Minnie Driver

Hey, everybody, thanks for pulling up a chair today on Table for two. This is Bruce on a beautiful, hot, so cool day, and we are not in Hollywood.

We are by the beach.

We're having lunch today in Santa Monica at the Shutters Hotel.

We so have a drink.

I wasn't getting it, but I've got to struggle all the way back to Malibron, probably says again under the full moon.

Today, we're having lunch with an actress that you all know. She's not from the United States. She's actually from across the Atlantic Ocean. You probably know her best from her role in Goodwill Hunting, which is like quite the cult classic at this point.

But she's busy.

She has two films opening in the Toronto Film Festival. She's got an incredible podcast, she's written a memoir.

Oh wait a minute, No, you know what I want you? I get a share the time.

That is sweetest drength.

Anyone's I'm able. We're having lunch today with Mini Driver. Pull up a chair, enjoy, grab a glass rose on this hot summer day, and.

We'll be back with Miss Driver.

I'm Bruce Bozzi and this is my podcast Table for Two.

Well, okay, if you've joined us today, if you've pulled up a chair on Table for two today, we're in a completely new space. We're at the Shutter's Hotel in by the Beach, very fitting, as you will all find out. An incredibly beautiful actress, woman, singer, writer. Your podcast blows me away. We are having lunch with miss Minnie Driver. Welcome to Table for two.

Thank you for having me, brit Oh my god, it's a pleasure, lovely to be here.

Thank you. Okay, your surfer, Yeah, every day surfing.

When I'm here. Yeah, yeah.

And today we went out early because I was coming here and my best friends Cameron, Cameron Richardson.

And Mini Mortimer.

I know, we never get surfed with each other because everyone's the minute school goes back, everyone's blown to the winds.

So we went super early. I was up at six.

It is the most beautiful day, like those these kind of dog days of summer.

The ocean is glassy, the air is like silk.

It's it's beautiful, pinky blue light that early in the morning, and it was just us just trading waves.

And what is surfing? What feelings does it evoke for you? It draws you to.

There is something about the confluence of.

Your body and your soul, the active feeling of the strength that you need to have when you're surfing, the wonder of your body as you're.

Flying down the face of this wave in harmony with this unbelievably powerful ancient ocean.

That's as close as I've got to feeling my soul, I mean, apart from honesty when my.

Son was born.

Those are the two great moments where I feel the presence of something else.

Yeah, when I'm learning about you, where I've seen in your eyes.

Is the importance of connection that you have with people that you have.

And I don't surf for some reason. I have a fear of it. I never learned it. I think, how did you What was the first time You're like, I want to do this. So you grew up in Great Britain unit surfing the.

Well, the thing is, I actually I grew up a lot in Barbados in the Caribbean, so I was in the water, like genuinely before I could walk, I could swim, and I have never had a fear of the water and was so comfortable there.

From a really early age.

I was a big water skier, when I was a kid, the surf was on the other side of the island, so I never surfed. But I when I moved to California, I began, not right away, but probably five or six years after I moved here, and I've been surfing a.

Really long time. I am okay. I'm not even good.

I'm okay. I can hand on myself. I don't know a huge amount about the full moon, but it's special.

I know.

I was going to do a little research today about because you know, with your astrological sign, and.

I'm an aquarian, so it's an aquarius. This is an aquarium full moon.

This is why, Yes, that's why I surfed last night in the full moon and this morning, and why I'm feeling a little bit like maybe I took mushrooms, like a little tiny bit high in the most loving, beautiful, existential way. I can only think that it is the moon because normally I'm a little more harassed, and you.

Have no fear of being in the water in the lat moon is going to make the water so right.

But we're going to wear glow sticks around our necks, but it will be so light you sort of look for the sliver of silver along the top of the wave, so you can see it lining up when there's a set coming and.

There's a huge amount of letting.

Go and just trusting, which I don't know, but I think that having the opportunity to do that when it presents itself, if I can do that, maybe it's like mitigated risk.

But now my heart will be beating really fast.

You know, you've had such an interesting career. Your life is very it's really interesting, and you've got you've been through a lot. What was the path that sort of kept leading you with a light that's sort of bringing you forward to eventually becoming a successful, very successful actors.

I went to a school and I grew up in a place that helped me because I was not an easy child.

I think I was hugely emotional and had.

A tough time focusing, needed to be physical all the time, and this channel of creativity when I discovered that I could write, and I had a teacher who supported that hugely from the very beginning, from like nine ten years old and acting and being in every play and music and when I couldn't do math, my math teacher was so extraordinary and he said, don't sit here, struggling, You're going to suck all the attention from the rest of the class. Go to the music school. I play music.

Oh my god, I'm lucky you It helped.

Yeah, Suddenly there were these avenues that all of the difficult things could be funneled into. And that's not to say that they didn't remain difficult. But you can't stop the hurricane, but you can know how to build a shelter. So that and I was always aware of what an unbelievable gift.

And opportunity it was.

No one can prepare you, because nobody really knows what devastation lies ahead as well, and the price that you will pay, and like what you're willing to sacrifice. And in those moments of real turmoil and like huge slumps, like in I suppose what is perceived success, those were the moments of like incredible growing. And I think because of the way that I was raised and my school, even when I was in this agony of unemployment or a broken heart or whatever, yeah, I knew I could

Part of that.

Like I don't separate out like writing a book, from like having the most incredible role in a TV show or a movie, or writing music or performing music, like it's all from the same crucible. Finding this tiny little place by the beach in Malibu, my little tiny cottage and surfing every day became a way of resetting all of the other stuff that was asked of me as a person with.

A profile that has to be maintained in a certain way.

Yeah, sure, your cottage. When you refer to your cottage, I found this you're happy place.

Yeah.

Yeah, And that's where a lot of people never find it. They keep searching for it. Did you know when you saw it? Yes.

I has to get up super early, like you know, four fifteen in the morning to be out first light surf in the dark of Malibu when there was no one out, and then maybe get like twenty or thirty minutes in before the guys came out and I couldn't get any more waves. And then really early I'd go into Malibu and there was still overrun by insane stores and oh yeah, change now.

But it was there used to be a lot of mom and power. There was this lovely girl who was working in this shop.

It was like a boutique, and I just went in there in my swimsuit and we were chatting, and I said, how does someone who doesn't have sixty million dollars that's how much they cost back there.

Now they're double that. What do you do? And she went, oh, you can do it. My parents live up the way and they live in this place, and you can come up. My dad's going up with me. I'll show you.

We went up to this place, and the minute I got out of the car, I know that there is a lot of sacred land like in California and Native land, and I know there's a lot of power in the land. I can only tell you that it's such a house that was this place, and I just rented their house.

But at that time, everyone who.

Lived in this little community I live in, like lived there like thirty forty fifty years.

You didn't sell them. They weren't. Like when I bought my place.

I remember Jay Lenno making fun of me on his talk shirt because I live in this place, and I just remember laughing and going, sure, this is going to keep everybody away. No one's gonna I was like, yeah, sure, it's it sucks, it's terrible, it's not swanky, and it's not You're absolutely right, nobody should come and live there.

And kept them away for a while. And now, oh my god, studio heads.

And directors and it's just bananas.

Now.

I guess they're the and I'm sure it makes money, and the first are incredibly high.

But what we've lost is this community that we used to have around the actual lumberyard, around the movie theater, around the ice cream store.

There was a skate park. It's now a whole foods like.

It's so it's it's so difficult if you don't defend the things that actually keep your new together societally.

And I'm a huge believer in community. I've seen what it does to people in terms of.

Rehabilitating individuals and families and keeping us kind of you're right connected and that.

The minute you.

Get rid of that's when you get so much dissolutions and division, and these schisms are created where you're just reacting to somebody.

Because of the amount of money they have, not because of.

The conversation you had completely, you know, standing outside the coffee.

Shop, right, completely and inevitably, And what's so horrible about that? In Malibu and I've seen it, you know, we would go out. I grew up on the East Coast, but like in the early seventies, they were all five, five and dime shops and it was one big movie theater.

It was like drive ins and all that stuff.

And over time, of course, that's all gone away, very very similar. Prices are exorbitant, can't afford it, The people that grew up there can't live there. But you use the specialness of that walking across the street going to the ice cream parlor, knowing the guy that owns it, the multi generational family that.

Has has that can and and I.

Think that's a huge issue here that we're having as far as community and in America.

It's a microlo exactly that, right.

I always keep saying that it has to be a pivot, There has to be a pivot. So yes, many, I think keep on wanting to call you a million. You can so beautiful a million. Dad calls really okay, so I'm gonna call you a million, so Amelia. So I think it comes down now to individual choices that you're going to live a life that you're gonna get as close to that as you can. It's just you have your cottage, your relationship with the people in your life, and you just have to we have to just bring

Thanks for joining us on Table for two. Our guest, Mini Driver, is very busy these days. She has two movies premiering in September, an amazing podcast called Many Questions, and is playing Queen Elizabeth on the second season of The Serpent Queen. I'm curious what true her to playing a character from history.

You're very busy, honestly, I know that The Surper Queen dropped season two, Dar, so you have that, but like you know, you make reference to wanting to play Queen Elizabeth and in your family to that the family play role.

Was there anything that.

It was interesting my dad. I mean, yeah, they did.

And my dad used to play polo with King Charles because my dad had a polo teach, so I knew him that the polo. I knew this very nice, lovely, polite gentleman who I knew was somebody important. The royal family is very present in the UK, like when you're growing up, and no matter if your dad plays a rarefied sport with the future King of England, you were aware of them all the time, And certainly with Queen Elizabeth. I remember when we learned about her in school when

Right, that's some way to look at it. Why are we still talking about her? And then you're teaching me like can you believe?

By the way, that was essentially what my English teachers said about Shakespeare when it was always on the curriculum for all of our exams.

I was like, why is it always Shakespeare? Why is it not you.

Know, Ben Johnson, why are him? And he was like, because he's so fucking good.

There's nobody better. That's why.

What did you love about playing? Like when you got the opportunity to play.

Her, I just love the way they said. Justin Hayes honestly is for me, one of the great writers working today. He is a genius writer. And his take on Elizabeth, on this idea of these powerful women. Have to remember that at that period in history, women couldn't even own own anything, not just property.

They couldn't in nineteen seventy five.

Exactly, it's banana. It's like the because women themselves were chattel. So first of all, there's like this whole female experience, and then you suddenly have these queens. You have Captain de Medici in France and you have Queen Elizabeth in England, and they were friends over letters, even though apparently they never met, but we don't know for sure. There was something about the unicornness of a woman being in that position and the fact that she had the longest reign

This is just fucking business. This is how it is.

It's amazing awareness of that.

Then, yeah, of course there was stuff going on behind the scenes.

Of course there was.

It really is, and this idea that it's also persisted, the idea that you can't have sex unless you're married. Because she never got married, she must have been a virgin queen. It's no So I love evolving that idea. I love the exploration of Elizabeth as a woman, and I know it can only be.

Imagined because we don't know.

Pivoting.

I want to talk about your podcast because I think it's such a joy to listen to you if you're not listening to Mini's podcast. You've picked seven questions that you've consistently asked your guests on your show.

So one is how do you pick a guest?

And then has there been a consistent sort of human behavior that you've seen that we share even though we're all different.

Yeah, well, essentially that what you said, because what I like is the.

The idea if you create.

A sort of constricted environment, which the same seven questions is a particular discipline. So what that does is it it makes people feel safe, and then it also makes them feel like they're in control. I've noticed is the thing amount of people is. That's a really good place to begin from. But those questions, I realized they're just tinder to ignite that the way someone thinks about the world,

Really truly, because it doesn't.

Matter how much somebody prepares your selfdom seeps out. So someone will answer their question and then I'll ask a follow up and then suddenly.

All is revealed.

Or some people don't like to see the questions beforehand, and I'll ask a question and out will bubble. This amazing response has been triggered by something that happened that very day.

But the essential idea of.

The show I think makes people feel it's completely manageable. I don't have to sit there and they're not going to ask me about my love life. They're not going to ask me about this there or the other.

I don't know.

I guess I always felt Q and as I loved doing those kind of interviews, I was like, send me a set of questions that I can sit and think back.

Yeah.

The reason that I why I launched a lunch that's we're in person.

It's because I feel like because it's basically the same thing.

There's a romance in a meal, there's a intimacy with eye contact, and inevitably I might definitely know, like, oh I want to hear about your films coming out in Toronto.

I'm gonna throw out the Serpent Queens, you know, season two. You know you have put the professional pieces of you.

But inevitably we are talking about other things because we have taken the time to connect is to humans for this moment, and I think that's things are revealed that are beautiful or kind or emotional, and that's really that's all we got.

It really is.

You've had such a career and if you're looking at Famelia now looking back, how have you navigated this decade of our life? I happened things are very important and an incredible decade.

It is like the big And I always used to think whenever I would hear people talking about their fifties, I always felt like, oh, yeah, you're just trying to spin being.

A yeah yeah, yeah yeah, or your wisdom.

Sure.

And I really did think that in my thirties and actually maybe even my forties. And the reality is.

I felt like it is the most extraordinarily clarifying moment. All of the wisdom, all the threads that I could never quite weave together. I feel like I actually am. I'm braiding myself, I am weaving them. I was constantly grabbing for different bits and modalities and this thing and is it this thing, and mastering some of it and not mastering other bits. And suddenly now it's like I

I don't have as much as I use.

