When he was seven years old, Adam Driver moved from San Diego in California to his mother’s hometown of Mishawaka in Indiana. Growing up there, the son of a paralegal and a Baptist minister, he says that Ku Klux Klanrallies were frequent and that some of his neighbours were Klan members.
spike lee
Driver is now thirty-five and plays an undercover policeman in Spike Lee’s acclaimed satire BlacKkKlansman. His role is that of Philip “Flip” Zimmerman, the stand-in for an African-American colleague who infiltrates the KKK. Driver was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for the part.
EXPERIENCE
Driver’s versatility as an actor has convinced many of the most prominent directors in Hollywood. But his rise to stardom was hard-won. Unsurprisingly, given his ultra conservative surroundings, Driver felt a misfit at school. An early application to New York’s Juilliard Drama School was rejected. After 9/11 he joined the US marines, but was medically discharged after breaking his sternum before being deployed to Iraq. He attended university, and another application to Juilliard met with success.
GIRLS
After performing on the Broadway stage, Driver was cast in the TV series Girls as the immature and infuriating boyfriend of the lead character, Hannah Horvath, played by Lena Dunham. So convincing was Driver in the role that the part led to a string of Emmy nominations.
BIG DIRECTORS
Supporting roles followed in an impressive variety of films, including J. Edgar (2011), Lincoln (2012), Frances Ha (2012), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) and Silence (2016), so he had Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Noah Baumbach, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Martin Scorsese as directors in a five-year period!
PERSONAL TOUCH
One defining role was playing villain Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a role Driver was to reprise in The Last Jedi and the forthcoming The Rise of Skywalker. Driver enjoyed working with director J.J. Abrams, he said, as he made a Star Wars blockbuster feel like acting in an indie movie.
AT CANNES
BlacKkKlansman premiered at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix award. Driver was there representing another film, too: Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in which he plays an ad executive who is mistaken for Don Quixote’s trusted companion Sancho Panza.
BlacKkKlansman
BlacKkKlansman tells the true story of Ron Stallworth, the African-American police officer who masterminded an undercover investigation into the local KKK in the 1970s. Acclaimed director Spike Lee transformed his story into a politically-charged satire that won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Lee, the sixty-two-year-old son of a jazz musician, adds this to a repertoire of more than forty films that include Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and Get on the Bus.
THAT’S ALL ME
In the movie, Ron Stallworth is played by John David Washington, the son of Malcolm X star Denzel Washington. In a presentation for the film, the young actor talked about how he prepared for the role through series and films with iconic soundtracks.
John David Washington (American accent): I really wanted to represent the time. My way in was music, a lot of Soul Train and Super Fly. Even before talking to Ron I was able to contact different men that lived in those times and it just seemed like America was just fed up: Vietnam, the murder of Martin Luther King, JFK… And so that frustration was filtered through positive things, like the clothing, the hair, the music, the entertainment.
AN AMERICAN HERO
And, says Washington, when he met the real Ron Stallworth he was blown away by his bravery.
John David Washington (mild South African accent): It was interesting hearing him speak about his experience. As he was telling us he passed around that KKK membership card, David Duke’s signature on the back! I kept asking him: “You didn’t get too emotional?” and he said, “No. It was always about the job.” I was like: “You’re a hero, man. Like an American hero.”
RESPECT
Laura Harrier plays Patrice Dumas, a college student activist. While Patrice is an invented character, the role pays homage to the many female members of the Black Panthers, a political organisation founded in 1966 to challenge police brutality against the African-American community.
Laura Harrier (American accent): Spike introduced me to Kathleen Cleaver, now she’s a law professor at Emery. She joined the Black Panther Party and then married Eldridge Cleaver and they were huge figures in the movement. I read a lot of Angela Davis’s books and talked to people in my life who were involved in the Black Power movement. At the height of the Panthers, the majority of the members were women, and usually when we talk about these movements it’s this macho male-driven face, so I just wanted to give them the respect that they deserve.
AUGUST 12, 2017
BlacKkKlansman was already in post-production when Spike Lee, who was at Barack Obama’s holiday home at the time, saw news footage of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which civil rights activist Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist. Lee made an instant decision, as he explained.
Spike Lee (American accent): Even before I told Obama, I’d made up my mindthis was going to be the ending of the film: written by David Duke, Neo Nazis, alt right and the KKK. But I knew that I had to get the blessing of Mrs. Bro [Heyer’s mother]. And I gave my condolences the best way you can. What can you really say? Her daughter got murdered on national television.
DEAL WITH IT
This is not just a film about America, said Lee, the rise of the far right is a global issue. To understand it and move on, we have to confront the past.
Spike Lee: We have to come from a place of truth. If we don’t acknowledge that the United States was built upon the genocide of native people and slavery, then you don’t deal with the foundation. Then we can move forward.
Based on an incredible true story, veteran filmmaker Spike Lee’s entertaining and politically-charged satire tells the story of Ron Stallworth, played by John David Washington, who in the late 1970s became the first African-American police officer and detective in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Stallworth then masterminded an undercover investigation into the local Ku Klux Klan, sending his white and Jewish colleague Philip ‘Flip’ Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to the meetings in his place, and chatting to KKK leader David Duke (played by Topher Grace) over the phone. Stallworth also befriends student Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), an activist in the Black Power movement and a devotee of the charismatic civil rights guru Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins). BlacKkKlansman combines historical fact and fiction and features a brief but stirring performance by iconic Jamaican-American singer and activist Harry Belafonte.