Introducing: Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver

Where and when were you happiest? What experience most influenced your life? Actor Minnie Driver wants to know, and she’s finding out in her new podcast, Minnie Questions. Minnie asks trailblazers across disciplines the same seven mini questions, but the truths that they uncover are hardly small; in these questions, Minnie asks about happiness, failure, love, loss and belonging. In interviewing a range of characters, Minnie questions... how are we the same? How are we different? How do we become who we are? Minnie questions... because it is the questions we ask that help us understand the world, and ourselves.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Minnie. This is such a good idea. I love the
questions and they do draw out a frightening the confessional
quality because their their tough ones to grap with. Are
they adapted prooft questions? It was the concept of the
prosting questionnaire. I've always loved it. It's what I would
turn to in the back of Vanity Fair. But I
needed to modify them because there were other things that

(00:20):
I wanted to ask. I feel that really specific questions
can elicit answers to questions other than the ones asked.
If you see what I mean, I'm mini driver and
I have questions. In fact, everything I've done in my career, acting,
music writing, I've done to investigate the human experience because

(00:41):
there's so much we don't know and so much that
defies our understanding. In my new podcast, Mini Questions, I
wanted to dig a bit deeper, so I put together
a little experiment. I wanted to ask trailblazers across different
disciplines the same seven questions, questions about what made them happy,
what they're curious about, what love means to them, with

(01:01):
each episode presenting a new guest a new data point.
In this great experiment, I wanted a musician's perspective, so
I cooled up Dave Girl of the Food Fighters, What person, place,
or experience most altered your life? I would have to
say the first time I saw a band play on

(01:23):
the stage, and it was a band called Naked Reagun.
They were like an infamous. I was in this dark
barred it smelled like bleach and beer and they started
playing and like, my chest was against the stage and
their sweat was on me. I was getting thrown around
people with mohawks, and so I was like, this is
what I'm doing for the rest of my life. I

(01:44):
was curious how an actor might answer this question, so
I asked the brilliant Viola Davis if I could pick
her brain. My dad dying was a big one because
I was there. You're not thinking about how we pissed
you all. You're not thinking about but he was an alcoholic.
You're just thinking about the fact that I loved him.

(02:05):
He was my father and he's gone. It whittles life
down to absolutely the essentials of really what makes a
life and what makes joy. It leveled me. Then I
wanted to hear a journalist's response, so I wrote to
pull it surprise winning investigative reporter ronand Pharah. I had

(02:30):
pitched a story when I was a TV reporter about
the Hollywood casting couch. It didn't, in my case, feel
like a triumphal moment of yes, I'm going to do
the right thing. What it feels like at the time
is incredibly shitty and scary, but I think you do,
invariably in those situations have a little voice saying, you know, well,

(02:50):
here's what the right thing is, regardless of what the
strategic or savvy thing is. And I think it's good
to listen to that. And I didn't stop that. I
called more and more people with my questions, and now
I'm sharing my archive many questions with you. Each episode
you will hear a guest I admire answered these seven

(03:10):
questions so that together we can examine how is people
were both similar and individual. Join me in my exploration
on many questions on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers,