Lena Dunham is not interested in discussing Adam Driver, despite writing about their working relationship in her new memoir, Famesick.
“You write in the book about so much, but partly about a complicated relationship you had with your costar Adam Driver,” Jenna Bush Hager noted while interviewing Dunham, 38, during the Wednesday, April 15, episode of Today With Jenna & Sheinelle. “You were his boss. You were the director of this television series. Moments where there was violence or anger, moments where there could have been romantic feelings.”
Bush Hager wondered, “How does it sit with you now?”
Dunham made it clear that she reflected on experiences that would be “useful, potentially, to the reader” for her book.
“I think I wrote about a dynamic that a lot of young women can understand in the workplace,” Dunham explained. “I spent eight and a half years writing this book, so I was super intentional with every word that I put on the page and then you come on live TV — with cool glamorous girls like you — and are asked to rehash it in a way.”
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The actress continued, “I really want people to read it in context and understand it in the totality. … It’s as much about my experience of coming to some kind of understanding of my own power as a boss than it is about anything else.”
Sheinelle Jones asked a follow-up question about where Dunham stands with her former costar now.
“When you were in that season [of life], did you ever think that you guys would still communicate again?” she wondered. “Or that you would stay in touch?”
Dunham offered an overarching response about the entire Girls cast. (The HBO hit ran for six seasons from 2012 to 2017.)
“I, in the book, really share that there were a lot of magical moments and our entire cast has a sort of bond that I don’t think can ever be broken,” she said.
In Famesick, which was published on Tuesday, April 14, Dunham wrote about one instance in which she nearly “crossed” a line with Driver, who played her on-off love interest for the duration Girls.
Dunham wrote that she and Driver “fought often,” but there was an “intensity” to their connection. When her parents were out of town for a week, Driver went over to their apartment — where Dunham was living at the time — and hung out with her every night.
“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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One night, when Driver was starring in a play, he called Dunham after a performance.
“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,’” Dunham recalled, noting that she “didn’t answer” when he got there.
“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 explained. “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.”
