Joe Skinner (Narration): To put it simply, Minnie Driver is a really cool person, and not just because of her legendary performance as Skylar in “Good Will Hunting,” but also definitely because of that.
Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting): You’re going to marry some rich prick who your parents will approve of, and just sit around with the other trust fund babies and talk about how you went slumming too once.
Minnie Driver (Good Will Hunting): Why are you saying this? What is your obsession with this money? My father died when I was 13, and I inherited this money. You don’t think every day I wake up and I wish that I could give it back? That I would give it back in a second if it meant I could have one more day with them. But I can’t. Then that’s my life, and I deal with it. So don’t put your [censored] on me when you’re the one that’s afraid.
Joe Skinner (Narration): She was nominated for Best Supporting actress at the Oscars for that role, and she’s been in dozens of other projects movies like “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” TV shows like “The Riches.” She even voiced a lead role in the English dub of “Princess Mononoke.” Like I said, these are the credentials of a very cool person, and she’s been a working musician this whole time, too. First signing with EMI records in 2001. Her song “Invisible Girl” reached number 68 on the UK music charts.
Jay Leno (Archival): Please welcome Minnie Driver.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Here she is with that song on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” back in 2004.
Minnie Driver performs “Invisible Girl.”
Joe Skinner (Narration): She wrote a memoir that came out in 2022. Her award winning podcast is cleverly titled “Minnie Questions,” and ultimately, Minnie Driver doesn’t let herself get boxed into one discipline. For her, it all bleeds together. And that’s by design.
Minnie Driver: My music has always been part of my acting, and my acting has always been part of my music and my writing. Whether it was writing the records that I wrote or the script notes that I’ve done, the book that I wrote, it’s all part of the same consideration.
Joe Skinner: I feel like maybe 20 years ago, people were less involved in multiple disciplines than they are now. Would you agree with that or disagree with that idea?
Minnie Driver: Yeah, I think that, look, getting a seat at the table if you are a minority, a woman, has always been… You sort of had to shrink to fit whatever the prescription was. And I think as we have become, are becoming, I mean, it’s kind of at a glacial pace, but as we are becoming a more inclusive society, certainly in the Western world, you are allowed to be a multi-hyphenate, that actually, it’s now encouraged. I mean, yeah, we do seem to be in it in a slightly more expansive moment in some areas. I think we should just will be allowed to make stuff and put it out into the great big repository of the world and see what people want to consume.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Hi, I’m Joe Skinner and this is “American Masters: Creative Spark.” In each episode, our guest breaks down their creative process behind a single work of art. Today, I talked to Minnie Driver about how she crafted one of her most ambitious performances yet as Queen Elizabeth, the first in season two of “The Serpent Queen.” First, to understand why Minnie Driver was drawn to play one of the most powerful women in the history of the English monarchy, you need to understand her early days.
Minnie Driver: Really early on, I went to a school that was so amazing at identifying the pool of creativity and whether you were a scientist, or whether you were a contemporary dancer or a musician or a poet, they spoke to that holistic idea of creativity in a child. And so I very much grew up with it being porous. The fundament of like acting for me was with school and was the English Lit department and was the music school and was finding my voice as a singer and then on stage as an actor. And it was all interwoven, and it was all just about expression and kind of the harnessing of energy.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Minnie Driver went to Bedales School in Hampshire, England. It’s a progressive school with a reputation for fostering creativity. Back in ‘97, in an article for The Guardian, one of her old classmates, Harriet Lane, described Minnie Driver as having a “radiating enthusiasm.” She said she was a bigger, noisier, more ambitious teenager than the rest of them.
Minnie Driver: The English department was the drama department at my school and they were like, go and read every single Shakespeare. So I went and tried and I was about 11. I was like, I don’t understand any of this. So this English teacher sat with me and it’s like a language. It was like someone teaching me a language. Line by line. I think “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” we started there, and he unlocked this language of iambic pentameter, of masculine feminine endings, of rhythm, of like symbolism, of what he meant, of subtext. And I sort of learned this language. This is extraordinary right, like here’s this whole other world.
Ian McKellen as Macbeth (Archival): Life is but a walking shadow. A poor player that struts and frets his hour up on the stage. And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
Joe Skinner: I failed my “Macbeth” test in high school. So I’m impressed by your discipline with Shakespeare. Did you have a favorite piece or favorite work at that time?
