Minnie Driver can imagine the alternatives. There’s a version of her life in which she went all-in on Hollywood, sustained the level of stardom she referred to as “that searing white-hot thing.” Another Minnie moved to the countryside, grew vegetables, birthed seven kids.
“I have always been fascinated about the life that I didn’t live,” Driver said. “Sometimes I can almost see it.”
At 55, Driver has walked a middle path: one child, a life split between Southern California and London, a varied career just under the A-list. It is, she thinks, an improbable life. And she’s fairly sure it’s the life she wants.
“To have been as fortunate as I am and to still be working the way I am at this point?” she said. “I know how rarefied that is.”
Driver was speaking over mugs of strong tea, on a West London evening in early October. We had started the night at a nearby pub, but the pub was loud, so she, with her Shih Tzu, Bob, on a leash, led me up the road to a rented townhouse, comfortable with the mess and busyness of family life.
She and her teenage son, home from boarding school, had spent the afternoon picking apples in the back garden. Driver had then baked them into a pie, though she labeled the finished product an “apple sock.”
“So here’s the deal,” she said as she plated a slice, her hair wild and eyes bright. “Martha Stewart said a teaspoon of salt in the pastry. I think it’s too much salt.” Then she addressed Bob, who had become unusually fond of his bed: “Good boy, just lie down. Stop humping.”
Actresses get a lot of credit for being “real,” for not smoothing their personalities and foreheads into nothingness. Driver seemingly couldn’t be unreal if she tried, and she infuses that realness into her roles. Unpretentious, congenitally outspoken, lightly wicked, she has made a three-decade career in Hollywood and out of it, while only intermittently playing the Hollywood game.
After what she described as a fallow year, she has upcoming roles in Netflix’s latest Harlan Coben thriller, “Run Away”; in the Fox Old Testament drama “The Faithful”; and in the fifth season of the Netflix bonbon “Emily in Paris,” which premieres on Thursday.
In “Emily,” Driver plays a penniless princess who supports herself through cheeky sponsored content and livestreams. She even has her own stan army: My Royal Subjects. “They’ll buy anything I tell them to,” Princess Jane confides.
“Minnie just gets this kind of character,” Darren Star, the creator of “Emily in Paris,” wrote in an email. “She knows how to make someone outrageous, glamorous and still completely human.”
And for the first time in 20 years, Driver had returned to the stage, starring in the one-person show “Every Brilliant Thing.” When I met with her, she was a week into rehearsals, crying every day, exhausted, ecstatic.
“I’ve never been so tired,” she said in her kitchen. “But I’ve loved it.”
The pastry, if you’re curious, was very nice.
Driver can still remember how it felt to be 14, to make an audience laugh, to lock herself in a restroom stall afterward and decide that this what she wanted out of life. She went to drama school, aiming for a stage career. But a role in a limited series, “Mr. Wroe’s Virgins,” led to an offer for the 1995 film “Circle of Friends.”
Driver gained about 25 pounds to play Benny, a plump and diffident budding writer in 1950s Ireland. That role piqued the interest of casting directors, though some of them were confused when Driver arrived for meetings slim and confident. She thought she was coming to America for a weekend. She stayed for decades.
“I was a British girl who came to Hollywood, and then all this stuff happened and I never actually went home,” she said.
At the time, Driver wasn’t entirely sure what kind of actor she should be, and neither was Hollywood. For a while she did it all: comedies, dramas, an action movie. She was even, briefly, a Bond girl. (“GoldenEye,” from 1995.) Between 1996 and 1997, she had indelible turns in “Big Night,” “Grosse Pointe Blank” and “Good Will Hunting,” the last of which earned her an Oscar nomination.
But she remained ambivalent about high-profile work and relegation to wife and girlfriend roles, and she let stardom slide. “I didn’t know how to stay chasing that particular supernova,” she said. “I couldn’t maintain the calculation that is involved.”
She mentioned turning down “The Wedding Planner” — the part eventually went to Jennifer Lopez — choosing instead to do the period curio “The Governess.” She is proud of that movie, but now she wonders why she found mainstream work so difficult.
