka High School in 2001. Driver was raised Baptist, and sang in the choir at church.
Driver has described his teenage self as a "misfit"; he told M Magazine that he climbed radio towers, set objects on fire, and co-founded a fight club with friends, inspired by the 1999 film Fight Club. After high school, he worked as a door-to-door salesman selling Kirby vacuum cleaners and as a telemarketer for a basement waterproofing company and Ben Franklin Construction. He applied to the Juilliard School for drama but was not accepted.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Driver enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He was assigned to Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines as an 81mm mortar man. He served for two years and eight months before fracturing his sternum while mountain biking. He was medically discharged with the rate of lance corporal.
After graduating from Juilliard, Driver moved to New York City, appearing in both Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Like many aspiring actors, he occasionally worked as a busboy and waiter. Driver appeared in several television shows and short films. He played a repentant witness and reluctant accomplice to an unsolved assault in the final episode of the television series The Unusuals. He made his film debut in Clint Eastwood's biographical film J. Edgar.
In 2012, Driver was cast in the HBO comedy-drama series Girls, as the emotionally unstable boyfriend of a writer (Lena Dunham). He received three nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his role. The same year, Driver played supporting roles in two critically acclaimed films, as telegraph and cipher officer Samuel Beckwith in Steven Spielberg's historical drama Lincoln, and Lev Shapiro in Noah Baumbach's comedy-drama Frances Ha. He starred in the drama Not Waving But Drowning and the romantic-comedy Gayby. He garnered major off-Broadway recognition for playing Cliff, a working-class Welsh houseguest in Look Back in Anger, winning the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play.
In early 2014, Driver was cast as villain Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). It was released on December 18, 2015, to commercial and critical success. He reprised the role in The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019). His performance was positively received, with his character lauded as the best in the series: David Edelstein of Vulture wrote, "the core of The Last Jedi — of this whole trilogy, it seems — is Driver's Kylo Ren, who ranks with cinema's most fascinating human monsters." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian highlighted Driver's performance in his review of The Force Awakens, calling him "gorgeously cruel, spiteful and capricious... very suited to Kylo Ren's fastidious and amused contempt for his enemies' weakness and compassion."
In 2017, Driver made a cameo in Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories, making his third appearance in one of their films. It premiered at the 70th Cannes Film Festival and was released on October 13, 2017. He played Clyde, a one-armed Iraq War veteran, in Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky, which was released on August 18, 2017. Driver played a Jewish police detective, who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan in Spike Lee's comedy-drama BlacKkKlansman. It premiered at 71st Cannes Film Festival and was released on August 10, 2018. He received critical acclaim for his performance in the film and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. Driver played Toby Grummett in Terry Gilliam's adventure-comedy film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which also premiered at Cannes.
In 2019, Driver played Daniel J. Jones in Scott Z. Burns' political drama The Report, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. He returned to Broadway to play Pale against Keri Russell in Michael Mayer's directed-production of Lanford Wilson's Burn This, receiving acclaim for his explosive performance and a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. He was part of the ensemble cast of Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy film The Dead Don't Die, which premiered at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival and was released on June 14, 2019. That same year, Driver starred opposite Scarlett Johansson in Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, which premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival. Reviewing the film in The Hollywood Reporter, critic Jon Frosch noted that Driver "delivers a brilliantly inhabited and shaded portrait" of a man undergoing a divorce. For his performance, he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
| Year | Image | Character | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-2020 | 
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Kylo Ren (Archive) | Star Wars Galaxy of Adventures |