Lena Dunham and Adam Driver “felt like partners” while filming the first season of Girls — and she claimed it nearly led to something deeper.
“One Saturday afternoon, as I reached for a glass of water in his galley kitchen and chatted offhandedly about something meaningless, I looked up to see him smiling at me with something so tender, it felt like it could only have been love,” Dunham, 39, wrote in her new memoir, Famesick, explaining that she and Driver, 42, would rehearse on the weekends at his apartment.
“It disarmed me so totally that I dropped my glass,” she wrote in the book, which was released on Tuesday, April 14. Dunham claimed that Driver asked: “You really don’t know how beautiful you are, do you?”
While they “fought often,” there was an “intensity” to their connection, which was displayed onscreen. (Dunham played Hannah and Driver played Adam on Girls, which ran for six seasons from 2012 to 2017.)
“Sometimes I’d tell him he made me feel safe,” she wrote. “I didn’t yet understand that sometimes you say what you wish were true, instead of just saying what is.”
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Dunham recalled meeting up with Driver after watching him in a play. He allegedly drove Dunham home because her parents were out of town. (Dunham has lived with her parents on and off throughout her career.)
“I don’t remember most of what we talked about — I think he complained about monogamy and feeling misunderstood — only that he listened with surprising concern as I described what had happened and stayed until my eyes started to close, then gently tiptoed out,” Dunham wrote. “I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me. He could be short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing.”
Despite his alleged temper, Driver was also “protective” and “loving” toward Dunham— especially when she discussed “mistreatment by one of the random guys” she dated.
“During this week — the week my parents were out of town, when his girlfriend was doing a play in Cincinnati — he was pure concern, pure laughter, pure gold,” Dunham recalled. “But that week, the week of my empty apartment, he came over almost every night.”
She claimed, “On Friday, he called me as he was leaving the theater. ‘You still home alone, Dunham?’ I was. ‘OK. I’m riding down to you. But I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.’”
After 10 minutes, Driver allegedly called Dunham when he was outside. She “didn’t answer” the phone.
“Some part of me knew — some wise part of me, some bold part of me — that if we crossed whatever boundary we were threatening to cross, the return to work would be tinged with humiliation,” she wrote. “That I’d be minimizing any authority I still had, and that, however it went, my heart-bruised but improbably not yet broken-would crack.”
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Dunham claimed that she and Driver “never” spoke about that night. He got engaged one month later. (The actor is now married to Joanne Tucker.)
“It was absurd to be heartbroken, to have thought I meant anything, that I occupied any role beyond distraction,” Dunham wrote. “I was his scene partner, sure — and so when we were in a scene, his attention was piercing, his presence all-consuming. But in life? It would never be me who kept him in line. I didn’t have the chops. Even at work, I couldn’t do it, in the one place I was meant to make the rules.”
Famesick is out now.
