Adam Driver Biography

Adam Driver is the raven-haired, Oscar-nominated actor best known to large audiences as the self-centered Jedi dropout Kylo Ren in the Star Wars films.

He has twice been nominated for Academy Awards: first as supporting actor for the 2018 Spike Lee film BlacKkKlansman (with Driver as an undercover cop), and then as leading actor for the 2019 film Marriage Story (with Driver in a bitter divorce, with his wife played by Scarlett Johansson).

Adam Driver was born in San Diego but moved with his mother to Mishawaka, Indiana at age 7 after his parents divorced. He graduated from Mishawaka High in 2001; after the attacks of September 11th that year, he joined the Marines. Driver “became an 81mm mortar man assigned to the weapons platoon with 1st Battalion, 1st Marines,” according to the Military Times, and was a Marine for nearly three years until he shattered his sternum in a mountain biking accident. Given a medical discharge as a lance corporal, he spent a year at the University of Indiana and then won a spot in the acting program at The Juilliard School.

He graduated from Juilliard in 2009 and made his Broadway debut the very next year in a revival of the George Bernard Shaw play Mrs. Warren’s Profession; the play starred Broadway legend Cherry Jones but was short-lived, lasting 65 performances.

Driver was back on Broadway in 2011 with Frank Langella in Man and Boy (57 performances). A year later, in 2012, he was cast in the HBO series Girls as Adam Sackler, the not-very-reliable boyfriend of star Lena Dunham. Though his long face and Roman nose made him an unlikely heartthrob, Driver became a sensation with Girls fans and has was Emmy-nominated for the role in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Driver had small roles in the films Lincoln (2012) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, with Oscar Isaac) and a bigger role in the comedy-drama While We’re Young (2014, with Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts). In 2015 he had his biggest role yet, playing the villainous Darth Vader-wannabe Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He returned in the role for the sequels The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).

He has since been a hard-working leading man, appearing in seven feature films between 2021 and 2024, including The Last Duel and House of Gucci (both Ridley Scott duds released in 2021), White Noise (2022), Ferrari (2023) and the Francis Ford Coppola film folly Megalopolis (2024).

Adam Driver is also the founder of Arts in the Armed Forces, a non-profit that aims to entertain and inspire troops “by engaging them in the power and social service of the performing arts.”