I think that's true.

I think there is the sort of laser focus and this is what I want to do.

I know what I want to do. And we've gone.

Through the twenties and thirties and forties, and each one is you can see say.

They're all beautiful, and they all have.

That completely and necessarily to get to messiness or the loves of the twenties and the youth and all that to lead you to your thirties to begin your We both had children in our forties.

I believe.

The podcast is amazing because when you listen to you answer and you share, which is also very beautiful, which I love, because you make it's a conversation. It's not like I'm going to ask you questions and you're just gonna I really did love the Debbie Harry one. She's something else and there was something about her too when she answered the questions. I was almost like a little intimidated by actually, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You asked me. Okay, I guess that's all answer.

By the way, I've really learned that.

Sometimes someone's no is it's revealing about them as a person, and they they should be allowed to have that.

So when someone just goes yeah.

Or no to a question that I've asked, instead of getting flustered, I now start to chuckle, going.

Oh wow, all right, that's okay. I wonder what it is around that.

And sometimes I'll even ask and go, that was really definitive, that no, or that yeah was really definitive.

And it's often about.

Quick thinking and going is that speaking to a larger issue around whatever it is that they've said no or yes to you don't judge someone on their reactions, which is very difficult to do on a podcast.

I can do it. I'm just gonna I'm gonna listen if.

It's over, if it's in it's completion, which is another thing when you like, have you found that in life? We have all these ideas that things are going to be forever and then they end, whether it's whether it's that was it's forever.

I did think everything was forever. I gotta tell you you do. I did if it was like if you fell in.

Love, it was going to be you were going to be with them forever?

And then did you When I was in my twenties, ually like year one was great, Year two.

Was like how do I get out of this?

And then terrible?

How did you say you have the same sort of rhythm?

I list, Yeah, Honestly, this is the longest relationship I've ever been in and we're like in year six. So he's the greatest, And I'm so funny because that's the other thing that I think I realized or again using that word clarified in my book, which was all of those relationships that in quotes didn't work out, they were

It's going to all work out, for sure.

It took a long time for me to let go of that expectation that this person had to be the one.

Well, I also think each one of those brings you to him.

Yeah, definitely, because without any of all of that, without any of all the years that we've lived. Like someone once said, I'm fifty eight years old, but still there's a seventeen year old is still in me.

That piece of you doesn't go all the way.

No, exactly.

Welcome back to Table for two. A couple of years ago, Many released her memoir Managing Expectations. The essays in the book are both funny and honest, and I'm curious how she went about the writing process.

And just so you know, Minnie's book is called Managing Expectations, a memoir and essays, and it's beautiful.

What was that process? And that's not easy, that's a very emotional thing to do.

Yeah, yeah, definitely, it was a function. The actually getting it done was a function of COVID, you know, on like day three, so like March fifteenth or sixteenth, man Jason, who is a very old friend of mine in addition to being my manager, he called me.

And he was like this, you got all this time. What are you going to do?

I started the podcast and he said, if you were going to write a book, what would it look like?

So I wrote as if he were a.

Teacher at my school giving me an assignment. We talked about it at dinner my son, Addison, my boyfriend, and me that night and I was like, okay, so I want to write a book, and my son went, well, it would be your stories. Because he's now lived long enough to see that there is very little I love more than telling stories. And my favorite thing is telling stories that I know people have heard before, but telling them again in a different way and getting a new laugh out of them.

I find that incredibly satisfying.

The next day, I went, okay, I'm just going to start with the stories that I maybe three stories that I know I've told that are so hardwired into my life.

And I began there. I wrote this proposal of what these stories might look like. And we then went out and sold.

I already said, look at this is not going to be a tell or it was never going to be a celebrity memoir. So then I started with these stories.

But there was so much humor in it as well.

Telling and we have a story like that, we're at eleven years old, you're traveling alone, and you can look at it and you can see the humor in it, but you can also see, well, like, this is insane.

Yeah it was insane. It was and devastating, but it was.

You then start going that created a level of independence and the fact that everything was fine and I was fine, and I did go on this bizarre adventure that was part of the infrastructure of how I think I moved to Hollywood when I was twenty five years twenty four years old. I could move seven thousand miles away from home, still loving my family and not wanting to and have the best time, knowing no one.

Right. Well, I think that all that.

Develops the strength of character that brings you into the room, because you also chose a very tough profession and you you know, you mentioned you know, goodwill hunting and what that did, and.

That was that's become.

