Adam Driver

Just being in the military, you're so violent. We got into fights about just random things all the time. I don't think as aggressively as I did when I was in the Marine Corps.

Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don't train - at all really - for film acting. It's mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.

I was an infantry Marine, and there are only so many things you can do when you get out of the military that you can apply your job to. Either a janitor or a cop. I tried to do both of those things because what else are you going to do?

Emphasis in the Marine Corps isn't on talking about your feelings.

When you get out of the Marine Corps, you feel like you can do anything.

At Juilliard, suddenly I was reading these great plays that could articulate the ways I was feeling in the Marine Corps, and that felt very therapeutic, by putting words to feelings, in a big way.

We don't understand why we're here, no one's giving us an answer, religion is vague, your parents can't help because they're just people, and it's all terrible, and there's no meaning to anything.

I studied Morse code.

What is a struggle is that acting isn't a place where you go to work and you do that thing. There aren't set boundaries, like an office, where you go and work. For me, the work is always on my mind.

I was living in a small town in Indiana working as a telemarketer and a vacuum salesman. I was really bad: the vacuums seemed to always be falling apart. Every time I did a demonstration, I'd say, 'This is the material the astronauts used on Apollo 13.' And no sooner had that come out of my mouth, something would malfunction.

You have friends, and they die. You have a disease, someone you care about has a disease, Wall Street people are scamming everyone, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. That's what we're surrounded by all the time.

I did plays in high school, but I was convinced you couldn't make a living doing it. You don't have a lot of options in Indiana anyway, though, so I didn't want to stay there. I graduated early and worked a bunch of really odd jobs, and then I joined the Marines.

Something I learned in the Marine Corps that I've applied to acting is, one, taking direction, and then working with a group of people to accomplish a mission and knowing your role within that team.

I was born in California. When I was six, we moved to a small town in northern Indiana called Mishawaka.

In the Marine Corps, everything had a purpose.

I was having an argument with my stepfather, and he was like, 'Why don't you join the Marine Corps?' And I was like, 'Noooo! Well, maybe, actually... ' I went and saw the recruiter, who was like, 'Are you on the run from the cops? Because we've never had someone want to leave so fast.'

The most you play a character in the theater is, like, a couple months, and then you put it away.

The Marine Corps is supposed to be the toughest and most rigorous of its class.

I think it's good to live an artful life.

I'm not fashionable.