Adam Driver Is an Oscar Nominee for Marriage Story; Here's His Broadway Story

Adam Driver just received his second Oscar nomination. This time it's for playing Charlie in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story—one of the four major films the actor released this year. But Driver actually started his career in the theater. The Juilliard graduate has appeared on Broadway three times and has been nominated for a Tony Award.

This week, Broadway.com is taking a look at the stage careers of a few of this year’s nominees, including Al Pacino, Jonathan Pryce, Scarlett Johansson, Cynthia Erivo and Antonio Banderas. Some started off in theater, others were film stars first, and a few regularly travel between stage and screen. For more on this year’s theater-friendly Oscar nominees, look here. 

Below, take a look at Driver’s stage credits.

The Retributionists (2009)
Driver, who grew up in Mishawaka, Indiana, first crossed our radar in 2009 when he starred as a Jewish World War II survivor in The Retributionists off-Broadway. Driver’s story of enlisting in the Marines after 9/11, performing plays at USO shows and attending Juilliard after an honorable discharge is well known, but he told Broadway.com about it first. “I made three people cry my first semester,” he said, laughing about the intensity he brought to acting—and perhaps foreshadowing the forceful roles he would play on stage and screen. “I was used to a very aggressive way of talking to people. I would consider it having a discussion, but I guess others didn’t see it that way! So I calmed down and found a way to communicate exactly what I was feeling.”

Mrs. Warren’s Profession (2010)
Driver’s next project brought him to Broadway, starring opposite Cherry Jones in George Bernard Shaw’s social comedy, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, about a prostitution madame in turn-of-the-century London. Driver, who played a clueless love interest, was praised for his work as an admirable stage partner to Jones. “The only actor who seems up for actually playing with her is Driver,” Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker. “He doesn’t hide behind shtick, as the other male actors do; he allows his character to be seen without filigree.”

Man and Boy (2011)
Driver continued his habit of starring opposite veteran stage actors with Man and Boy, his next Broadway credit, in a revival directed by Maria Aitken. Terence Rattigan’s 1963 drama told the story of the downfall of an international industrialist who hides out in his estranged son’s Greenwich village apartment. Frank Langella played Driver’s father. It was the first time an acting legend played Driver’s father, but as Star Wars has made clear, it wouldn't be the last.

Burn This (2019)
A few projects kept Driver away from Broadway—playing Kylo Ren in Stars Wars, Adam in the HBO show Girls and a detective in BlacKKKlansman (for which he earned his first Oscar nom) kept him busy. But last year, Driver made his return to Broadway. His fiery portrayal as the volatile Pale in Michael Mayer’s revival of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This ignited the Broadway stage (this writer certainly enjoyed it), earning him a Tony nomination. Set in the 1980s, Burn This is about an unstable romance between a choreographer (played by Keri Russell) and her late best friend’s brother, Pale, a damaged man forced to reckon with his brother’s homosexuality. Driver’s turn as half of that romance was well-received and reminded Broadway of Driver’s longstanding dedication to stage performance, something that he makes clear in Marriage Story, where he plays a theater director and memorably sings the Sondheim anthem “Being Alive.” We’ll drink to Driver and hope that we’ll see him back on Broadway soon (in a musical perhaps?).