Adam Driver, who has a fairly big conclusion to 2019 with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker premiering yesterday and Netflix’s Marriage Story receiving critical claim, recently walked out of an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
The fiercely private actor is said to have left the interview after Terry played a clip of the actor singing a rendition of Being Alive, in one of the most memorable scenes from Marriage Story, as first reported by the Daily Beast.
Adam is known for not wanting to see or hear his performances, admitting that when he did he would drive the people around him crazy by criticising his portrayal of roles that he was powerless to change.
According to NBC, Danny Miller, Executive Producer of Fresh Air, said the team was unsure why he walked out.
“We knew from our previous interview with Adam Driver that he does not enjoy listening back to clips of his movies (that isn’t unusual, a lot of actors feel that way). So Terry invited him to take off his headphones while we played back the 20-second clip, and that our engineer in New York would cue him to put his headphones back on after the clip ended (we also did this during our 2015 interview). But this time around, after the clip concluded we were informed by our engineer in NY that he had walked out of the studio, and then left the building. We still don’t understand why Adam Driver chose to leave the interview at that point,” he added.
On one hand, it could be argued that Adam overreacted – since he could have taken off his headphones like he had done with his 2015 interview with Fresh Air – as tweeted by British TV host Piers Morgan:
Oh what a load of cobblers, he was extremely rude & disrespectful to the interviewer and production crew whose time was all wasted.
If Mr Driver is too ‘anxious’ to hear someone play a clip from his own movie he’s there to promote, I suggest he finds another job. https://t.co/hEufLlPqBi— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) December 18, 2019
However, many have also sprung to Adam’s defence on Twitter:
The lame coverage of Adam Driver ‘storming out’ of a radio show shows the amount of stigma that is still there around anxiety. I can remember similar shaming coverage of Stephen Fry’s stage fright two decades ago. We haven’t come far..
— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) December 18, 2019
I think the understandable, but mistaken, response to Adam Driver's anxiety issue is "Why do you act if you don't want to see yourself?" and the answer is making art and ingesting the art you've made are two VERY DIFFERENT things.
— C. Robert Cargill (@Massawyrm) December 18, 2019
Re Adam Driver and Fresh Air: You know what the least interesting thing in the world is? Your opinion about the validity of someone else's anxiety.
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) December 17, 2019
What do you think? Should he have stayed and finished the interview since the production team tried to accomodate his preferences by asking him to remove his headphones? Or, was he right to walk out of a situation that made him uncomfortable?