In her new memoir “Famesick,” Lena Dunham reflects on her hit show “Girls” and the complex relationship she had with co-star Adam Driver both on and off set.
“Girls,” which ran on HBO from 2012 to 2017, starred Dunham as the self-centered yet oddly charming writer Hannah Horvath and Driver as her toxic on-again, off-again boyfriend, also named Adam. According to Dunham’s new memoir, their real-life relationship wasn’t too different.
Things got off to a rocky start during the filming of the first season, with Dunham claiming her “careful blocking went out the window and he hurled me this way and that” during their first sex scene. “Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment, unsure of what had happened — had I lost directorial authority, allowed the scene to go off the rails, not given proper instructions? Would I be removed from my command post immediately?” she writes. “It wasn’t that I felt violated — and I also wouldn’t know if I had, as there was little in my sexual life that I hadn’t allowed to happen, and for no pay. But I felt that something intimate, confusing and primal had played out in a scenario I was meant to control.”
She also writes that Driver walked out of the room after she showed him the pilot episode and “didn’t answer any of my calls for the next three weeks.” When he finally called, Dunham was sure he was going to quit the show, but instead he admitted that he rushed out because he hates watching himself.
After “Girls” was picked up, Dunham’s anxiety increased as she faced the pressures of running a TV show at just 24 years old. When it was time to shoot the final episode, she reveals that she disassociated to deal with the stress.
“At work, I found it was hard to act or direct when I wasn’t, in fact, a person. I wondered if everyone on set could tell that an alien had replaced me,” Dunham writes. “I wondered if my scene partners could feel how barely human I was.”
She then recalls one instance with Driver where he grew frustrated with her for forgetting her lines during rehearsal and alleges he “hurled a chair at the wall next to me.”
“I remember doing a fight scene with Adam and how scary it was to meet someone so totally present with such absence,” she writes. “Late one night, as we practiced lines in my trailer, I found that mine were suddenly gone. I knew I’d written them. I’d known them only minutes before. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer — until finally, Adam screamed, ‘FUCKING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’”
A rep for Driver did not immediately respond to Variety‘s request for comment.
After the chair incident, Dunham says that she “didn’t tell anyone” but “I said my lines correctly after that.” However, during the first season she and Driver still “felt like partners” and continued to rehearse together frequently, though they “fought often.”
“I reasoned that the intensity of his anger at me, anger that could make him spit and throw things, was proportionate to the intensity of our creative connection,” Dunham writes in “Famesick.” “One day in his dressing room, as I apologized for a perceived slight I couldn’t remember committing, he got close to my face and hissed, ‘Never forget that I know you. I really fucking know you.’ ‘What do you know?’ I yelped. ‘You don’t go to parties. You love animals. And you hate being whispered about.’ And he was right.”
As they continued to spend time together on and off set, Dunham admits she “spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me.”
“He could be short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing. He could also be protective, loving even,” Dunham writes. Later in the book, she even claims that he once “punched a hole in his trailer wall” because he “hated his new haircut.”
But he was also there for her. During a particularly rough anxiety week for Dunham, she details how Driver came over to her apartment every night to keep her company. One night, he called her to say, “I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.” But Dunham didn’t let him in.
“I crouched at the window, watching him park his bike, pull out his phone, and dial. But I didn’t answer. It felt as simple as ignoring your doorbell, as pretending to be asleep, as impossible as stopping your blood from flowing,” she writes. “But 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, 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.”
She says the two “never spoke about it again,” but when Driver told her he was engaged, she felt “heartbroken.”
“It was absurd to be heartbroken, to have thought I meant anything, that I occupied any role beyond distraction,” she writes. “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.”
Dunham also details filming their last scene together in the final season — the one where their characters break up for good and Adam famously says “good soup.” Although she writes that the two of them “had barely spoken in three years,” they “kept crying” in between takes.
“It felt, for just a moment, like he was saying sorry,” Dunham says. “Maybe I was, too — for never knowing how to manage him, what he needed, how to avoid making his face contort with frustration and rage.”
When filming wrapped, Dunham says Driver told her “I hope you know I’ll always love you” before saying goodbye.
“Who knows — maybe I’d write him new parts. We would tell new stories. We would laugh at the way things had been, and smile at the way they were now,” Dunham writes. “But I never heard from him again.”
“Famesick” is available now at booksellers everywhere.