Minnie Driver lived and worked in America for nearly three decades. Many British celebrities view America as a place to work but disparage as a place with inferior culture compared to Britain. But Minnie loved her life in California, living in a fancy trailer in Malibu and raising her son Henry. Nowadays, she splits her time between California and the UK, because Henry goes to school over there. But she has nice things to say about America – and awful things to say about Donald Trump – in an interview with the Times of London. Some highlights:
Her “Cinderella moment” while promoting ‘Circle of Friends’ in America. 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. 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.”
Being 54 years old: “I’d much rather have my face when I was 25. But I certainly wouldn’t want to have to go through all that sh-t again, of all the other attendant stuff that was coming down the pipe.”
She’s back to living 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.”
She stopped making movies when she became a mother: “It’s why I stopped making movies, really consciously. 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. 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 was happy to find work in America: “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. In England, I felt I was punished for wanting more. I was punished for being ambitious. The British press think it’s greedy for me to want to be more.”
Whether she believes things really changed with #MeToo: “Yes, I do. But not because of some kind of systemic epiphany that men had. Rather, because they know that there’s accountability now. 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. 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.”
Another big change for the industry: “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. 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.”
She is British but: “I identify as a Californian.” Driver is more anxious than jubilant [about Trump’s felony conviction]. “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. But just looking at how much money he raised in that two days, $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?’ ”
Whether she would live in America again if Trump was reelected: “If I lived in a red [Republican] state, no, I couldn’t. 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.”.
Yeah, her assessment of Trump and the MAGA cult is dead on. Trump IS a symptom. The thing is, while I think the cult is a fundamental crack in America’s foundations, I also feel like it’s an underreported story – especially by the American media – that the cult seems to be less enthusiastic these days. The same energy isn’t there. Minnie’s right about being insulated from everything in California too, and she’s right about how the industry has changed.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.