Lena Dunham awkwardly dodged questions about her previous working relationship with Adam Driver after revealing in her new memoir, Famesick, that Driver was prone to violent outbursts.
“You write so much in the book, and some of it is about your complicated relationship with co-star Adam Driver,” Jenna Bush Hager said in a Wednesday interview with Dunham, 38, on “Today with Jenna & Sheinelle,” which aired April 15.
“You were his boss. You were the director of this television series. Moments where there was violence and anger, moments where there might have been romantic feelings,” Bush Hager continued, asking, “How do you feel now?”
Dunham told the hosts that she wanted to avoid sharing anything in her book that “may not be of benefit to readers,” and began deftly dodging questions about the sometimes stressful “workplace dynamics.”
“I think I wrote about power dynamics that a lot of young women can understand in the workplace,” Dunham said.
“I spent eight-and-a-half years writing this book, so I was very intentional with every word I put on the page, and then when you go on live TV and there are cool, glamorous girls like you on the show, you’re asked to rehash it in a way.”
“I really want people to read it in context and understand it as a whole. … This is more about my experience of coming to some kind of understanding of my power as a boss than it is about anything else,” she continued.
Busch Hager’s co-host Sheinelle Jones then switched gears and asked for a specific answer about whether he ever thought he would cross paths with the driver again later in his career.
“When you were in that season (of life), did you ever think you guys would still communicate again?” she asked. “Or do you plan on staying in touch?”
Dunham quickly deftly dodged the question with an answer that revealed her feelings toward the entire “Girls” cast.
“I really share in this book that there were a lot of magical moments and that the whole cast has a kind of bond that I think can never be broken,” she said.
Dunham made headlines earlier this week when excerpts from “Famesick” were published in the Guardian. In a small section of her memoir, she writes that Driver, who played her boyfriend Adam Sackler on Girls, was “astonishingly rude” to her while they worked together on the show.
In one incident, she recalls when he threw a chair against the wall next to her. She also claims he punched a hole in the wall of her trailer and screamed in her face.
“At the time, I didn’t have the skills… It never crossed my mind to say, ‘I’m your boss, you can’t talk to me like this,'” the series creator and showrunner told the Guardian in an interview about the exchange.
“And at that point in my 20s, I still thought that what great male geniuses do is eviscerate you, which is weird because I was raised by male geniuses who would never do that,” she continued, referring to her father, the painter Carroll Dunham.
Dunham’s “Famesick” was released on April 14th and is available for purchase now.
