Lena Dunham was not to fond of the way Adam Driver treated her while they were shooting “Girls.”
In an interview with The Guardian, Dunham spoke a bit about her memoir and her stories of the “spectacularly rude” way Driver acted toward her on the HBO series. He played Adam Sackler, the off-and-on boyfriend of Dunham’s Hannah Horvath throughout the show. During filming, Dunham remembered hurtled chairs and holes punched in trailers as just some of the treatment she endured while making her show. She explained to The Guardian that at the time she thought thats just how it was.
“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,’” Dunham said. “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.”
He added: “I have lots of amazing men in my life. 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. But there were years when I thought: Can’t I just make things that only have women in them?”
Dunham made a name for herself in the early 2010s, when she created and starred in “Girls.” By 2013, she had made the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. “Girls” became a cultural juggernaut for HBO, earning them 19 Primetime Emmy nominations and two wins.
But despite the show’s success, the actress found herself constantly the target of online discussion going after her work and appearance. This caused her to retreat more from the creative world until her Netflix show “Too Much” premiered last year.
“I thought if I explain properly who I am, or give a glimpse of who I am, people are going to have a different perception of me, that we would be friends. But no one cares — and that’s fine. I always joke that I need a T-shirt that says ‘I survived New York media in 2012 and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.’” Dunham told The Times last summer. “All I got was this lousy PTSD.”
She added: “I felt like all the maturing and changing that had been kept at bay by the experience of being in that cocoon of the show was suddenly happening at a speed that was overwhelming. It was a painful metamorphosis. I definitely took an intentional break [from public life].”
