More than 30 years after her breakout roles in Danny Boyle-directed miniseries Mr. Wroe’s Virgins and the cult classic Circle of Friends, Minnie Driver is busier than ever. In the past year, Driver has dominated the small screen, the podcast sphere and the West End, with yet another slew of promising projects on the horizon. In our conversation, Driver ponders juggling her work, family and daily rituals. She notes that even her own podcast, Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver (which has featured guests from Courteney Cox to Colman Domingo), has had to take on a looser rhythm. “It’s so tricky because I’ve worked so much last year and I’m working again a lot this year. And it requires a lot of work,” she says.
“I would love to do it in a more formal way, but to do that means you cease doing all the other things. And you [could] do the way that the amazing Amy Poehler has done it, where it becomes your job; it’s in the studio, it’s filmed and it’s lit professionally. And the way that I do it, which is far more ad hoc, requires me to have a lot of time on my hands. And I just don’t right now. But, I don’t think it will ever be gone. It will just be dormant and then come back like, you know, a daffodil.”
We are in the midst of a self-coined ‘Minnaissance’, which Driver has used in a half-joking, half-earnest sense. It’s the kind of phrase that lands with a laugh, but lingers because it feels surprisingly perfect. Alongside her podcast, Driver has found herself in a rhythm that feels less like a career reinvention, or a return after stagnancy, and more of a blooming.
That feeling of blooming becomes clearest when Driver talks about theatre, a medium she describes as both artistically exciting and emotionally exposing. When talking about her recent one-person show on London’s West End, Every Brilliant Thing, she lights up. Reflecting on her return to theatre after her last West End stint in David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a playwright known for his large ensemble casts and fast-paced, witty dialogue, she explains how different this play felt. “It was 20 years ago, yeah. I hadn’t done any theatre since. Every Brilliant Thing was amazing, but I mean, I was a total neophyte doing it because I had never been on stage by myself before. It was 50 pages of dialogue. It was a lot to learn, but it was an extraordinary experience because it was very interactive with the audience”. She continues, “all I want to do is kind of explore that further now, but I don’t really have much to compare it to because the Mamet play was completely different. This was just me. So, it was a kind of internal exploration that was externalized by just being me on stage and interacting with all these incredible audience members every night. Every night was so sublimely different.”
Despite the emotional vulnerability and endurance needed for the role, Driver insists, “It was amazing, though. Really, one of the top professional experiences of my life for absolutely certain, it was absolutely amazing, I wish I could have done it for longer actually. I mean, I think I did the longest. I did [it] for five weeks. Five weeks. Eight shows a week.”
This renewed energy has clearly carried into her recent and upcoming screen work. In her part in The Faithful, Driver takes on the role of Sarah, a foundational biblical matriarch whose story blends devotion with doubt. It was the framing of The Faithful that appealed to Driver when she first read the script. Based primarily on the Book of Genesis, The Faithful aims to highlight the women who have been historically underrepresented in biblical adaptations.
“The Old Testament from the point of view of six women was really my starting point. We haven’t done that [yet]. I was actually part of a production of a TV show called The Red Tent, which was based on a really wonderful book where I played Leah, who was one of the other women in The Faithful,” Driver recalls. “But this is from the female perspective, that’s what interested me, this patriarchal creation.” She remembers hearing a statistic that stated women make up only a small minority of named figures in the Bible, often estimated at under 10%.
“It felt important that we could sort of retell these stories from the purview of these extraordinary women. There wouldn’t be any of those guys without any of these women. I mean, quite literally. The way they gave birth to and the way in which they partnered with the men who the stories are centred around, it’s fantastically important that we have that voice.”
Driver clearly feels passionately about highlighting the experiences of the women we don’t always get to see on screen. But, she is also very capable of making light of the show’s reception on social media. “I’m really excited for it to be out. I know people are already cross that I’m not, like, 97 and giving birth, as was said in the Bible. I already had a couple of people on Instagram, which really made me laugh, saying, ‘You’re not 97, why are you playing Sarah?’ and I was like ‘who are you gonna get? Who is gonna ride horses across the Levant?’”
Minnie Driver is no stranger to speaking about her own spirituality and how it influences her personal life alongside her career. For Driver, her spirituality is less tied to theology and is more of an innate curiosity and a connection to nature. “I’m hoping that the show will ultimately be super relatable because this is a woman whose husband finds faith, whose husband has a whole set of beliefs that she really doesn’t. She’s watching God go through her husband, who she loves with all of her heart. And she follows him and she goes with him.” She continues, “well, she’d actually die if she was left behind because if the caravan leaves, there is no protection, there’s no food, there’s nothing. So she goes because she loves him. And she went and tried. She had a surrogate baby with Hagar. She didn’t wait for God to do it. She took it into her own hands. And for me, that’s very human. She wanted a baby.” In many surprising ways, Sarah’s story echoes her own. Driver has been open about how similarly, having a child later in life (after being told by doctors she would never be able to) shaped her. “Motherhood and being in nature are the closest that I feel to God. And also being with friends and my parents as they died, feeling very, very much like there was a veil that was being lifted. But again, I’m not a sort of theocratically minded person. I just observe stuff really.”
That instinct to observe is obvious in her podcast, Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver, where curiosity becomes the guiding principle. “Honestly, the podcast really was just because I’m a nosy cow. I just want to ask people questions. All the questions, because I have so many questions and I love hearing everybody’s different answers. I am constantly challenging what I believe.” In reflecting on what she’s learned from being on the other side of the microphone, Driver states “it’s been so much food for thought, for my soul and my spirit, in having people share their answers. I’ve always called myself a magpie around information and other people’s opinions. And I love to just gather bits and then synthesize it. Usually, when I’m walking or surfing or meditating, taking all these bits and pieces and then actually figuring out what I think about things. But yeah, those conversations, they often change how I see the world, which was the whole point.”
Driver is a deeply curious person, clearly most concerned with learning and the expansion of her own self. In speaking with me, she is never so concrete in her judgments. Considerate and philosophical, yes, but never pontifical. “I’m not one for dogma, I must say. If you asked me on a Tuesday what I feel about God, it might be very different on a Thursday.” On her process for Minnie Questions, she speaks on how even the most closed-off people often open up with a bit of patience. “In fact, it was most interesting when people would be very shut down or very media trained and their answers had already been prescribed. Even with all of that, the fundamental humanity just can’t help but bubble up. If you just keep listening and you keep gently asking, but mostly if you keep listening, people really do want to tell you stuff beyond. I found that all of the stuff that sounded very rehearsed, something would then give way and out would come this, you know, like a dandelion in between the cracks of a pavement. Yeah. And it was really cool. I really, really liked that.”
We acknowledge how interviewing can often feel like a dance; knowing when to push and pull, or when to allow some grace. “And it’s often in follow up questions, I think, that people open up. If you pick up on something someone said, as opposed to going on to the next question. Invariably every question that you answer, within that answer, there is going to be another question that I can seize upon to inquire further. And I think if you’re polite and gentle with people, or funny and irreverent, you often make people feel like they’re not being trapped and then their humanity is revealed.”
That same openness feels central to the way that Driver approaches her career right now. In the past year, her projects have moved fluidly between theatre, animation and television. She joined Emily in Paris as the fan-favourite character Princess Jane, made her Harlan Coben debut in Run Away, played the ruthless crime boss in The Borderline, and just wrapped up her one-person West End show, Every Brilliant Thing. All while promoting The Faithful, British romcom Finding Emily, working on her second book, and thinking about another album.
Her career has never really gone quiet; instead, it has unfolded in phases. Film, television, music, writing, each returning to her throughout her life. We speak about the different crafts she’s taken on and how none of them really feel like a major departure from her acting career. Instead, they just feel like an intrinsic part of being a creative person. “I think I’ll always make music and hopefully I’ll always write. I think it all comes from the same crucible, you know. I just live a creative life. That’s what I do. And I do some things really well and I do some things not so well. But I really enjoy doing it anyway.” On the topic of if there’s a chance of another album any time soon, Minnie says “Yeah, I think there is. There definitely is. It’s one of those things that was so public. Like, I sing and I write, I’m doing things that often are just not in a public sphere, so it’s like it never stops, it’s just when it rotates to kind of be made public again. I don’t know when that will be.”
In speaking about how she chooses which projects to focus her energy on, we strike up a dialogue about how she has always tried her best to be selective of the roles she has taken on. But, she admits, there have been instances, especially around the birth of her son and entering a chapter as a single mother, where sometimes jobs simply had to be taken to put food on the table. “When you’re young and starting out, you really don’t have much of a choice. You do what you can get, you know. I’ve always tried to be picky, even when I was hungry. But sometimes, I needed to work. I started out just doing everything and trying to make it as good as possible and then realizing that women’s roles were always underwritten, never as fully fleshed out.”
Just a few short years after bursting onto the British acting scene, Driver traveled across the pond to the US. Her early roles in the States included small parts in GoldenEye, Stanley Tucci’s directorial debut Big Night and the star-studded crime drama Sleepers. Expanding on some of these roles, Driver says, “even the films that I started making in Hollywood were underwritten. Everyone would admit to that, from John Cusack in Grosse Point Blank to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting. The girls’ roles just weren’t as fully fleshed out. So, you become really adept at turning these good ideas into really interesting, fully rounded people. I feel like you can do it as long as the writing is good, you can breathe life into a female character if you have the intention.”
Towards the end of our conversation, the pace softens. A teenage voice is heard off-screen, followed by the patter of dog paws. Driver laughs, momentarily dividing her attention between our discussion and the chaos of rescue dog Bob eating her son’s sandwich across the room. It is a genuine glimpse of the life she has been describing all along, where her work, her attitudes and motherhood coexist.
Borrowing a question from her own podcast, I ask Driver what person or experience has shaped her the most. She is quick to answer, arriving without hesitation. “Having my son,” she says. “Genuinely, it changed, or revealed, the person that I have grown into. Almost like I knew she was in there, but I had no way of getting hold of her. I had no relationship. I wasn’t married. My work was my everything.”
On the jobs leading up to the birth of her son, she says, “it had become quite uncreative, because it was just about keeping the wheel going and this notion of success. Sort of being frightened into an idea of failure, that if you stop you’ll be off the wheel in Hollywood and people won’t think of you for movies. That you’ll be a has-been, there’ll be no money and living that way… Henry just stopped the clock. He stopped the hamster wheel and it was a complete reset. What I realized was not only my deep love for him, but that the deep love sort of piggybacked onto my deep love of what I do for a living. I really rediscovered what it was to love my job. And the person that I became as a result of that is so much happier, so much less neurotic, a better friend, could ultimately be a better partner.”
Photographer: Alexandra Arnold
Hair: Matthew Monzon
Makeup: Gita Bass
Styling: Andrew Gelwicks
