You'd have to admit there's some weird circularity at play there, even if the Adam of Girls – all hyperactive masculinity and unfocused energy – is as far from the passive, poetry-writing hero of Jim Jarmusch's Paterson as you can possibly imagine.

So which of them is closer to the real you, I ask Driver?

"Both," he says. "There is no such thing [as the real me]. I have no idea who I am. Does anyone? They're both characters where you draw from your experiences, different parts of yourself. So there isn't one in particular who's closer to who I am, I guess."

The same applies to Kylo Ren, he insists. The villain of last year's Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the sequel, which he has already filmed for release next December, is no less a version of himself than the other characters.

"I feel like you try to make them all as personal as possible. Even though with Star Wars the setting is 'a long time ago in a galaxy far away', it's not like those relationships, the family dynamic, is something that people can't relate to. It's not like you can't make it personal."

From the outside, the rise of Adam Driver appears to have been stratospheric. He was nowhere, then there was Girls, which debuted in 2012, and now he's everywhere – in indie pics such as Noah Baumbach's brilliant While We're Young, in the multiplexes with Star Wars, and straddling both spaces with a lead role in Martin Scorsese's tale of religious persecution Silence, which lands in January after a 20-year gestation.

But as with most overnight success stories, Driver's journey has been far longer and slower than it seems.

He applied for a spot on the acting program at Juillard, the most prestigious performing arts school in the United States, when he was 17. He didn't get in, and he didn't have a fallback plan, but he knew he had to get out of Indiana, where things between him and his folks (his stepfather was a preacher, just like his father had been) were tense.

He set off with his mini-fridge in the back of his car and a desire to make it in Hollywood. He got as far as Santa Monica before running out of money and heading back home, just a week after leaving.

He was aimless, drifting, flirting with trouble when September 11 happened. Immediately, he said in a TED talk he gave last year, he was "filled with a sense of patriotism and retribution and the desire to do something". So he enlisted in the Marines.

As Adam in Lena Dunham's Girls, the role that launched his acting career.

He spent two years there, but didn't see active duty; he dislocated his sternum in a mountain biking accident, and was medically discharged. A lucky escape, some might say, but that's not how he felt.

"I loved being a marine … firing weapons is cool, driving and detonating expensive things is great," he told the TED audience. "Being told I wasn't getting deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan was devastating for me."

Aimless once more, he again tried his luck with Juilliard. This time they were ready for him. But he found the adjustment to civilian life tough.

"I couldn't justify … doing acting exercises where I gave birth to myself while my friends were serving without me overseas."

Eventually he came to see parallels between acting and the military; in both, the individual is sublimated to something more important than themselves, a team that is conjoined on a mission.

"I feel like acting is a service industry," he tells me. "I'm there to support the other people – the other actors, the crew, ultimately the director. What he does with it is beyond my control, so I don't really want to think about it as a finished thing. I like it feeling like a rehearsal process that someone films."

Driver in his days as a marine.

He tries to avoid watching his work because, he says, "it doesn't really help me. I don't want to try to make it perfect, and the things I have seen in the past, I'm thinking about those external elements, I'm not really focused on what we're doing in the scene. I don't want to be thinking about anything else but what's going on. It's all part of my surrendering responsibility."

He hasn't seen Paterson, and it's about three years since he shot it. Naturally he can't talk about the finished film, but he can talk about what he thinks Jarmusch was trying to achieve when they were making it.

The movie is a portrait of both a man and a town. Though it's a typically depressed post-industrial hub, Paterson has a surprisingly rich history in the arts, with Alan Ginsberg referencing it in Howl, William Carlos Williams writing a five-volume poem cycle about it, John Updike setting his 1997 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies there. It was the birthplace of Lou Costello (of the 1940s comedy duo Abbot and Costello) and it's featured in films, novels, songs and even an episode of The Sopranos. For a town of 140,000 or so, it punches above its weight.

In Star Wars: The Force Awakens as Kylo Ren. Photo: LucasFilm

"I think that's what Jim thought was unique about the place, what drew him to it – that a seemingly off-the-radar, random location has all this rich history," Driver says. With its dilapidated factories, set against the backdrop of the Passaic Falls, there is something at once beautiful and melancholy about the place, and that's pretty much the tone of the poetry Paterson scribbles in his notebook before starting his shift, or on his lunch break, or in his basement hidey hole in the evening.

