Facts about Adam Driver

Adam Driver is 40 years old
Best known as: Kylo Ren in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’

     

     

Adam Driver Biography

Adam Driver is the raven-haired and enigmatic actor who plays a self-centered boyfriend on TV’s Girls and the self-centered Jedi dropout Kylo Ren in the Star Wars films.

Adam Driver was born in San Diego but moved with his mother to Mishawaka, Indiana at age 7 after his parents divorced. He graduated from Mishawaka High in 2001; after the attacks of September 11th that year, he joined the Marines. Driver “became an 81mm mortar man assigned to the weapons platoon with 1st Battalion, 1st Marines,” according to the Military Times, and was a Marine for nearly three years until he shattered his sternum in a mountain biking accident. Given a medical discharge as a lance corporal, he spent a year at the University of Indiana and then won a spot in the acting program at The Juilliard School.

He graduated from Juilliard in 2009 and made his Broadway debut the very next year in a revival of the George Bernard Shaw play Mrs. Warren’s Profession; the play starred Broadway legend Cherry Jones but was short-lived, lasting 65 performances. He was back on Broadway in 2011 with Frank Langella in Man and Boy (57 performances). A year later, in 2012, he was cast in the HBO series Girls as Adam Sackler, the not-very-reliable boyfriend of star Lena Dunham. Though his long face and Roman nose made him an unlikely heartthrob, Driver became a sensation with Girls fans and has was Emmy-nominated for the role in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Driver had small roles in the films Lincoln (2012) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, with Oscar Isaac) and a bigger role in the comedy-drama While We’re Young (2014, with Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts). In 2015 he had his biggest role yet, playing the villainous Darth Vader-wannabe Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He returned in the role for the sequels The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).

He has twice been nominated for Academy Awards: first as supporting actor for the 2018 Spike Lee film BlacKkKlansman (with Driver as an undercover cop), and then as leading actor for the 2019 film Marriage Story (with Driver in a bitter divorce, with his wife played by Scarlett Johansson).

Adam Driver is also the founder of Arts in the Armed Forces, a non-profit that aims to entertain and inspire troops “by engaging them in the power and social service of the performing arts.”

Extra credit

Adam Driver is 6’3” tall, according to The Guardian… Adam Driver married actress Joanne Tucker in June of 2013. She is also a graduate of Juilliard… Mishawaka, Indiana is a city of 46,557 people, as measured in the 2000 census. The city is immediateliy next to South Bend, home to Notre Dame University… GQ named Adam Driver one of its dozen Men of the Year in 2012… Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac also appeared together in Driver’s Star Wars films; Isaac played rebel fighter pilot Poe Dameron.


     

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