Is she the most outspoken female star in Tinseltown? About to return to our television screens as Elizabeth I, the 54-year-old British actress tells it like it is, as Jane Mulkerrins finds out.
Minnie Driver has had a very late night. After the celeb-studded Dior show at Drummond Castle in Perthshire, Scotland, the previous evening, Driver got to bed at an impressive 3.30am — before, even more impressively, forcing herself up again at 6am for her flight. She is, she declares, having arrived straight from the airport (large sunglasses, small suitcase), “F***ing knackered.”
She goes on, “I hate that I can’t bounce back quickly these days. Everyone [on the flight back] was talking about Lumity and Arrae and all these different supplements and I was like, ‘Does that shit work? Does it give you back your joie de youth?’ "
She may not be feeling the joie right now, on two and a half hours’ sleep, but, as she relates in her memoir, Managing Expectations, her looks were hardly a source of joie to her in her actual youth either.
Her late mother, Gaynor — a former model — and elder sister, Kate, were both willowy blondes, while Driver’s corkscrew mane earned her the teenage nicknames Slash (from Guns N’ Roses), Animal (from the Muppets) and T. Rex (Marc Bolan). Or, as she puts it, “My hair was part of my identity that had shown up too soon for the rest of me to accommodate.” Her angular features, meanwhile, gave rise to the school tag “50p face”.
It was during a US press tour 30 years ago for Circle of Friends — her breakthrough film in which she starred alongside Colin Firth and Chris O’Donnell — that she had what she calls her “Cinderella moment”. She’d put on weight for the role because, “Benny [her character] was meant to be soft and bigger and smart and funny and lovely,” and Driver was happy to do so. “I just wanted ten grand to pay off my debts and get new wheels on my Ford Fiesta.”
Landing in the US having lost the weight again, she was treated to the full Hollywood glam-over. “They came at my hair and blow-dried it straight,” she says. “And they got me a good bra and the right size jeans. And suddenly I was sleek. Suddenly, I was revealed to myself as being a girl who was pretty, and it was so exciting.”
At 54, the aesthetic doubts are now different. “I’d like to write a strongly worded letter to somebody saying, ‘It [high-definition television] should have just been for Animal Planet, for David Attenborough’s programmes and for sport,” she says firmly. “Nobody wants to see my pores and my wrinkles. Or now, the strange outline of dermal filler. You can’t win.”
Her solution? “You don’t look at it. If you’re me, you go and you shoot it and you don’t ever watch it. When you’ve grown up on film it is hard to go and look at your dramatically changed countenance and not be judgmental. And frankly, I don’t want to judge myself. So I’d rather just do the work and not watch it.
“I’d much rather have my face when I was 25,” she admits freely. “But I certainly wouldn’t want to have to go through all that s*** again, of all the other attendant stuff that was coming down the pipe.”
Handily, given Driver’s lack of sleep, we’re meeting in a hotel suite off Bond Street in central London, and she only takes a little persuading to make full use of the facilities, removing her trainers and climbing gratefully onto the vast bed.
Home these days is mainly here, back in London after 27 years in Los Angeles.
“I will always be between both places, but my son’s at school here, so if I’m not working, I’m wherever he is.”
Her son, Henry, 15, attends her old school, the progressive Hampshire boarder Bedales, to which her mother sent Minnie and Kate following her separation from their father and rapid remarriage to their stepfather.
Driver’s California place, meanwhile, is a mobile home in the same Malibu “trailer park” where Pamela Anderson lives. A keen surfer and outdoor swimmer, Driver seems to possess a strong free-spirited streak. She is also prolifically sweary but requests that I report her swears “judiciously”, as she worries cursing doesn’t land quite the same when it’s written down.
Having grown up in Barbados until the age of six, Driver’s life thereafter changed dramatically. Her mother left her father and the family court decreed that for her to retain custody of her daughters she had to be married, have bought a house and have them in school by the time of the relocation — all within seven weeks.
So Gaynor sold most of what she owned, “bought a dilapidated cottage in the middle of Hampshire… then cheerfully told the man with whom she had begun a relationship that they were getting married. She marched into the school where she herself had gone and said they had to take her children.”
Gaynor, who died from liver cancer three years ago, sounds like a genuine force of nature. “That’s what was brilliant about her. She would decide and she would do something,” Driver says. “She was not all roses. She was a very difficult, complicated person because of her history. But she was really funny and really wise as well.”
At 12, Driver discovered the reason for her parents’ split: her father, Ronnie, had another family. Her parents had never been married during their 16-year relationship as Ronnie still had a wife.
“I had such an aversion to my stepfather, and I think she told me [that] in quite a selfish way, to try to make me feel better about her choices,” Driver says.