“I wish I could go back and go, ‘Dude, just do the [expletive] movie: It’ll be fine, it’ll be fun, and just relax,’” she said of her “Wedding Planner” decision. “But I was jumpy and unmoored because I was completely out of my element. I was just untethered.”
In 2006, she signed on to do a TV series, the FX con artist comedy “The Riches.” She had a brief relationship with a writer on that show and gave birth to her son, Henry, in 2008, “which just reoriented everything,” she said. She didn’t work much in the baby years and then made her way back, choosing steady roles in television shows like “About a Boy” (2014-15) and “Speechless” (2016-19).
If this résumé is disparate in medium and tone, it speaks to a general Minnie Driver type. “They’re always quick and fast and have a certain alacrity,” she said. This is the Driver of real life, too.
“A life playing, it’s just exploring fragments of yourself,” she said. “It sounds really pretentious, but you learn from it.”
By the 2010s, she had made a home for herself and her son in California, a relocation that seemed permanent. But during the coronavirus lockdowns, with Henry eager for in-person school and fewer projects being shot in Los Angeles, she moved with him and her longtime partner, the documentarian Addison O’Dea, back to London.
Having entered her 50s, she had begun to wonder about career longevity, a wondering exacerbated when she didn’t work much last year. It wasn’t all bad. She spent time with her son. And having written a memoir, “Managing Expectations,” she began work on a novel about the lives she might have lived.
But still, she worried. She had often played romantic roles. Was that all gone? Would she play only grannies now?
“I refuse to stop working, and I don’t know how I’m going to convince people to keep me as I get older and older,” she said. “But I did it when I was a sweet, soft, chubby, very unlikely movie star. I did what, when I look back, was the absolute impossible. So I need to carry on believing that I can do the impossible.”
Then she called out to O’Dea, in an upstairs room. “You still find me attractive, don’t you, darling?” O’Dea, who had his headphones on, didn’t answer. “Oh God,” Driver said, laughing. “That’s hilarious.” (He came down a few minutes later, in a Hawaiian shirt that Driver described as “quite defibrillating,” and reassured her.)
Apparently it wasn’t time for grannies yet. The high drama of “Run Away,” premiering on Jan. 1, came her way first. She plays a woman with a dark past whose daughter disappears. Then she was offered “Emily in Paris,” which was, she said, “a confection of a time.”
“The costumes? Insane, bananas.” she said.
Star described her as “pure fun” to work with on set — “she had everyone laughing all day.” A sample Princess Jane line: “Do either of you like speedboats?”
“Emily in Paris” was filmed in Rome this season, as was her next project, “The Faithful,” premiering on March 22. Driver plays the biblical matriarch Sarah.
That role stretched her most, requiring a quietness and a stillness she doesn’t usually offer. “There’s not a great deal of wit in the Old Testament,” she said. But she was entirely herself between scenes. Jeffrey Donovan, her co-star, recalled her making him laugh so hard that he wept.
“She’s a hoot,” he said in a phone interview. “So sharp and witty and very caring.”
Then the shoots were done and she was back in London, preparing for “Every Brilliant Thing,” crying in the rehearsal space bathrooms. When I met her she was joking — mostly — about wanting to refund all the tickets.
“I apologize,” she said to an imaginary audience. “I’m so sorry. I’m emptying my bank account.”
It took a while for Duncan Macmillan, the play’s writer and co-director, to realize she was struggling. “I didn’t see that for some time because she’s so contained and so controlled,” he said. The reviews were uniformly excellent. (The show closed last month.)
Driver’s success in the role shouldn’t have surprised anyone, least of all Driver. Acting for over 30 years has taught her that feeling as if everything could collapse is just part of the job. Her chosen life, however unlikely, has worked out well.
“I’m pretty proud of being happy,” she said. “It makes me feel like, Wow, I’m 55 and that’s what I’m doing. Maybe it’s not all just dust and cobwebs.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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