Adam Driver walks out of interview after scene is played from his new movie
Adam Driver famously doesn't ever watch anything he's been in.
But the Star Wars actor has taken this to a whole new level, walking out of a radio interview with NPR in the US after it played the audio of a scene from new movie, Noah Baumbach’s awards-tipped Marriage Story.
Driver was appearing on the famous Fresh Air show from a studio in New York with veteran interviewer Terry Gross, who conducts her interviews from another studio in Philadelphia, when a part of the movie where Driver's character sings a version of Sondheim's Being Alive was played.
But though the actor was warned beforehand, and told he could take off his headphones during the segment, instead he walked out of the studio.
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In a statement to Variety from the show's executive producer Danny Miller, he said that they were 'looking forward to the interview', and 'don't really understand why he left'.
“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.
“We knew from our previous interview with Adam Driver that he does not enjoy listening back to clips of his movies (that isn’t unusual, a lot of actors feel that way).
So Terry invited him to take off his headphones while we played back the 20-second clip, and that our engineer in New York would cue him to put his headphones back on after the clip ended (we also did this during our 2015 interview).
“But this time around, after the clip concluded we were informed by our engineer in NY that he had walked out of the studio, and then left the building. We still don’t understand why Adam Driver chose to leave the interview at that point.”
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He said on the Fresh Air show in 2015: “Yeah, no, I’ve watched myself or listened to myself before, then always hate it.
“And then wish I could change it, but you can’t. And I think I have, like, 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.”
Many have stepped forward to defend Driver’s actions including The Good Place actor Jameela Jamil, who say his mental health issues shouldn’t be trivialised.
“He wasn’t rude to anyone, he was just anxious,” she tweeted.
Seeing so many snide tweets about this. If the man has anxiety or a phobia then let him do whatever he needs to do. Being a famous actor doesn’t mean you don’t have mental health needs just like everyone else. He wasn’t rude to anyone, he was just anxious. https://t.co/b6xx864bQF
— Jameela Jamil 🌈 (@jameelajamil) December 18, 2019
Driver admitted in an interview in The New Yorker from October this year that it was his performance in the Coen brothers movie Inside Llewyn Davis in 2013, in which he played musician Al Cody, which turned him off ever watching his own performances.
He also added that he was later forced to go to the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015.
“I just went totally cold,” Driver said. “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.”
What forced the issue this time remains unknown, with no word yet emerging from Driver's reps.
Perhaps he’d seen some of the reviews for Rise of Skywalker...