“As opposed to explaining to her kid what was going on, she told me in a fight, in a moment of rage, which was not good, but I understand it. Maybe that’s about getting older — all the faulted stuff about your parents you just go, ‘Oh yes, I know why they did that, because I did something similar last week.’ "
I wonder what she thinks the discovery of her father’s infidelities did to her own ideas about relationships — particularly at such a formative age. “If I look at my history, what it did was make me want to be married so much and then choose men who were so not the right men to be married to,” she says.
“So I would carry on longing to be married and to have that conservative version [of a relationship], find men who had no interest in that, and then if one did, run a mile.
“The one time I was engaged [to fellow actor Josh Brolin in 2001] it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life,” she says.
“But now I’m with someone [the American writer and director Addison O’Dea] who doesn’t want to get married but who is the most devoted, loving, extraordinary… Everything I could have wanted in my childhood idea of a husband, he actually is.”
She and O’Dea first met at a party in LA, after which she referred to him as “the spy” because he had worked a lot in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. When California wild fires blocked her route to her mobile home by road, the spy helped her reach it by boat.
She has talked of growing up “being unused to certainty”. When she became pregnant with Henry, the result of a short-term relationship with the Hollywood writer Timothy J Lea, she was determined to give her son the opposite.
“It’s why I stopped making movies, really consciously,” she says. “I called my agent and went, ‘OK, I’m having a baby and I would really like you to go and look for a show that’s called Shoots in Los Angeles and will pay me a regular wage,” she says.
“I couldn’t be travelling. I couldn’t be taking a tiny baby to Romania — and I didn’t want to. As a single mum, I didn’t want him to have that uncertainty. I wanted him to have school and football and mates and tea and his own bed and our house,” she says. She took parts in television sitcoms such as About a Boy and Will & Grace, which meant she could also be home each night. “And it was so lovely because with what you consciously give your children, you can perhaps at the same time be giving yourself the thing that you did not have.”
Her latest small-screen project is The Serpent Queen, a historical drama about the life of Catherine de Medici, showing here on Prime Video. Driver plays Elizabeth I. Her Elizabeth is glorious: quirky, charismatic, funny.
“There was incredible licence to start exploring who this woman was,” she says.
“And the two most powerful women in the world at that time were Catherine de Medici and Elizabeth I, and both of them husbandless.” Which is not to say, Driver adds, that they were nuns.
“There’s this brilliant, spitting speech that I have to Sam Morton [Catherine de Medici], who is basically calling Elizabeth a phoney for being the Virgin Queen, and she says — essentially; I’m paraphrasing — ‘It’s a brand, you idiot.’
“She was so aware that if you had a man, he would take your power. If you had children, other people would probably kill them, which made you vulnerable. So her being this brand, the Virgin Queen, was how she lived.”
In reality, Driver says, “she was a woman of appetites. And I was interested in who that woman was once she took off her corset, when she was sexual, when she was free.”
For Driver, freedom came when, following the success of Circle of Friends, she began getting cast in Hollywood in films such as Grosse Pointe Blank and Good Will Hunting, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
“In America there was just this idea of, ‘Whatever you want to do, try it. Do it. Throw everything you have at it and see what happens.’ There is this idea that you’re allowed to renew and to change course; you’re allowed to pivot. I can be a writer, I can be a musician, I can be a mother, I can be an actor — you don’t have to be just one thing.”
This was new for Driver. “In England, I felt I was punished for wanting more. I was punished for being ambitious. The British press,” she says, “think it’s greedy for me to want to be more.”
While not as well known for her music as her acting, Driver has recorded three albums, toured and performed at festivals. She names a British music journalist who, years ago, wrote that he “wanted to hate” one of her records “but couldn’t”.
“The idea that the default position was, ‘We need to hate this because this is somebody stepping outside and wanting to express themselves in another way…’ " She sighs.
The success of Good Will Hunting sent her profile soaring, in part thanks to her relationship with her co-star, Matt Damon. That she’d been offered the role was a triumph in itself, since Harvey Weinstein had objected to it, telling the casting director that, “Nobody would want to f*** her,” just one of the litany of horrors and incidents of harassment Driver details in her memoir.
She was once asked to fake an orgasm in front of 17 executives in an audition for a chocolate bar ad.
“Fake an orgasm?” she clarified. Yes, she was told, “Unless you fancy having a real one.” Driver walked out. Her agent was given the feedback that she had been “difficult”.
Given her upbringing, it is probably not surprising that Driver was more defiant than most in the face of such misogyny.
“You try to find a mechanism that could help you, that you could tell someone, ‘This thing is happening, please help me make it stop, but also help make it stop for that person over there and that woman over there.’ "
But instead, she says, she was “crucified” for speaking up, “completely and utterly vilified for being some sort of ‘whistleblower’. This idea of ‘causing trouble on the set’ — ‘She called her lawyer.’ "
It would be 30 years before the rest of Hollywood would rise up and add their voices with the #MeToo movement. Does Driver believe things have really changed?
