HBO’s Girls saw Lena Dunham and Adam Driver’s characters, Hannah Horvath and Adam Sackler, lived a toxic situationship over six seasons from 2012 to 2017. As Lena gears up to publish her memoir, Famesick, she revealed that their off-screen dynamic was just as tumultuous in a bombshell interview.
According to The Guardian, Lena’s new memoir alleges that Adam “once hurled a chair at the wall next to her,” “punched a hole in his trailer wall,” and “screamed in her face.”
Though Lena was the writer, showrunner, and lead actor for Girls, she told the outlet, “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.’”
She added, “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.”
Elsewhere during her interview with The Guardian, the Golden Globe winner went on to praise “lots of amazing men,” saying, “Judd [Apatow] is a great hero of mine; Tim Bevan at Working Title is a huge part of my life, and so is cinematographer Sam Levy. I just worked with Mark Ruffalo, the most thoughtful, sensitive, politically engaged, beautiful person. There’s plenty of them walking around.”
She then admitted that she felt hesitant to cast men in other projects after her allegedly violent encounters with Adam, adding, “There were years when I thought: Can’t I just make things that only have women in them?”
Since then, Lena has worked with Will Sharpe on Netflix’s Too Much and with Mark Ruffalo and Role Model (aka Tucker Pillsbury) on a new rom-com also starring Rashida Jones and Meg Ryan, Good Sex.
In a separate interview with The New York Times, Lena revealed that she “didn’t intend” for Girls fans to see Adam’s character as a “romantic hero.”
“What was also interesting was those dynamics, which were in life scary at times, lonely—those would be recreated on television and people thought they were funny and fun and at times sexy!” she told the outlet.
She later added, “I didn’t write Adam’s character to be a romantic hero, and by the end, everyone was like, ‘I want a boyfriend like that. I want a boyfriend who throws two-by-fours and spanks me,’ and that is not what I was going for, but it was certainly a lesson in: What we desire cannot be untangled from what we have been through and what we fear.”
Adam has yet to respond to the allegations. Lena’s memoir, Famesick, is available for presale now and hits bookstores on April 14.