Minnie Driver: Yeah, I mean, always the ones that I wasn’t supposed to love. Like, I love Coriolanus, I love Volumnia, I love his mother. Like. And that was me at like 14, going God, she’s amazing. This is so insane. Like, this is so. I don’t know what it was. It was like this mother son relationship.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Volumnia is one of Shakespeare’s more complex and strong female characters. She’s a bold and domineering mother who centers her attention on pushing her son to succeed, creating a mother-son relationship that’s both fraught and tightly bound.
Volumnia in Coriolanus (Archival): You might have been enough the man you are with, striving less to be so, lesser had been the thwarting of your dispositions if you hadn’t showed them, how you were disposed ere they lacked power to cross you.
Minnie Driver: I remember when I was getting into drama school auditioning, I’d just seen Judi Dench play it, and I was like, oh, that’s the speech for me. It always has been. And I remember people going, this is a terrible idea. You should really be playing Viola or Juliet, like, you’re 17, 16, like, what are you doing? I was like, no, no, it’s this, this woman, this middle-aged mother is the one for me. And I think there was something sort of insane about that. But I also think that the characters that Shakespeare wrote, you should be able to dive into all of them, male, female, old, young. They speak to everything in all of us.
Joe Skinner: So do you subscribe to any kind of acting methods, so to speak? What was your training like?
Minnie Driver: Oh my God, my training was honestly reading books. If you read Dickens, if you read Thomas Hardy, if you read Melville, if you read Thoreau, what you’re looking at, the examination of character, circumstance, plot, nature, all of that is how I then sort of thinking about characters in plays or in TV shows or whatever it was, was like, there’s the whole world in the prose of a character that you sometimes have to create the prose. You find what’s there in a script, but you’re filling in the prose around it in the way that Dickens filled in the prose around a character. And I think always looking for more is my process. But it, honestly, it can be in nature. It can be in reading a book. When I’m playing a character, I’m going, okay, well, where have I felt some of these themes before, oh, it was in Jane Austen. I need that alacrity and that sharpness.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Having been well read and grounded in classics like Shakespeare, Minnie Driver headed out to drama school in London at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
Minnie Driver: I think I was very young. I was like, I was just a couple of weeks past my 18th birthday, which I know that’s when kids do go to college. But there were people in my year at school who’d been to university and were now coming to drama school, like they were proper grown-ups. And funnily enough, there was an awful lot that was figuring out what it wasn’t. If you see what I mean, I figured out a lot of what I knew acting wasn’t. So I was a bit of an idiot at school. I didn’t really learn a great deal. I learned more when I started working.
Joe Skinner (Narration): And she sure did start working. She graduated drama school in 1991 and jumped right into acting roles, figuring things out by doing the work. She cut her teeth with British dramas like the made for TV movie in 1990 called “God on the Rocks.”
Excerpt of Minnie Driver in “God on the Rocks.”
Joe Skinner (Narration): Eventually, she landed a lead role as Benny Hogan in the ’95 film “Circle of Friends.”
Excerpt of Minnie Driver in “Circle of Friends.”
Joe Skinner (Narration): It’s projects like these that helped Driver find her creative process through trial and error.
Minnie Driver: For me, whatever blows you hair back, like whatever gets you to that thing, you do it. If it’s not hurting anybody. Go. Go right ahead. But I’ve always looked to try and find a method or a pattern. And for me, every project in a way asks something different.
Joe Skinner (Narration): By 1997, she was starring opposite John Cusack in the cult classic “Grosse Pointe Blank.”
Excerpt of Minnie Driver in “Grosse Pointe Blank.”
Joe Skinner (Narration): For Driver, where she wasn’t finding her process was in an overly prescriptive rulebook or set of guidelines. It had to be more organic.
Minnie Driver: You have to find whatever works for you. You know, it’s hard when you’ve been told this is the way from A to Z, because I just don’t believe that’s true. I think at any point in your creative process, you can go, no, that’s not true. This isn’t the way. It’s this way. And it might seem weird to everybody else, but if it gets you to the place where you feel connected, which is really all it is right? Do I feel connected? And do I feel like what I’m saying is true? I think that that’s my distillation of what it is I’m trying to do. You have to throw away all of the work that you you’ve done, even though you’ve done all this work, in order to figure out what it is like if something isn’t working, being ready to chuck everything out, well, maybe not chuck everything out, but be able to shake the Etch-A-Sketch and just go back and go, okay, I just need to reform this. It’s all in there. I just need to put it together differently. It’s like being in love, you know? You just know. You just know when it’s right and whether that’s putting on, you know, a false nose and a funny pair of shoes, but you suddenly get there, or whether that’s reading a poem and you’re suddenly there. I don’t think anyone should ever restrict themselves to how they get to the place of sharing what they do creatively.
