Adam Driver has addressed former Girls costar Lena Dunham’s memoir for the first time.
“I have no comment on any of that,” Driver, 42, said during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, May 17. “I’m saving it all for my book.”
Dunham, 40, made headlines in April when she released her memoir, Famesick, and detailed their working relationship. (Dunham and Driver played Hannah and Adam, respectively on Girls. The series ran for six seasons from 2012 to 2017.)
In the book, Dunham wrote that she and Driver “fought often,” but there was an “intensity” to their relationship. Dunham recalled one instance in which she nearly “crossed” a line with Driver, claiming that he called her one night after a play performance and asked about coming over.
Allison Williams Responds to ‘Girls’ Costar Lena Dunham’s Memoir
“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.”
Dunham alleged that she and Driver “never” discussed that night, and he got engaged one month later. (Driver tied the knot with Joanne Tucker in 2013.)
“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.”
Where Lena Dunham Stands With Her ‘Girls’ Costars 9 Years After Finale
While promoting her memoir in April, Dunham appeared to dodge a question about Driver.
“You write in the book about so much, but partly about a complicated relationship you had with your costar Adam Driver,” Jenna Bush Hager said during an 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. How does it sit with you now?”
Dunham shared 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.”
She 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.”
When Sheinelle Jones asked a follow-up question about where Dunham stands with her former costar now, the actress gave a response about the Girls cast.
“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.