His words come slowly, with much thought and effort, in fits and starts before finally bursting forth across the screen to Driver's narration. And it's these words taking shape that constitutes most of the drama and tension of the movie, which follows a week in its namesake's life, on the road, at home with his kooky Iranian wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), and in the bar where he stops each night to have his one beer while taking the dog for a walk.

But far from being dull, Paterson is a slow-burning delight from beginning to end.

"Jim wanted to make a movie that was an antidote to heavy action, heavy drama, heavy crisis – to actually present a relationship that's well functioning, people that are mutually inspired by each other, someone whose overall demeanour is agreeable," Driver explains. "It's kind of funny that that's a bold move to make."

With Naomi Watts in While We're Young.

Still, it must have been a little difficult to find your way into a character who is so internal, and so little given to action?

"Yeah, but I feel a lot of things are over-explained in movies, people say exactly how they feel. So to get a character whose main action is to observe and to listen to the things around him, I found that a really exciting thing to play for a few months."

Besides, he adds, "trusting that the power of thought is cinematic enough was not so much a leap of faith because I knew Jim was behind the camera".

The next thing we'll see Driver in is Silence, which demanded a leap of faith of an entirely different sort. Martin Scorsese's tale of Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan made the sort of serious physical demands on its cast that perhaps only a former marine could take pleasure in.

Driver as Paterson contemplates the Passaic Falls in Paterson. 

At the outset of the film, Driver's Father Francisco and Andrew Garfield's Father Sebastiao have been travelling by ship from Portugal to the Far East for the best part of two years, suffering malnutrition and dehydration and disease on the way.

"So Marty asked us to lose weight because it made sense for the story," says Driver. "And over the course of the movie they're very much being persecuted, so we lost more weight, to do a lot of storytelling physically."

Driver says at the outset he weighed 94 kilos, and by the end he was down to 71 kilos.

Shedding a quarter of his bodyweight was, he says, "very challenging" but in terms of performance it had its upside.

"Sometimes you're so tired all you can do is listen to what's happening in the scene, which is pretty great. You have no room really to put anything on top of it."

On the downside, "if something's not working, it's hard to focus on how to make it better. Some of your ideas go out the window."

They shot on a mountainside in Taiwan, with changeable weather and thin clothing. Pretty much everything was difficult.

For some actors, that would be reason for complaint. But for Driver, you get the sense it's part of the reason for doing it.

"It's good when you're playing persecuted priests to not have a retreat to your trailer, where you're well-fed and going drinking every night," he says. "It all helps in a way."

Words spoken, you might say, like a real trooper.

Five things you probably didn't know about Adam Driver

He grew up in a religious family. Twice. His father was a preacher in San Diego. After his parents divorced, his mother moved him and his sister to the small town of Mishawaka, Indiana, and remarried. A Baptist preacher. Go figure.

It may have been the zeitgeisty show of its generation when it debuted in 2012, but Driver has never watched Girls. In fact, he avoids watching all his work as much as possible. "I think it doesn't really help me," he says. "I don't want to try to make it perfect."

He missed the Marines when he left, but finally found a way to merge his past life and his present when in 2006 he launched Arts in the Armed Forces, a program he established with his wife, fellow Juilliard graduate Joanne Tucker. It stages no-frills performances of serious works for military personnel.

His chest – so familiar from all those shirtless scenes in Girls – has been a frequent topic of conversation on Twitter. There are dozens of Adam Driver accounts, even one named for his mole, but he doesn't have a Twitter account. Nor is he on Facebook or Instagram. "I don't understand technology, and I'm very scared of it," he once said, apparently in deadly earnest.

Adam Driver clearly takes his craft seriously, but he's a big Star Wars fan, and making The Force Awakens was by no means a just-for-the-money gig. "I got to be in Star Wars every day, that was pretty exciting." His highlights, he said, included, "walking in and seeing a life-size Tie Fighter, walking in and seeing the original cast, walking in and seeing Chewie, lots of opening doors to sets and rooms and just being blown away".

Karl Quinn is on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin