Adam Driver may be known for acclaimed movies like “BlacKkKlansman” and starring roles in blockbusters like “Star Wars,” but it was Lena Dunham’s HBO series “Girls” that first gave his career a boost. The show has recently been in the news again after Dunham’s memoir “Fame Sick” revealed behind-the-scenes drama, including allegations about Driver’s on-set behavior.
Dunham claimed in the book that the driver was sometimes “verbally aggressive” and once “threw a chair against the wall next to me.” At the Cannes press conference for his latest film, Paper Tiger, on Sunday, it didn’t take long for Driver to be asked about the allegations.
“I’m not going to comment on that. I’m keeping it all for my book,” Driver clarified, eliciting laughter from the audience.
In “Fame Sick,” Dunham wrote: “I remember doing a fight scene with Adam and how scared I was to meet someone who wasn’t there at all. Late one night, as I was practicing my lines in my trailer, I realized that my lines were suddenly gone. I knew it was written in minutes. I knew it just a few minutes ago. But when I opened my mouth, I just stammered, and finally Adam yelled, ‘Say something,’ and threw me. ‘Wake up,’ he said, ‘I’m tired of just staring at you.’
Despite their complicated relationship, Dunham said that during the first season of Girls, Driver and she “still felt like partners” and that she “wondered too much whether Adam liked me.”
“He can be short-tempered, verbally aggressive, condescending, and physically imposing,” she writes, but “he can also be protective and even affectionate.”
Paper Tiger, directed by James Gray and starring Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, premiered Saturday night to a seven-minute standing ovation. Set in 1986, the story revolves around two brothers, Irwin and Gary Pearl, whose get-rich-quick scheme to help clean up the Gowanus Canal ends in disaster when impoverished family businessman Irwin (Teller) unwittingly witnesses their criminal activities, angering Russian gangsters. He is rescued by ex-cop Gary (Driver), but his efforts to make a deal only drag them further into a world of violence.
