Even on your hiatus, you feel like you need to keep the character in the back of your brain.
— Adam Driver
I've got weird conflicting feelings about my generation.
I think some of my best theatre training has been in the Marine Corps. Not only meeting a bunch of characters, but growing up. You're in really adult situations at a young age, as far as being in charge of people.
My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.
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.
There's such an emphasis on having a character be likable. I don't think it would be helpful if I worried about that. I mean, not everyone's likable.
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.
I have a control problem. I hate the feeling of not being in control.
I don't feel like I have to dress up to go to the deli.
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.
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 mean, I did plays in high school, but I was convinced you couldn't make a living doing it.
I'm not an acting monk or anything. I'm not, like, the most well-adjusted actor.
I used to eat a whole chicken, every day, for lunch. I did that for four years. But it got tiring - go to the store, buy it, eat it. It's a mess.
'Girls' feels very active and stirring a conversation and controversial, and you can't really ask for more as an actor.
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.
It's hard to kill that father-son bond.
How do you take what you do as seriously as possible but not so seriously that it ends up inhibiting what you do?
My grandpa was in the Navy, but it wasn't something that was expected or planned for me to do.
I was born in California. When I was six, we moved to a small town in northern Indiana called Mishawaka.
Through theater and acting school, I found a way to articulate myself.
It was very clear to me I wanted to be an actor when I got out into civilian life.
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.
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.
Acting, believe it or not, can get very self-involved! I feel fortunate to have been able to work on things with people who have a very specific point of view and perspective, and who feel like they're doing something very active.
I was in a mountain biking accident and broke my sternum about three months before my unit was supposed to deploy to Iraq, and it's such a close-knit community that the idea of not getting to go is hugely jarring, so I tried to get put back in training and wound up injuring it worse.
At Juilliard, suddenly I was reading these great plays that could articulate the ways I was feeling in the Marine Corps, and that felt very therapeutic, by putting words to feelings, in a big way.
In the military, you learn the essence of people. You see so many examples of self-sacrifice and moral courage. In the rest of life, you don't get that many opportunities to be sure of your friends.
Acting is really about having the courage to fail in front of people.
I originally passed on 'Girls' because I thought TV was evil.
Emphasis in the Marine Corps isn't on talking about your feelings.
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.
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.
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.
There's a kind of immediacy that comes with being constantly connected that I don't really relate to in my generation.
You have to be forward-moving and able to balance a lot of things at the same time. I attribute a lot of that to the Marine Corps and Juilliard both.
I was living in a small town in Indiana working as a telemarketer and a vacuum salesman. I was really bad: the vacuums seemed to always be falling apart. Every time I did a demonstration, I'd say, 'This is the material the astronauts used on Apollo 13.' And no sooner had that come out of my mouth, something would malfunction.
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.
There were definitely dark nights when you're like, 'Maybe joining the military wasn't such a good idea.' But, in a way, it was the best training to be an actor.
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.
I don't understand technology, and I'm very scared of it.
I feel like I'll never get over red carpets. They're so bizarre and awkward.
September 11 happened, and all my friends were like, 'Let's join the military!' and I was the only one who actually did.
I auditioned in Chicago for Juilliard and didn't get in. I was basically living in a back room of my parents' house, paying rent and not doing anything with my life. I'd like to say it was patriotic to join the Marines, but it was also that I was doing nothing honorable with my life and spending too much time at McDonald's.
Yeah, September 11 happened and all my friends were like, 'Let's join the military!' and I was the only one who actually did.
If I'm not doing something or working on something, I literally just sit in the room and think, which I don't think is productive. I won't go outside for days.
I loved being in the Marine Corps, I loved my job in the Marine Corps, and I loved the people I served with. It's one of the best things I've had a chance to do.
For me, becoming a man had a lot to do with learning communication, and I learned about that by acting.
I'm conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn't typically go to the theater.
I don't have cable. I just never watched a lot of TV.
