Actress Lena Dunham claims she wrote about her ‘Girls’ co-star Adam Pilote in an “honest” manner. In her tell-all memoir “Famesick,” Dunham alleges that the “Star Wars” actor threw a chair, punched a hole in her trailer and screamed in her face when she forgot her lines. She also claimed that their relationship almost crossed a boundary before he married his new wife, Joanne Tuckerin 2013.
Lena Dunham opens up about her relationship with ‘Girls’ co-star Adam Driver
While promoting her new memoir, Dunham reflected on the difficulty of being the showrunner of “Girls” at such a young age, since she was just 23 when HBO called to offer her a blind pilot deal for the series. While the comedy series was a success for HBO, Driver was also navigating his newfound fame as Kylo Ren in the “Star Wars” sequel trilogy.
“For better or worse, these were all of our first jobs. I think Adam had a very specific path because he had a turn on the show and also a turn on becoming a big movie star at the same time,” Dunham told PEOPLE magazine while promoting his memoir.
“So he was on both of those tracks, and he’s a very, very serious, work-focused private person. So I have a lot of empathy for that,” she added.
Dunham said she didn’t want to make Adam Driver ‘the outlier’
Dunham insisted that she didn’t want to make Driver seem like “the outlier” of the comedy series when she wrote about her experiences with him in her memoir. Instead, she said she wanted it to serve as an example of how difficult it can be to go through your “first experiences” as a boss, which she hopes others can relate to.
“And again, the goal was never to make it seem like Adam was somehow the outlier on the show, but just to talk about the complexity and confusion of those early experiences of trying to become a boss,” she said.
Lena Dunham says it was a ‘challenge’ being a leader
Dunham insists it wasn’t just his experiences with Driver that made being a “boss” on set difficult.
“I was also, at that point in my life, extremely intimidated by men, so it was a real challenge for me to try to be a leader when it came to men,” she explained. “And I learned in this business, and luckily I don’t feel those kinds of fears anymore.”
Adam Driver’s character, also named Adam, played the role of the recurring boyfriend of Dunham’s character, Hannah. While reflecting on the experience of filming “Girls,” Dunham claimed that they had “two different relationships” when they were on screen and in real life.
“It was a really rich creative dynamic where we came to understand each other completely when we were on screen, and then in some ways, not at all when we were off,” she said. “And so it was almost like we had two different relationships, one that played out in our scenes together and one that played out in life.”
She said she wrote about Driver in the book only to capture the relationship in an “honest” way while reflecting on her experiences.
“It was an attempt to capture that [relationship] in an honest way, and also really talk about how much being with this very talented, charismatic, complex, powerful person affected me in a really positive way and in a slightly more difficult way,” she says.
Lena Dunham reflects on the behavior of ‘great male geniuses’
In a separate interview with The Guardian to promote his memoir, Dunham admitted: “I also really care about people being happy, feeling free, heard and unafraid. A lot of it is because I don’t want people to feel some of the things I felt.”
“At the time, I didn’t have the skills to… it never occurred to me to say, ‘I’m your boss, you can’t talk to me that way,'” Dunham said of Driver’s alleged behavior. “And, at that point, in my 20s, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses did: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that.”
As of this writing, Driver has yet to publicly comment on his accusations. In her memoir, she said the last time they had contact was when “Girls” ended in 2016.