Adam Driver Walks Out Of NPR Interview After Host Plays ‘Marriage Story’ Clip

Adam Driver recently walked out of an interview on NPR’s talk show “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross — and the show isn’t sure why.

Sources including “Fresh Air” Executive Producer Danny Miller have confirmed to The Daily Beast (which first reported the story) and Variety that the 36-year-old actor left mid-interview as a clip from his Netflix film “Marriage Story” played.

Many speculate that the “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” star left due to his discomfort with hearing or watching himself act, an issue Driver has described publicly in the past, including during a “Fresh Air” interview in 2015.

HuffPost reached out to NPR and Driver’s representatives for comment.

According to The Daily Beast and Variety, Driver was taping his part of the interview in NPR’s New York studio as Gross conducted the interview from the program’s main studio in Philadelphia.

“We don’t really understand why he left,” Miller said in a statement to both outlets. Miller told Variety that the show offered Driver a workaround that would allow him to avoid listening to himself on film during the interview.

“We knew from our previous interview with Adam Driver that he does not enjoy listening back to clips of his movies (that isn’t unusual, a lot of actors feel that way). So Terry invited him to take off his headphones while we played back the 20-second clip,” Miller told Variety. “But this time around, after the clip concluded we were informed by our engineer in NY that he had walked out of the studio, and then left the building.”

When the Daily Beast article hit Twitter on Tuesday, the story quickly went viral. Many users defended Driver’s actions.

Driver told “Fresh Air” about his discomfort with watching or listening to himself act in 2015.

“Yeah, no, I’ve watched myself or listened to myself before, then always hate it,” the actor said at the time. “And then wish I could change it, but you can’t. And I think I have, like, a tendency to try to make things better or drive myself and the other people around me crazy with the things I wanted to change or I wish I could change.”

Driver also told The New Yorker in October that he hid in the greenroom during a screening of Spike Lee’s “Blackkklansman” and said he “felt like I had to puke” when he was obliged to sit through a screening of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

He told the magazine that his aversion stems back to when he was on HBO’s “Girls” and he watched a scene of himself on Lena Dunham’s laptop.

“That’s when I was, like, I can’t watch myself in things,” Driver said. “I certainly can’t watch this if we’re going to continue doing it.”

Steven Soderbergh, who directed Driver in “Logan Lucky,” told The New Yorker he sympathized with Driver.

“I think he’s rightly concerned that he would become conscious of himself in a way that would be harmful to his acting,” Soderbergh said.