“Yes, I do. But not because of some kind of systemic epiphany that men had. Rather, because they know that there’s accountability now,” she says. “There are actually mechanisms in place [which mean] that kind of behaviour can’t be hidden. And I think #MeToo put a dent in it, but I just don’t know whether that power dynamic is ever really going to be redressed.”
I wonder if she’s bitter that it took so long. “Revolutions are bloody. People want to maintain the status quo for as long as they possibly can until they absolutely can’t and then, kicking and screaming, people will change.
“It annoys me no end that there wasn’t recourse and there was actually punitive stuff that happened [to me] as a result,” she says. “But here we are talking about this new project that I couldn’t love more, and I’m 54 and it’s been 30 years…”
One important shift she sees is in younger actresses taking ownership of their productions. “I watched Challengers the other night and what I loved most was seeing that Zendaya was a producer. Not an executive producer — a producer.” She namechecks Margot Robbie, the creative force behind Barbie. “They’re like, ‘I’m part of this creation, I am making this happen.’ And I think maybe that is how it changes.
“We all should have been doing that back in the Nineties,” she continues. “When I think about the work that I did on scripts, the fixing things, the making stuff better, absolutely uncredited.
“I made so many of the roles that I was in through improv, through rewriting, through ideas that were all then completely uncredited. So what’s great is that these girls are now getting credit for it.”
Driver has said that, while she is British, “I identify as a Californian.” Days before we meet, Donald Trump is found guilty of 34 felony counts in the historic hush money trial in New York, for paying Stormy Daniels US$130,000 in the run-up to the 2016 election. But Driver is more anxious than jubilant. “He’s going to say that the whole thing is like the election, that it’s corrupt.
“Of course he deserves to be in prison — of course he does,” she says. “But just looking at how much money he raised in that two days, US$53 million in a 48-hour period, and the idea that because the founding fathers — if there had been some mothers involved perhaps it would be different — left no room in the constitution for the idea that the American people could be so stupid as to vote for a felon, there is nothing reflected in the judiciary about what would happen if he wins. It’s a pickle when you’ve got the Secret Service already scoping out prisons, going, ‘What would this look like?’ "
Were Trump to be re-elected, could she live there again?
“If I lived in a red [Republican] state, no, I couldn’t,” she says. “But living in California, you are somewhat insulated. But do you want to go and live in a bubble? Do you run away from the fire or do you go back and help?”
It’s not just Trump himself, she says, but “the revelation of the 70 million people who really quite like a bit of a racist attitude and non-existent immigration policies and dismantling the environmental agencies. And they were always there; they weren’t created by him. He’s just a symptom, and now they’ve got a mascot,” she says.
Is the UK in a much better state politically? “At least the memes are funnier,” she says with a laugh. “And I am more hopeful. For all the division in the UK, there just seems to be a more robust connection between us. We have this discourse. We talk about it and we laugh about it. We don’t pull out guns and shoot each other about it.”
Following the success of her memoir, Driver is now writing a novel. “But is it really fiction? No, it’s not,” she says, laughing. Her mother’s death meant she found herself unable to write for three months and ran out of time to put more stories into her memoir. “But I didn’t want to write another memoir. And there is no reason this character can’t have that experience that I had in Morocco in 1988.”
She’s also cribbing — openly — from others. “When you’re standing in line at the supermarket, people do pontificate and philosophise about the world and say hilarious stuff. I’m a bit of a magpie.”
Certainly, she’s a keen student of human nature. Her podcast, Minnie Questions, in which she asks public figures seven existential questions based on the so-called Proust Questionnaire — a set of questions often used by modern interviewers — has been running for three years now, with guests including Chelsea Clinton, Tony Blair, Alan Cumming, Cindy Crawford, Graydon Carter and Courteney Cox. Her favourite guests include the actress and presenter Jameela Jamil, “Because when I asked her, ‘What question would you most like answered?’ she said, ‘Does anybody actually enjoy reverse cowgirl?’ " She throws her face into her mound of pillows in mirth.
What question would Driver herself most like answered? “I want to know if there will ever be equality for women. Will there ever be parity — in the way in which we’re treated and financially? I’d love to know that so we could stop feeling angry and sad about it.”
The seven questions also include asking guests, “What in your life has grown out of a personal disaster?” For her, Driver says, it’s “the repeated humiliation of being rejected by people you respect for jobs that you really wanted and then having to meet them socially.
“You can’t possibly not take it personally. It’s so personal,” she says.
“But what grows out of that is: sink or swim. You have to find a way not to attach your self-worth to the opinions of others. I work on it every single day. It’s not like I’ve managed to do it. But it has grown, because it’s enormously powerful to feel that you are the one picking yourself up and going, ‘Don’t worry. It’s Netflix who are the idiots. It’s not you.’ "
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London