Lena Dunham reflects on her hit show Girls and her complicated relationship with co-star Adam Driver off-set in her new memoir, Famesick.
Girls, which aired on HBO from 2012 to 2017, starred Dunham as self-centered but strangely charming writer Hannah Horvath, and Driver played her on-and-off toxic boyfriend, also Adam. According to Dunham’s new memoir, their real-life relationship wasn’t much different.
While filming the first season, things got off to a rocky start, with Dunham claiming that in their first sex scene, “my careful blocking went out the window and he threw me all over the place.” “I was stunned, didn’t understand what was happening, and was speechless for a while. If I had lost my supervisory authority and been left out on the scene without proper direction, would I have been immediately removed from the command post?” she wrote. “It wasn’t that I felt violated, and I wasn’t sure if I felt violated because so little in my sex life was gratuitous or unforgivable. But it felt like something intimate and confusing and primal had unfolded in a scenario I was supposed to be in control of.”
She also wrote that Driver left the room after showing her the pilot episode and “did not answer any of my calls for the next three weeks.” When he last called, Dunham was convinced he was planning on quitting the show, but instead he admitted he left the show in a hurry because he hated watching himself.
After “Girls” was picked up, Dunham’s anxiety increased as she faced the pressures of running a TV show at just 24 years old. When it came time to film the final episode, she revealed that she insulated to deal with the stress.
“While working, I realized that it was difficult to act and direct when I wasn’t human. I wondered if anyone on set would understand that an alien had replaced me,” Dunham wrote. “I wondered if my scene partners felt how inhuman I was.”
She further recalled one instance in which she became irritated with Driver, who forgot his lines during rehearsals, and claimed that he “threw a chair against the wall next to me.”
“I remember doing the fight scene with Adam and how scared I was to see someone so fully present in such absence,” she writes. “Late one night, as I was practicing my lines in the trailer, I suddenly noticed that my lines were missing. I knew I had written them. I knew them just a few minutes ago. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stutter. Finally, Adam screamed, ‘Shit, say something,’ and threw a chair against the wall next to me. ‘Get up,’ he told me. ‘I’m tired of looking. Just stare.’
A representative for Driver did not immediately respond to Variety’s request for comment.
After the chair incident, Dunham said, “I didn’t tell anyone,” but “I said my lines after that.” However, during the first season, she and Driver still “felt like partners” and continued to rehearse together frequently, although they “quarreled a lot.”
“I thought that the intensity of his anger toward me, to the point of spitting and throwing things, was proportionate to the strength of our creative connection,” Dunham writes in “Fame Sick.” “One day in his dressing room, as I was apologizing for a slight I didn’t commit, he got in my face and hissed, ‘Never forget that I know you. I really do know you.’ ‘What do you know?’ I cried. “You don’t go to parties, do you? You love animals. And you don’t like being whispered about.” And he was right.”
As they continued to spend time together on and off set, Dunham admitted that she “spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me.”
“He can be short-tempered, verbally aggressive, condescending, and physically imposing. He can also be protective and even affectionate,” Dunham writes. Later in the book, he even claims that he “hated his new hairstyle” and once “cut a hole in the wall of his trailer.”
But he was there for her too. During a particularly anxious and difficult week for Dunham, she detailed how a driver came to her apartment every night to keep her company. One night he called her and said: “I’m warning you, if I come out, I won’t come back this time.” But Dunham wouldn’t let him in.
“I crouched by the window and watched him park his bike, take out his phone and dial. But I didn’t answer. It felt as easy as ignoring the doorbell, as easy as pretending to be asleep, as impossible as stopping the blood from flowing,” she wrote. “But somewhere in my heart, both the wise and the bold, I knew that if I crossed the line we were about to cross, my return to work would be humiliated, I would minimize the privileges I still had, and no matter what, my heart — bruised but not yet broken — would crack.”
She said they “never spoke of it again” but that her “heart broke” when Driver told her they were engaged.
“It was ridiculous to have my heart broken, to think I meant anything, to have been anything more than a distraction,” she writes. “Sure, I was his scene partner. So when we were in a scene, his attention was prickly and his presence was all-consuming. But in life? It’s never going to be me keeping him up. I didn’t have a chore. Even at work, the only place I’m supposed to be making the rules, I couldn’t do that.”
Dunham also detailed filming their final scene in the final season. That scene is when their characters completely break up and Adam says his famous “good soup.” She wrote that the two “barely spoke for the last three years” but “continued to cry” between takes.
“For a split second, I felt like he was saying he was sorry,” Dunham said. “Maybe I was like that too. I had no idea how to manage him, what he needed, how to keep his face from contorting with frustration and anger.”
When filming ended, Dunham said Driver said, “I want you to know that I will always love you” before saying goodbye.
“Who knows, I might write him a new part. We’ll tell a new story. We’ll laugh at the way things are, we’ll laugh at the current situation,” Dunham wrote. “But I never heard from him again.”
“Famesick” is on sale at bookstores nationwide.