Joe Skinner (Narration): But perhaps most important for Driver is to be ready and present when the camera’s ready to roll. When you’re on everyone else’s time.
Minnie Driver: I don’t like to be working or doing anything once you’re on set. When you’re on set, it’s a whole other organism, you know? You just got to be ready. You got to be ready to turn in a million different directions and not be, for me, not be precious about whether some guy’s smoking in the corner or whether there’s a light shining in your eyes, whether it’s a good day or a bad day. You just have to be ready. So there’s a kind of practicality that I feel about acting as well. It’s just like, do your job. Get on with it. You can’t [censored] around. There’s too many people trying to make that film with you, you know? So be as precious as you want in the process and then be a proper worker on the day. That’s my process. There you are.
Joe Skinner (Narration): After a quick break, more with Minnie Driver about how she was a proper worker in her recent performance as Queen Elizabeth I, and how she found universal truths in one of England’s most politically savvy and effective rulers.
There are only a few historical figures with as complex a legacy as Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth had a fairly tragic upbringing. Soon after she was born, her father, the King of England, beheaded her mother. Eventually, after much of her family passed away while seated on the throne, the crown became hers at age 25. She famously never married or had children, so she was the last monarch in the House of Tudor up until her death in 1603. England’s economy grew under her leadership, along with the country’s art and culture. It should be noted that Elizabeth also imprisoned her cousin, who threatened her place on the throne for 19 years and eventually executed her. Like I said, she had a complex legacy. So how do you play such a complicated historical figure?
Minnie Driver: This is a historical character who existed definitively. You know, there’s a finite number of portraits that exist of her. There’s a finite number of books and history, and I could research all of that. But then there’s the idea of who that woman is that we can’t know. So you fabulate. You know, you use your kind of subjectivity to go, oh, what is this? And I found it in lots of different ways. A huge amount of my character was from the four-hour process of hair and makeup and costume, like she would sort of be revealed after having consumed lots of ideas about a person and then who she was as a woman, and then the revelation of this extraordinary costume that she wore. That’s sort of how I came by her.
Joe Skinner: Well, I read that it took quite a physical toll at times too. I’m just curious to learn more about how, you know, with a period piece, the production design is so intense, the costume and the makeup is so intense. What kind of immense shift happens once you actually are in that space? Does it really feel palpably different for you?
Minnie Driver: Yeah. You can’t help but kind of rise up. You have to rise up to meet those costumes, those sets. It helps enormously, helps enormously with the character. I think. I’ve done a lot of period pieces and I love it. I mean, I hate the corsets, but I do love, because it’s proper dress up, which is really all it’s about for me. You know, dressing up in clothes, pretending to be someone else. I really, honestly like doing stuff in modern dress. Like it’s, I don’t know, it’s pretty boring to me. I really like looking completely different. Feeling completely different. I think it’s fun. Never underestimate the power of dressing up from when you were a kid, the dressing up, the dress up box, the all the different things. Like it’s not more complicated than that, or that’s at least the beginning. The idea of dressing up to become another person, that also has an internal process. There’s a dressing up of all these different parts of this character that you’re playing, but you can always bring it back to you put on a hat, you look like a different person or a different version of yourself that, you know, there’s often a lot of external things that can help trigger an internal work or world, and to never underestimate that or forget the power of play. I think it’s really important.
Joe Skinner (Narration): It’s become something of a time honored tradition to play the larger than life Queen Elizabeth I. To date, several actresses have put on the corset and taken on the test in award winning turns. Minnie is in very good company in this lineage, like Cate Blanchett.
Cate Blanchett (Archival): Tell him if he wants to shake his little fist at us, we’ll give him such a bite he’ll wish he’d kept his hands in his pockets.
Joe Skinner (Narration): There’s also Margot Robbie in 2018’s “Mary, Queen of Scots.”
Margot Robbie (Archival): You were right when we spoke a half lifetime ago. You said the day would come and that day has come.
Joe Skinner (Narration): And Helen Mirren in the 2005 series, “Elizabeth I.”
Helen Mirren (Archival): Before I hang you or manage to hang you now, with my own hands too, get out of my sight!
Joe Skinner (Narration): Even one of Minnie’s first inspirations for acting, Judi Dench, played Elizabeth the first in 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love.”
Judi Dench (Archival): The Queen of England does not attend exhibitions of public lewdness, so something is out of joint.
Joe Skinner: There’s been several other, performers, obviously, that have taken on some pretty legendary approaches to Elizabeth I. Were you referencing them at all? Were you kind of re-watching those films and shows?
Minnie Driver: Nah nah nah nah, definitely not. Definitely not. Because I also feel like people’s interpretations are sovereign. You know? That’s their world. I’m not going to go and pick over what someone else has done, because we have this finite information about Elizabeth, and then it’s sort of up to you to fill that out as a human. But there’s also this weird thing that I found with playing Elizabeth that she comes to meet you, like, this character shows up to meet you, and you have to, in a way, embody that. It’s quite hard to explain. I wonder if it’s the specter of, like, such a powerful energy that she has just survived all of these hundreds of years. So clearly, in all of our minds, still.
Joe Skinner (Narration): In “The Serpent Queen,” Driver takes on an especially sardonic and expressive version of Elizabeth.
Minnie Driver (The Serpent Queen): My darling cousin.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Who stands tall and domineering and a little bit unhinged.
Minnie Driver (The Serpent Queen): Goodness, I had no idea you were being kept in such horrid conditions.
Queen Elizabeth’s Cousin Mary (The Serpent Queen): What? I have been here for five years…
Minnie Driver (The Serpent Queen): For five?
Queen Elizabeth’s Cousin Mary (The Serpent Queen): And before that, a rather gruesome tower in Scotland for six.
Minnie Driver (The Serpent Queen): Oh boo. I will see what I can do. It’s not me, though, you understand. Oh, I have these counselors, men, of course, old men who think they know better than I do, better how to steer the great ship of state. Men who think me a trifling weak breeder who couldn’t possibly undertake such an endeavor on her own. The truth is, they’re frightened of us, as well they should be, don’t you think?
Joe Skinner: What part of you do you feel you’ve brought to Elizabeth I?
Minnie Driver: Well, there’s a physicality that I have, whether it’s from sort of being tall and really athletic and very strong physically. And the minute you put me into a corset and these giant clothes, I become so much bigger than I am. I’m already quite big. And there’s this terrible restraint that a corset puts on your body, like genuine physical agony. It is awful. You can’t breathe, it pinches, it’s tight. You have these welts on your body at the end of the day, and yet it gives you a spine and it gives you this, this countenance. So it was really interesting. Like, physically, I felt like I could inhabit this huge character, because she is a huge character, in a way that was physically imposing and interesting.
Joe Skinner: When I was watching, I really noticed the sense of humor that you brought to it.
Minnie Driver: It is. It’s funny, it’s funny, and it’s sort of bawdy and like, I like that. That’s all part of the armor that she had to have. I always went back to the fact that people were constantly trying to kill her. I thought of her as this person, waking up every day wondering if today was the day someone was going to try and kill her, and that she was going to have as much fun, be as interested in everything, and live fully every single day because you never knew if it was going to be your last. So there was like an immediacy and a humor that I wanted her to have.
Joe Skinner (Narration): It should be noted that “The Serpent Queen” is not actually a TV show strictly about Queen Elizabeth I. It started out as a show about the life of Catherine de Medici, the 16th century Queen of France. In its second season, Elizabeth I is introduced and the two powerful women meet. Something that likely never happened in real life but makes for great television. It’s a battle of power and ambition and in a way, an exploration of two powerful businesswomen going head to head. It’s often a two-hander between Minnie Driver and actress Samantha Morton.
