Top 40 Adam Driver Quotes

I was having an argument with my stepfather, and he was like, ‘Why don’t you join the Marine Corps?’ And I was like, ‘Noooo! Well, maybe, actually… ‘ I went and saw the recruiter, who was like, ‘Are you on the run from the cops? Because we’ve never had someone want to leave so fast.’

With brain and body, it’s great if you have a connection between the two, but when separated, that leads to a lot of conflict.

I did plays in high school, but I was convinced you couldn’t make a living doing it. You don’t have a lot of options in Indiana anyway, though, so I didn’t want to stay there. I graduated early and worked a bunch of really odd jobs, and then I joined the Marines.

I’m constantly thinking about the role, and there’s an infinite amount of questions you can ask yourself about a character to the point that it’s hard to find the boundaries of when to not work.

My plan was to be able to make a living as an actor.

There’s so much emphasis on Daniel Day-Lewis and his process, which is appropriately his own. But I was just blown away by his generosity as an actor. He’s so giving as an actor that he just naturally commands the focus on set.

Just having the internet is a weird and dangerous thing because people become accustomed to knowing things when they want to know them and not having to work for it. I definitely see the value in not knowing everything and having mystery in life and mystery in people.

When you get out of the Marine Corps, you feel like you can do anything.

Something I learned in the Marine Corps that I’ve applied to acting is, one, taking direction, and then working with a group of people to accomplish a mission and knowing your role within that team.

I’m not fashionable.

Writers are so important.

I studied Morse code.

I actually run a non-profit where one of the main objectives is to branch out and get a new audience for the theater. Just because the writing is so good and nothing is more effective than seeing something live and happening right in front of your face, so I definitely want to continue to pursue that.

I have this really big face.

It was very clear to me I wanted to be an actor when I got out into civilian life.

I don’t feel like I have to dress up to go to the deli.

I feel like I’ll never get over red carpets. They’re so bizarre and awkward.

I don’t know what else you could do that is more vulnerable – maybe dancing – than singing.

I never played sports or got into the whole guy camaraderie of, like, ‘I love you, man! Seniors forever!’ So suddenly being in the military with these guys who were under these very heightened circumstances, isolated from their families, living this very kind of Greek lifestyle, it changed my life in a really big way.

I don’t really have foresight as an actor as far as career trajectory – I just stick to no-brainer situations.

I feel like I have to move violently once a day, or I’ll lose my mind.

How do you take what you do as seriously as possible but not so seriously that it ends up inhibiting what you do?

College wasn’t something I saw myself doing.

Yeah, September 11 happened and all my friends were like, ‘Let’s join the military!’ and I was the only one who actually did.

When I happened to get into school, I felt like I could approach it as aggressively as things in the military.

I don’t have cable. I just never watched a lot of TV.

I saw the pilot for ‘Girls’ about six months before it aired.

I don’t understand technology, and I’m very scared of it.

Interesting things always come from being really exhausted and really sick.

I want to show that theater isn’t just talking about feelings or people wearing tights.

People always are desperate to have others acknowledge that they are different.

The Marine Corps is some of the best acting training you could have. Having that responsibility for people’s lives, suddenly time becomes a really valuable commodity and you want to make the most of it. And for acting, you just have to do the work, just keep doing it.

Emphasis in the Marine Corps isn’t on talking about your feelings.

Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don’t train – at all really – for film acting. It’s mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.

There’s something really exciting about playing someone where you’re given license to be unpredictable.

By the time I got into Juilliard, I was working at a Target distribution warehouse. It didn’t make anything, it just shipped things, and my job was just to stand there and look at the security codes on the back of trucks and see if they would lock, and check them in.

Acting is a business and a political act and a craft, but I also feel like it’s a service – specifically, for a military audience.

I was an infantry Marine, and there are only so many things you can do when you get out of the military that you can apply your job to. Either a janitor or a cop. I tried to do both of those things because what else are you going to do?

Acting, to me, has been many things: It’s a business, and it’s a craft, and it’s a political act – it’s whatever adjective is most applicable.

What is a struggle is that acting isn’t a place where you go to work and you do that thing. There aren’t set boundaries, like an office, where you go and work. For me, the work is always on my mind.