Adam Driver had been working professionally as an actor for several years before Girls, but it was his role as Adam Sackler, Hannah Horvath’s (Lena Dunham) sort-of sometimes boyfriend, that first commanded widespread attention. How could it not? Introduced shirtless in the pilot — he wouldn’t be seen wearing one until the seventh episode — Driver establishes Adam as passive aggressive and controlling even before he initiates a sexual encounter that blurs the line between kink and assault and includes an act of deception that doubles as a horrible violation of Hannah’s consent. Though later seasons would temper and complicate Adam, the character is awful in these early outings, a bad partner who, at best, has no respect for Hannah and, at worst, poses a genuine threat to her safety. Driver doesn’t try to soften any of this, but he also captures Adam’s magnetism, the sexual allure and unapologetic self-confidence that allows him to behave the way he does. Call him a villain if you like. He knows what he is and has no plans to change — even if realizes he should.
In the years since, Driver has revealed himself as a versatile actor capable of playing many different types of characters. But the qualities in evidence in his breakthrough performance have continued to serve him well in the years that followed. Driver has played plenty of good guys — the gentle soul at the center of Paterson, the heroic cop ally of BlacKkKlansman, the impossible-to-deter investigator of The Report — but even his most admirable characters share a refusal to compromise that makes them a little scary. Driver most often plays men fully committed to being who they are. And quite often, they’re assholes.
This year alone has seen Driver playing toxic men in Annette and The Last Duel (with the forthcoming House of Gucci unlikely to break the streak). We’re currently in an era without any real leading men or women, the sort of stars that can get moviegoers to turn out based on name alone. The underperformance of the excellent The Last Duel — the Ridley Scott film starring Driver, Matt Damon, Jodie Comer and Ben Affleck—provides the latest in a string of examples confirming this. But Driver is still undeniably a star, and one at the phase of his career when his peers usually begin erring on the side of playing heroes, particularly in an era in which starring roles in ongoing franchises seem to be the closest thing to job security that movies have to offer.
It’s no accident that Driver’s own excursion into franchise-land found him playing bad guy Kylo Ren, the erstwhile Ben Solo who turned his back on his heroic parents in an attempt to pursue a life on the Dark Side. Across three films, Driver brings the full weight of his talent to the role, never more effectively than in The Last Jedi, which finds him turning Kylo into a kind of galaxy far, far away Adam Sackler, a bad-for-you-but-irresistible love interest to Daisy Ridley’s Rey. Kylo becomes the sort of character Driver plays better than anyone, a man who projects tremendous confidence and destructive force but who’s troubled, sometimes tortured, by a sense he should change his life.
It’s that ability to convey a suggestion of conflict and doubt behind a shield of aggression that’s made his work in this year’s films so effective. In The Last Duel, Driver plays Jacques Le Gris, a French nobleman accused of raping Marguerite de Carrouges (Comer), the wife of Le Gris’s one-time friend Jean de Carrouges. Working from a script by Damon, Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener, Scott depicts the events leading up to and after the crime from the perspectives of all three lead characters. But rather than a Rashomon-like total reworking of the narrative, each segment’s overlapping scenes mostly place the emphasis in different places, change small but significant details, or fill in gaps deemed inessential by previous perspectives.
Tellingly, even when remembered from Le Gris’s point of view, the rape looks much the same. He just can’t bring himself to see what he’s done as rape. To Le Gris it’s a sporting encounter, a chance to seize an object of desire, as men do. The subsequent legal action taken against him baffles him. He’s a man used to never being told no who’s suddenly forced to consider whether his actions have consequences. So he digs in, eschewing the easy out of a church trial to see the legal case through to the deadly end of a trial by combat. (It’s the 14th century equivalent of attempting to tweet through a PR crisis.) Driver plays it with all the necessary arrogance but it’s his notes of doubt, the mounting sense that he might have actually done wrong and could face consequences for it, that make the performance sing.
Centuries separate Le Gris and Henry McHenry, dark souled comic of Annette, Leos Carax’s cinematic rock opera featuring songs and a story by the venerable sibling eccentrics of Sparks, but more qualities unite than divide the characters. Henry’s job is to lay himself and all his awful thoughts and impulses bare on stage before a public that accepts and forgives him — up to a point. Crossing a line on stage by sharing a bizarre murder fantasy sends his career into a spiral. Then, through reckless, if not intentionally murderous actions, he causes the death of his wife (Marion Cotillard), only to get a second chance at stardom as the guardian of their angel-voiced daughter Annette.
Annette is played for the most part by a succession of puppets, but that’s only the most conspicuously stylized touch in a film set in a kind of heightened reality. Henry’s “Ape of God” show is closer to performance art than stand-up but it plays best as a riff on how confessional self-deprecation can work as a mask for bad behavior. (Look no further than Louis C.K.) That’s what makes the end of the film, when Henry finds he has no mask to hide behind, so haunting. Rather than the selective exposure he engaged in on stage he’s been truly exposed. And instead of the forgiveness of a crowd’s laughter and applause, he faces a silent future in which he can never be redeemed.
It’s Driver’s ability to balance his innate charisma against a willingness to play unlikable, even awful, men that makes him such a reliably exciting talent. There’s no movie star vanity to what he does. He never winks as he willingly plunges into the dark and sticky regions of the human soul, a skill that serves him well even outside his work as villains. Driver’s performance as the far-from-monstrous but far-from-perfect Charlie in Marriage Story might invite sympathy and prompt tears but one of his performance’s strengths — one he shares with co-star Scarlett Johansson — is that he does nothing to try to win viewers to his side. He’s fully, discomfortingly, recognizably human, just as he’s been from the start, and nothing about his work suggests he has any interest in being anything else.