Adam Driver

Adam Driver is an American actor born on November 19, 1983, in Fontana, California. His family relocated to San Diego, where he lived until age seven, after which he and his mother moved to Mishawaka, Indiana, following his parents' divorce. He was raised primarily by his mother and stepfather, Rodney G. Wright, a Baptist minister. During high school, Driver was active in choir and theater, participating in school productions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Into the Woods, and Guys and Dolls. He graduated from Mishawaka High School in 2001.

Following high school, Driver worked a series of jobs, including door-to-door sales of Kirby vacuum cleaners and telemarketing for a basement waterproofing company. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, where 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 in a mountain biking accident. After his discharge, Driver attended the University of Indianapolis for a year before successfully auditioning for the Juilliard School, where he was a member of the Drama Division's Group 38 from 2005 to 2009. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2009 and met his future wife, Joanne Tucker, during his time there. Driver is also the founder of Arts in the Armed Forces, a nonprofit organization that provided free arts programming to active-duty service members, veterans, military support staff, and their families worldwide.

Driver made his Broadway debut in Mrs. Warren's Profession in 2010, launching a stage career that spanned nearly a decade. He subsequently appeared on Broadway in Man and Boy in 2011. In 2019, he starred in Burn This, a role that earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play. His screen career began with a small role in the television series The Unusuals, followed by his film debut in Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar in 2011. That same year, he began garnering off-Broadway recognition, including a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in Look Back in Anger.

Driver rose to wider prominence through his role as the emotionally unstable boyfriend of a writer in the HBO comedy-drama series Girls, which ran from 2012 to 2017. The performance earned him three consecutive Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. During this period, he also appeared in supporting roles in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, and Baumbach's While We're Young. His performance in the 2014 drama Hungry Hearts brought him the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the 71st Venice International Film Festival.

In 2015, Driver took on the role of Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a part he reprised in The Last Jedi in 2017 and The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. The role brought him global recognition. Concurrent with the Star Wars trilogy, Driver delivered acclaimed performances in Martin Scorsese's Silence in 2016, in which he played a 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit priest, and in Jim Jarmusch's Paterson, also in 2016, where he portrayed a bus driver and poet. His work in Paterson earned him multiple Best Actor nominations from critics' associations, including a win from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Driver received consecutive Academy Award nominations for his work in BlacKkKlansman in 2018, in which he played a Jewish police officer infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, earning a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and for Marriage Story in 2019, in which he played a theater director navigating a divorce, earning a nomination for Best Actor. He has continued to take on prominent film roles, including Jacques le Gris in The Last Duel in 2021 and the title character in Ferrari in 2023, as well as appearances in Logan Lucky, The Report, Annette, House of Gucci, and Megalopolis.