Adam Driver, who stars in two of the most-talked-about movies this December, “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” and Netflix’s “Marriage Story,” recently walked out of an interview with NPR’s talk show “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross.
Sources confirm to Variety that Driver, who was recording his side of the radio interview at NPR’s New York offices while Gross was at “Fresh Air’s” main studio in Philadelphia, left mid-interview after “Fresh Air” played a clip of the actor singing a rendition of “Being Alive,” one of the most memorable scenes from Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story.”
“We don’t really understand why he left,” Danny Miller, exec producer of “Fresh Air,” said in a statement. “We were looking forward to the interview — 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.'”
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Miller continued, “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.”
The Daily Beast first reported the news.
Driver has spoken publicly before about his aversion to watching or listening to his own performances. He told “Fresh Air” about this apprehension back in 2015. “Yeah, no, I’ve watched myself or listened to myself before, then always hate it,” Driver said at the time. “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.”
More recently, he recalled to the New Yorker about hiding in a greenroom during a screening of Spike Lee’s “Blackkklansman” and getting nauseous during a premiere of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
Driver, meanwhile, has earned critical acclaim for his performance opposite Scarlett Johansson in “Marriage Story,” picking up both Golden Globe and SAG nominations for Best Actor. His third and final “Star Wars” movie, “The Rise of Skywalker,” opens worldwide on Friday.