Adam Driver walks out of interview with Fresh Air host Terry Gross

Adam Driver was supposed to be on NPR’s Fresh Air with Philadelphia’s famed host Terry Gross for an interview about his new Netflix film Marriage Story.

But after the show played a 20-second clip from the film, Gross learned her guest had left the building.

“We still don’t understand why Adam Driver chose to leave the interview at that point," Fresh Air executive producer Danny Miller wrote in the statement. Driver was in the New York studio and Gross was at Fresh Air’s base at WHYY-FM in Philadelphia. “We were looking forward to the interview – Terry thinks he’s a terrific actor, he was a great guest when he was on FA in 2015 – so we were disappointed that we didn’t have a new interview to share with our listeners about Marriage Story.”

The interview was being recorded Dec. 10 and was scheduled to air the next day. Instead, Gross had to rerun an episode with late-night host Conan O’Brien and, the Daily Beast reported, acknowledged the show “had promised you an interview with actor Adam Driver today, but unfortunately, we weren’t able to do it as planned.”

Driver has previously said he does not like to watch or listen to his past performances. The Daily Beast reported he left when the show played the clip of his character in Marriage Story singing part of “Being Alive” from the musical Company.

Knowing Driver didn’t like listening back to clips, Miller wrote, “Terry invited him to take off his headphones while we played back the 20-second clip, and that our engineer in New York would cue him to put his headphones back on after the clip ended (we also did this during our 2015 interview)."

When Driver was on Fresh Air in 2015, he refused to listen to a clip of himself.

“I don’t want to hear the bad acting that probably was happening during that clip,” Driver said at the time, according to a transcript.

“Does it throw you off to hear yourself?” Gross asked.

“Yeah, no, I’ve watched myself or listened to myself before, then always hate it,” Driver said. “And then wish I could change it, but you can’t. And I - you know, 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.”

He stopped watching himself perform after seeing the 2012 pilot of HBO’s “Girls,” in which he played Adam Sackler. The rewatching experience was “terrible,” he told Esquire in 2015.

When the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was approaching in 2015, Driver, who played Kylo Ren, told Vogue in 2017 that he thought "I don’t know if I can watch this.”

“Thankfully I’m masked through a lot of it, so I could kind of hide that way,” he told Vogue. "But it took a long time. I remember being sick to my stomach and almost vomiting in the theater at the premiere which was just... very disconcerting, really.”