Actress Lena Dunham is claiming that she wrote about her “Girls” co-star Adam Driver in an “honest way.” In her tell-all memoir “Famesick,” Dunham alleges that the “Star Wars” actor threw a chair, punched a hole in his trailer, and screamed in her face when she forgot her lines. She also claimed that their relationship nearly crossed a boundary before he married his now-wife, Joanne Tucker, in 2013.
Lena Dunham Addresses Her Relationship With ‘Girls’ Costar Adam Driver
While promoting her new memoir, Dunham reflected on the difficulty of being the “Girls” showrunner at such a young age, as she was only 23 when HBO called to offer her a blind pilot deal for the show. While the comedy series was a hit for HBO, Driver was also navigating his newfound fame as Kylo Ren in the “Star Wars” sequel trilogy.
“For better or worse, it was all of our first jobs. I think Adam went on a very specific ride because he had the ride of the show and then also the ride of becoming a major movie star at the same time,” Dunham told PEOPLE magazine while promoting her memoir.
“So he was on these two tracks, and he’s a very, very serious work-focused private person. So I have a lot of empathy for that,” she added.
Dunham Said She Didn’t Want To Make Adam Driver ‘The Outlier’
Dunham insisted that she didn’t want to make Driver seem like “the outlier” of the comedy series when she wrote about her experiences with him in her memoir. Instead, she said she wanted it to serve as an example of how difficult it can be to navigate her “first experiences” as a boss, which she hopes others can relate to.
“And again, the goal was never to make Adam seem like he was in any way the outlier of the show, but just to talk about how complex and confusing those first experiences of trying to be a boss were,” she said.
Lena Dunham Says It Was A ‘Challenge’ To Be A Leader
Dunham insists that it wasn’t just her experiences with Driver that made it difficult to be a “boss” on set.
“I was also, at that point in my life, extremely intimidated by men. And so there was a real challenge to me in trying to be a leader when it came to men,” she explained. “And I learned on that job, and luckily, I don’t feel those same kinds of fears anymore.”
Lena Dunham Says They Shared A ‘Rich Creative Dynamic’
Adam Driver’s character, also named Adam, played the on-again-off-again boyfriend to Dunham’s character, Hannah. While reflecting on the experience of filming “Girls,” Dunham claimed that they had “two different relationships” when they were on-screen and in real life.
“It was a really rich creative dynamic in which we were able to understand each other completely when we were on screen, and then in some ways, not at all when we were off,” she said. “And so it was almost like we had two different relationships, one that kind of played out in our scenes together and one that played out in life.”
She said she wrote about Driver in the book only to capture the relationship in an “honest way” as she reflected on her experiences.
“It was an attempt to capture that [relationship] in an honest way, and also really talk about how much being around this very talented, charismatic, complex, and powerful person affected me in ways that were really positive and in ways that were a bit harder,” she says.
Lena Dunham Reflects On The Behavior Of ‘Great Male Geniuses’
In a separate interview with The Guardian to promote her memoir, Dunham admitted, “I also care a lot about having a set where people are happy, and feel free and heard and unafraid. Largely because I don’t want people to feel some of the ways that I felt.”
“At the time, I didn’t have the skill to … it never entered my mind to say, ‘I am your boss, you can’t speak to me this way,’” Dunham said of Driver’s alleged behavior. “And, at that point in my 20s, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that.”
At the time of this writing, Driver has yet to publicly comment on her accusations. In her memoir, she said that the last time they had contact was when “Girls” wrapped in 2016.