Exactly when did Adam Driver get hot? A timeline

I’ve written about Adam Driver before.

In fact, I’m sure there are a few articles sporting my byline circling the ethernet on Star Wars’ millennial dark prince. I can guarantee many of them center on his talent — he’s been nominated for multiple awards throughout the years including a couple of Oscars and the coveted Teen Choice Award for “Best Hissy Fit.” I pray none of them are the kind of clickbait, celebrity dating trash I reveled in writing during the unpaid internship era of my journalistic career. But I can promise, upon pain of death, that none of those Driver-themed elegies attempted the feat that I’m now undertaking.

Many will say it’s impossible. Some may question the ethical implications. Yet more will wonder why this even matters.

For all of this, I have no answer, except to say that one can only outrun their destiny for so long and fate has finally come to collect from me this investigative timeline into that most holiest of celebrity thirst traps: Sir Adam “Slap Some Ranch On Those Thighs” Driver.

The gods demand that we, as a fandom, pinpoint the exact moment Driver ascended the hotness mountaintop and, like Moses, led his people to the promised land – you know, for scientific purposes.

So throw off that societal shame and let your freak flag fly high during this extended whorantine because we’re revisiting Driver’s extensive filmography to see if we can spot the first signs that his BDE would one day become the stuff of legend.

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Sure, Driver had a couple of roles before Noah Baumbach put him in a deep V-neck and fedora and instructed him to go forth and dehydrate the masses. His first feature film was in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar and he had a Law & Order appearance or two to get those obligatory SAG credits out of the way. But it’s this Greta Gerwig-starring comedy that establishes Driver as a devilishly handsome bovine bulldozing his way through every scene and stealing screen time from Gerwig and the rest of the cast with his dangerous charm. It’s not just the perfectly-placed fedora, it’s that come hither look shaded by the statement hat that convinces us he could crack us open like a pistachio and we’d just say thank you.

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Oscar Isaac was the lead in this Coen Brothers drama about a struggling young folk musician trying to make it in '60s era New York. But Driver — who has a grand total of one scene in the nearly two-hour flick — is the one who shot us into outer...space... with a voice so deep, so smooth, you could bottle it up, use it as tanning oil, and slather it all over your bits on a warm summer’s day. Don’t believe me? Watch the movie’s recording session scene again and tell me if you can pay attention to Isaac or Justin Timberlake – two incredibly attractive men in their own right – with Driver’s crooning sonically stimulating your nether regions.

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Again, this adventurous, Australian epic was Mia Wasikowska’s star-making vehicle, which means Driver had a few short scenes in what was otherwise a long, grueling tale of one woman’s fight for survival in the Outback. And by “short scenes” we mean scenes in which Driver was wearing criminally short khaki shorts. We didn’t even mind the ghostly paleness of his meaty quads because those cuffs of cotton were doing things for the man. He’s got cake like a bakery and we’re craving carbs.

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Daniel Radcliffe plays the romantic hero in this offbeat comedy about a young dude trying to romance his best friend’s cousin — who has a long-term boyfriend. No one told Driver this though because it’s his character Allan, a guy who worms his way into our hearts with the sexually-charged mood lighting of antique lamps, that gets the best love scenes. His fresh from the oven sex nachos are hot, but not as hot as his make-out scene with Mackenzie Davis. Who knew being told by a guy that he wants to grind up your muscles and organs and bones and spread you on toast could be foreplay and not a red flag that you’re dating a serial killer?

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An underrated sci-fi drama from director Jeff Nichols, Midnight Special marks one of the few times Driver sports a pair of glasses on screen, and thus, we must pause to appreciate this sex symbol level up. Nichols somehow knew that fitting Driver in a government suit and spectacles would make otherwise rational women scream unintelligible innuendos at their TV screens. Go ahead, gnaw my appendix you profound Sasquatch!

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In Martin Scorsese’s religious epic Silence, Driver plays a devout 17th century Jesuit priest stranded in a foreign country, desperately fighting for survival among people who would see him dead because of his faith. Driver lost an incredible amount of weight for the role because Scorsese wanted to show the physical toll this commitment to faith took on the movie’s main leads. But what he ultimately ended up proving was that, even if his frame now resembled the stretched neck of a giraffe, we’d still want to climb that like a Sequoia tree.

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In Logan Lucky, Driver plays a soft-spoken hick named Clyde who goes along with his brother’s plan to pull a heist during a big NASCAR race. Clyde is a vet who lost part of his arm in an explosion overseas who now works as a bartender at a dive pub in West Virginia. And it’s not just his accent that's thick as molasses, if you get my drift. In fact, rumor has it that Lizzo wrote the lyric, “I’m a thicc b*tch, I need tempo” after seeing Driver in this movie.

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All of this brings us to the Star Wars films, specifically, The Last Jedi, which some mistakenly believe marks Adam Driver’s entry into the “Celebrities You’ve Definitely Had A Sex Dream About” club. We get it. After all, Rian Johnson’s masterpiece did launch the Ben Swolo challenge in which incredibly attractive celebrities confronted the horror of not being able to pull off a pair of wide fit chino pants like Kylo Ren does in the film. And there’s a moodiness, a brooding, slightly-emo air surrounding Driver’s Force-wielding bad boy that only adds to his appeal. But, if anything, watching this broad-chested Armenian cucumber prance around planets in his cap and ridiculous headgear only proves Driver’s been at this game a lot longer than we’re giving him credit for. It takes a real master of sex appeal to get us to overlook Ren’s childish tantrums and murderous dictator tendencies in favor of entertaining fantasies about tracing Driver’s face moles with our tongue in some weird sexualized game of connect-the-dots. That’s a skill that can only be learned through experience, through years of silently smoldering on screen.

Adam Driver’s always been hot. The world is just finally realizing it.  

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's, and do not necessarily reflect those of SYFY WIRE, SYFY, or NBC Universal.