Minnie Driver

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

For many great actors, their moment when they have arrived in Hollywood is a zeitgeist to a new plateau in an acting career. However, some actors choose to press on and continue to make their impact in the roads less traveled and one such actor is actress Minnie Driver.

Hailing from London, England, she made an impact in Hollywood with a role in 1997's Good Will Hunting, which garnered her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Since then, Driver has continued to make an impact with major and supporting roles in films like An Ideal Husband, Return To Me, Ella Enchanted, and The Phantom Of The Opera.

She has also made a surprising turn as a singer-songwriter with the release of her debut album Everything I Got In My Pocket, of which the title track became a top 40 hit in the UK. Minnie's also made an equally surprising turn on television with a popular recurring role on the sitcom Will & Grace, as well as with her current one as Dahlia Malloy on the FX drama The Riches, which garnered her an Emmy nomination for Best Actress In A Dramatic Series.

Now, the 38 year-old actress embarks in what is possibly the most intense role of her career in the film Take. In the film, Minnie plays Ana, a struggling mother, who must confront the man who has forever altered her life. She first discussed with us how she got aboard on such a challenging role.

'It was really, Charles Oliver, the producer, sent it to my agent and they sent it to me,' Driver recalls, 'Sometimes, those things really slip through the cracks because an agency doesn't always necessarily want you to do the lowest budget movie that comes along. I had worked with great people who recognize the profundity of this character and how it turned out.'

Driver adds that it was Oliver who ultimately made her feel confident in taking on such a low-profile, high-intensity role.

'It was a total crapshoot, a first-time director,' Minnie says, 'Believe me, I've done a couple of movies with first-time directors that nobody saw them and they were terrible and there was a reason no one saw them. Charles Oliver, there was a reason, he turns out to be this virtuoso who had this incredible story to tell and he knew how to tell it in a way that wasn't melodramatic. It's slow-paced sometimes I feel, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing. I feel like I understand the choices he made as a director and just having met and talked with him.'

'I think I was shooting the pilot of The Riches. I was in New Orleans when I had this conversation with him,' she adds, 'I was kind of out of my mind doing this crazy role and the thought of going into this part was so tough, going from one deeply emotional place to another, because I pretty much came out of that and went into doing Take. But that's the choosy stuff you hope is going to come your way as an actor and you have to bide your time sometimes.'

Minnie shared with us the process she had to undergo to prepare herself for such a role.

'That was always going to be a rarified, insane place to go emotionally,' she says, 'I mean It's unimaginable to have what happens to her child happen. It's not like I did research speaking to people. I read a few books and I watched a few great specials on restorative justice.'

'As an actor, it was really about the invention of an idea and I came from the relationship a lot that I had with Bobby [Coleman], such a magnificent little person and such a great actor,' Driver continues, 'You create a little bond with them, then you get to do the emotional stuff, which is some of the hardest stuff I ever had to do. Like the stuff in the grocery store, it was really, really hardcore. You can't really prepare for that.'

However, Driver claims it was not a process that she achieved through the traditional wringing out of emotions many actors use in order to hone their dramatic performances.

'I found that with actors I really enjoy watching, it's that quality I like most, where you're not sure exactly what it is, that thinking, but you see the emotions kind of scuddering across the face and there's no effort to it,' Minnie notes, 'I really don't like to cry unless I cry as that character. You're never going to see me there thinking about my parents dying or something happening to my sister or my brothers to get to that place.You either get there in that moment as the character or you don't.'

'I suppose in this season, it really was interesting looking at that rear view mirror in the car and seeing Bobby behind, thinking about might she do that,' she continues, 'I remember my mom always doing it when we were in the back of the car and you suddenly do it and you realize your kid's not there anymore. And I don't know, all these kind of fragments of ideas of what it must be like to leave a child.'

The themes of Take deals with the concept of restorative justice, which is a more personal and fairly controversial system in which the perpetrators are dealt with in a more humane light. Driver shared with us her own thoughts on the death penalty.

'I can't believe that I'd ever be privy to the death penalty, I'm just not,' Minnie believes, 'I don't believe in sanctioned killing. I'm not somebody who has lost someone, so I understand.'

In her research for the role, Minnie discusses the real-life encounter with a mother who experienced tragedy of her own during a gig on the radio.

'I went on a show on NPR, which was one of the heaviest things I have ever done, it was a show on restorative justice,' Driver recalls, 'There was this lady there who is heading up this big campaign in favor of restorative justice. She had been through a home invasion and watched the most unspeakable things happen to her daughter, who was then killed in front of her. She was on the ground. I think her husband was killed and her daughter was killed, but for some reason, they didn't kill her. And she listened to this woman speak so eloquently and so connectively to her grief, to the love of her daughter, but also to the process of restorative justice.'

'It's taken many, many, many years for her to finally face the perpetrator of this terrible crime,' she adds, 'To hear it recounted from his mouth, to hear him say the words finally of what happened. First, she said, that gave him so much strength because she knew she wasn't crazy. She knew that even in the heightened grief of a man that lost her child and her husband, this man was saying yes, it did happen. It did happen, as he was saying has happened. And from that moment, there's some kind of a letting go. Hearing somebody's story, hearing this man's story, from his birth to what led him intake the path of that person's journey that led them to the point that they did this terrible thing.'

Driver claims this encounter helped crystallize her personal feelings on both the death penalty and the concept of restorative justice.

'Somehow, when you see these markers along the road, you start piecing together an understanding of how a person can do something, not maybe in your own paradigm, but there's slightly more sense to it,' she explains, 'Plus, the actual visceral human experience of being in front of somebody and seeing that they are a living, breathing human being, they're not sort of Hannibal Lecter with a bag on their head and a crazy hockey mask, but this totally fractured, messed up human being that did this terrible thing.'

'And I don't know, but listening to her speak was one of the most liberating, extraordinary things,' Minnie continues, 'Because this woman was just a regular woman from the Midwest, just like a mom. She's not some sort of great activist or sort of political/social observer, like she was just a woman.'

Driver also shares what she has learned from a role she believes to be the most intense of her career.

'It was certainly the heaviest,' she says, 'Just to be able to go to that place and have that opportunity to go to that place as an actor was completely extraordinary and very amazing. In terms of the themes, I wasn't really familiar with restorative justice. I sort of knew what it was, but it always seemed really strange to me the idea. I mean, how terrifying to sit in front of the person who had done something terrible to you or a loved one. I mean why wouldn't you want to do anything except scream and yell at them and get incredibly upset.'

'But what I learned is to ask a lot of different questions about the nature of forgiveness in all of us,' Minnie continues, 'I saw, in talking to this woman, and seeing all the specials, we think forgiving somebody is a weak thing, but it's actually the most healing, powerful, and extraordinary thing you can do for yourself. That's what I learned from this incredible woman. It was not about doing the Christian thing and being forgiving about somebody. It's genuinely about how do I process this unspeakable thing that happened and live beyond it.'

We asked Minnie if she feels doing Take and all that she's learned from it has made a profound impact on her personally.

'Yeah, totally, I think I do,' Driver replies, 'Believe me, just walking down the street, the protectiveness you feel, just like a lionness. I feel like I've become more protective of everybody in my life because of what's going on in my body [with this pregnancy]. But I simply do not believe that killing someone and sending that as a message of punishment as an example.'

'I don't believe that,' she adds, 'I don't believe it's right to do that in the first place, I don't believe that it's right to do in the second place. I think it's a more just punishment just to stay and live with what you done.'

Driver took the opportunity to share with us her thoughts on her pending motherhood in what she described to us as a 'fairly easy pregnancy'.

'I've got to have the baby out,' she says, ' I'm a totally crunchy, Mother Earth type. I'm not really looking for any kind of intervention, so, yes, I'm afraid, definitely, but my anxieties are about more I'm still such a mess who gives my mother such a hard time. How on Earth am I going to have anything relevant to say to this child when I still hear myself on the phone, 'But, mom, it's not fair!' And I'm like, 'Oh, my God! What am I going to do'''

'And then you laugh and you go, 'Oh, well, all that you can do is take stock of all the good really wonderful stuff that you know and pass that on and create as much joy as you can in whatever form that takes,' Minnie continues, 'I eat a lot of green stuff. A lot of green apples in my complete obsession and cucumber and snack peas. It's all green food, it's weird, I've had big cravings for that. It's weird, I haven't had this huge appetite. It's the weirdest thing. I feel like there's no room to eat tons of stuff. It's really weird. I was ready for having this massive appetite and I'm OK.'

However, unlike many of the more recently pregnant Hollywood celebrities, don't expect Minnie to have a immediately radical change in her body shape.

'Believe me, you're not going to see me in like an air-veil-ish air dress two weeks after I've given birth,' Driver insists, 'I don't know what that is about. The new celebrity obsession is about getting your new baby body back in the shortest time possible, which is just the most unhealthy, most horrifying thing to me, that you're meant to be like a size 2 a couple weeks after you've given birth. Plan on seeing me poochy and fat, knocking around Malibu, proud of it. There's too much else to worry about.'

We wondered whether Driver would take the also fairly traditional path by most new celebrity parents of doing more roles in children's films.

'It's so funny, because I did Tarzan,' Minnie says, 'I knew I'd want my kids to be able to see something like that and I definitely did Ella Enchanted for the same reasons. I've done it sporadically. But definitely, yeah.'

Unlike most actors, Minnie has rather enjoyed her career on the small screen, which she says she fell in love with after a recurring role on the sitcom Will & Grace.

'[Will & Grace] was the funnest time I had on any job, so I did The Riches. I never laughed so much,' Driver believes, 'I realized that [executive producer and director] Jimmy Burrows has been laughing for 40 years straight, which is probably why he's such a fantastic person. It was just a very rare and magnificent collection of people and writers. It was just that strange confluence of it really is the lightning-in-the-bottle thing. It was an absolute pleasure to be there and I could have done it like forever.'

However, Driver says that as much as she enjoys her role on The Riches, she is unsure at the present time whether the show will continue next season.

'I don't know if we've even been picked up,' she says, 'We're still waiting to find out. We're in a strange kind of limbo right now. It will be a real source of devastation if that show doesn't make it, but it's been a strange year with the strike and everything.'