Minnie Driver: It was amazing to go up against another very powerful not only character but actor, who is female. It’s a totally different vibe and sensation when there isn’t any kind of sex underlying anything, when there isn’t jostling for position of how one is positioned against a man, it’s always really, I mean, it’s interesting and I haven’t done it very often. There’s something incredible about the imagining of these two women meeting, even though we don’t think they met, although everybody travels in secret and who knows, they might well have. It wasn’t that far across the pond, you know, from England to France. But as far as we know, they didn’t. So just the imagining of these two great characters from history meeting like, that’s really fun. That’s amazing. That’s like when you know, other characters from the Marvel Universe show up in other movies, you know, people like that. It’s fun.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The larger than life dramatizations of “The Serpent Queen” are the invention of Justin Haythe, the show’s creator. And it really becomes a showcase for these two actors to play off each other.
Minnie Driver: There was also such a sharpness and a wit and an alacrity that Justin wrote into her. And then he led into that once we spent time together and he wrote the last two episodes, once he knew me more, and I think he leant into my quite sharp, quite articulate, quite fast way of speaking. And that then became this wonderful tool. But there’s, you know, there’s a scene in “The Serpent Queen,” which is maybe I mean, it’s one of my favorite scenes I’ve ever shot in anything, ever. And it’s at the very end and it’s, it’s with Catherine de Medici, with Samantha Morton. And like, really going toe to toe with an unbelievably brilliant actor in an unbelievably brilliant scene where you say a lot of really interesting [censored], Justin encouraged me to drop everything, all of the all of the artifice, all of the all of the bearing, all of the Queenliness, to drop all of it and to just get in her face and [censored] let her have it.
Minnie Driver (The Serpent Queen): Let me explain something to you. Men have been marrying women off for thousands of years. My own father, for example, was a pig-headed fool. But his will was irresistible. He defied a Catholic god and the whole country went with him. Your late father in law, Francis I was almost his equal. They did what they did as men, unapologetic in their appetites. You and I don’t have such luxury. So, yes, I must pose as a virgin and you as a witch to get what we want.
Minnie Driver: That woman lives inside Elizabeth. So I was very interested in examining who the woman was inside the political beast that we saw and what the overlapping areas were. I mean, I’m still fascinated by her. I could play out all day, every day, and I didn’t. I didn’t get enough of a chance. I wish I could have done it more and for longer.
Joe Skinner: What of Elizabeth I do you think you’ll be kind of carrying with you?
Minnie Driver: Her sharp eye, the way that she played. The whole thing was a game to be taken very, very seriously. But nonetheless, she played in the space. And I think that’s something that I think about a lot is particularly when things are challenging or difficult in any capacity. I really think, how can I find the play in this? How can I play with, with, with these different parts and take it less seriously but more sincerely? So kind of find a focus in not holding on so tightly. There was a confidence that Elizabeth had that I loved. She was confident in her ability to sort of be in the present moment, I think.
Joe Skinner: What do you find to be universal about Elizabeth I?
Minnie Driver: Gosh. I mean, if you think back at that time in the late 16th century or middle 16th century, women couldn’t own anything. They weren’t even they weren’t allowed to own so much as a bowl. And here was a woman who was the Queen of England who, yes, people were constantly trying to kill her. But there’s this wonderful for me universality about Elizabeth that speaks to the way that women are powerful. But they we’re so often not allowed to be represented in that way or haven’t historically. And her duty, and her sense of commitment to something other than herself also has always felt like a huge feminine trope, even though she wasn’t, as far as we know, a mother, she was a kind of a mother to a queendom. So this kind of triumphing over the position that women have so often found themselves in, I’ve always found very universal, and she is a character that we return to over and over again. She is so interesting. Her clothes are interesting. The strange symbols and amulets she had woven into her clothes, the way that she presented herself as a terrifying specter in a way, in order to maintain power. She did whatever it took. Yeah, she cut some heads off. But not as many as others. She brought peace to a country that hadn’t seen peace in a thousand years. I’m fascinated by her. Always have been. Always, always have been.
Joe Skinner: I think that’s a great note to end on. I appreciate you taking the time.
Minnie Driver: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it.
Joe Skinner (Narration): That’s our show. Thank you so much to Minnie Driver for taking the time to talk. “The Serpent Queen” just finished season 2, so you can stream the entire series on Starz now. And don’t forget, if you like what you heard, please rate and review the show, and tell your friends to listen to “American Masters: Creative Spark” on the iHeart app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. You can also listen on our site at pbs.org/americanmasters.
“American Masters: Creative Spark” is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner, and by Artis Curiskis. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Josh Broome.
Funding for “American Masters: Creative Spark” was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, the Marc Haas Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Charina Endowment Fund, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, and the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation.
