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Toronto Film Festival: The whirlwind weekend of Adam Driver

Adam Driver arrives for a screening of the movie "Hungry Hearts" at the Venice Film Festival on Aug. 31.
(Titziana Fabi / AFP/Getty Images)
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Adam Driver was just landing in Toronto on Saturday when he was told that he had won the best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for his role in Saviero Costanzo’s film “Hungry Hearts” and that his co-star Alba Rohrwacher had been named best actress.

Last year Driver had two films at the Toronto International Film Festival and this year he has three. The trio of roles show not only the range of Driver as an actor, but also the breadth of what’s on display in Toronto — from the foreign-tinged intimacy of “Hungry Hearts,” to the much-anticipated acquisition title of Noah Baumbach’s “While We’re Young” and the studio-backed all-star cast of Shawn Levy’s “This is Where I Leave You.”

For Driver, who rose to fame through his role on the television show “Girls” and has been in cast in J.J. Abrams’ coming chapter of the “Star Wars” saga, it would seem that doing small, intimate films like “Hungry Hearts” may soon become a harder thing to make time for as his career takes off.

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“I don’t think it will be harder. For me it doesn’t matter, the scale,” Driver said in an interview Sunday afternoon after a photo shoot and before two screenings that night. He would be back on a plane very early Monday morning.

“Big, small — if the writing is good, than it’s something I want to do,” he said. “For ‘Hungry Hearts,’ the script was really good, and then I met Saviero and he was smart and I was excited by what he wanted to do with it. I knew Alba was doing it, and I watched the movie they did together, ‘The Solitude of Prime Numbers,’ and that was all I needed to know.”

“Hungry Hearts” is an intense drama about a young couple dealing with their sick infant. Many scenes in the film are just of Driver and Rohrwacher alone in an apartment, heightening both a sense of encroaching claustrophobia alongside a deep emotional connection. Variety compared the film, currently looking for U.S. distribution, to something of a cross between “Blue Valentine” and “Rosemary’s Baby.”

“Saverio was actually operating the camera, so it all seemed like a really private conversation between three people,” Driver said. “So I think for me and Alba, he made it less precious, with the director way back somewhere saying action. We were all having this conversation and the line of when we were acting and when we weren’t was very blurred.

“And I’d never worked in that way before,” he added. “I was just coming off a movie with Noah Baumbach where it’s a lot of takes and very scripted, and I like that way too, but I’d never worked where it’s mostly just impulses and reactions, and I loved it.”

Driver recently appeared in a photo layout in Vogue magazine and on the cover of GQ. Much has been made of his brooding but tender intensity and unconventional looks, and it seems he is fast becoming something of an emblem of American masculinity in this cultural moment.

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“I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m not conscious of it,” he responded, seeming genuinely a bit startled by the notion. “That’s not anything that I have control over.”

But has his recent fame and the attention to his looks changed the way he dresses?

“My wife changes the way that I dress. She makes me dress nicer than I want to dress,” he said with a smile. “I feel like I perpetually dress like a 14-year-old boy, and she makes me stand up straight and wear clean clothes.”

Even Baumbach cracked “Star Wars” jokes during the Q&A after the premiere of “While We’re Young,” and that project now seems to hang over Driver in every interview and appearance. And though Driver is getting used to being asked to talk about something he can’t talk much about, he is only now nearing the point of a boilerplate response.

“I feel like I’m forming one. The denials are easy because I can’t say anything,” he said. “I usually just say that it’s happening, and it’s all I can say. But even when I met J.J., the first thing he talked about in our first meeting was character and story. That’s what he talked about what he and Larry Kasdan were working on, and it just happened to be ‘Star Wars.’”

“Obviously I’m such a fan of those movies and the scale of them is humongous, but they’re all similar in that it’s great moments,” he added. “It’s what makes those original three so good and have such longevity is that it’s all these really human stories and these really great characters.”

With three movies at Toronto and seeming endless galaxies in front of him, Driver is trying to take it all in stride.

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“It’s all humbling and flattering and nice,” he said. “Unique. Unique to me, not to anybody else.”

Follow Mark Olsen on Twitter: @IndieFocus

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