This was not only an incredible movie where it came out, but it's still amazing.

It's a cult classic. It's an amazing film that you did.

Some movies just they age out, you're like, oh my god, I love that.

Movie when I saw but it's just not other, but definitely that movie no matter what age you are.

Now, we made a classic. And it's very rare to make those kinds of films. It's very difficult to keep making good films.

So much has to come into alignment for movies to be good on all the levels. Received well, I have a timeless quality, great performances, wonderful time on set.

It was the happiest experience shooting that movie.

The movie has touched people for now twenty five years or whatever it's been like there was. That's very special, and it's the very beginning of these two extraordinary careers of Matt and Ben. This beautiful performance of an icon in Robin Williams.

Everyone who is in it, everyone, but it was very lowcly.

I mean turn.

So speaking of movies, so you have two films that are going to be in the film.

Yeah, very different films.

Yeah, it's kind of wild.

Yeah.

One is this extraordinary film that stars Alusia Vikander and Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel.

It's a kind of dystopian future where if you want.

To have a child, you have to be assessed by an assessor. It's called the Assessment, and Elusivikanda plays the assessor and it is this extraordinary journey into I think, what it means to be a parent or what it means to want to have a child, but set against in a very Alex Garland way in a way, this dystopian idea of the future. We all take this drug to remain looking young called synoxin, and I think I'm one hundred and eighty three years old in it, but

Wow, I forgot about that sum Yeah.

And so that is this movie that we made, which is an ensemble piece with Patrick Wilson, Julianna Marguley's.

Benjamin Bratt, Rishian Mare, Campbell, Scott Eddie.

Amazing, amazing and a very sort of adult grown up movie about relationships.

What do you love about me?

Oh my god?

Honestly, from like the cables snaking across the floor to the kind of harod ads with their ear pieces in.

The quiet on set, I don't know what it is, but it feels like home. It's this idea of like.

You're playing you're literally playing make believe and everyone's taking it really seriously and you know that it's going to be metabolized in a way that makes people feel a whole other thing, Like, it's such a beautiful con for people to be to enjoy themselves watching you play that.

They're called movies not because it's a moving image, but because they move people, They move you.

And you get to be like a conduit for all the things that people they don't want to feel, those big emotions in their life, they want to.

Watch you do that.

And particularly if you don't find that difficult to do. I mean, perhaps it's difficult to do well.

No, I think it is. I think you have to be talented like yourself. Not everyone can do it, and a lot of things have to come together.

But yeah, it's funny. I don't know what is that.

I know certain things that make a great actor in my opinion, but there is this kind of special there is this special something that is really unquantifiable that certain actors have.

I've been actually looking recently.

I've been watching movies and thinking about that, and watching movies with people that.

I just I was about to ask, who are the people that.

So Isabel Lupere is my I can watch Emma Stone all day long, Michael Fassbender, Alicia the Canada, Sean Penn and Dan day lewis probably being the I think he was the king.

Of all of them. I love watching them. I actually love.

Watching Margot Robbie work because it's also she's such a fine actress, and it's like, in a way, it's like, don't be taken in by her.

Beautiful she is.

She is so finely tuned to emotion, and she holds her space so brilliantly and doesn't incroach on other people's There's something incredibly delicate and very powerful about that.

I agree she has a very special quality.

I think she's magical.

Yeah, she really is.

I've had such a great time having much of you, and there's so many things.

If you've pulled up a chair with.

Missing me driver, I'm just staring at you because you're you're mesmerizing, just so you know, you're mesmerizing you and you're a doer and you and I can feel it. You've inspired me today, which is I think right is all about thank you for taking the time wow today.

Thank you so much for having me.

It was really delicious and it was really lovely talking to you.

Good.

Thank you, Thank you everyone, Thank you for falling up at chair and have a great dead.

Thank you for pulling up a chair.

I love our lunches and never forget the romance of a meal. If you enjoy the show, please tell a friend and rate and review us on Apple podcast. Table for two with Bruce Bozzi is produced by iHeartRadio seven three seven Park and Airmail. Our executive producers are Bruce Bosi and Nathan King. Our supervising producer Dylan Fagan. Our editors are Vincent to Johnny and Cas b Bias. Table

And Jesse Funk. Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our talent booking is done by Jane Sarkin.

Table for Two's social media manager is Gracie Wiener. Special thanks to Amy Sugarman, Uni Scherer, Kevin Yvane, Bobby Bauer, Alison Kanter, Graber, Barbara Jen, Jeff Klein, and the staff.

At the Tower Bar in the world famous Sunset Tower Hotel.

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