Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
Happy New Lena Dunham Memoir Day to all those who celebrate. Dunham’s latest book, Famesick, finds her reflecting on Girls, chronic illness, and her relationship with Jack Antonoff. It’s all incredibly juicy, but perhaps the most attention-grabbing moments come from her tumultuous personal and professional relationship with Adam Driver. Dunham paints Driver as both a hothead who once screamed at her during rehearsals and also a brilliant collaborator with whom she shared a unique intimacy. Let’s unpack everything she wrote about their relationship, shall we?
According to Dunham, Driver came into his Girls audition as a gangly boy and “morphed into half-man, half-beast.” “I didn’t understand what he was doing, exactly, but I had the rare feeling that I was standing in front of someone who was at the very beginning of an ascent, who — whether I cast him or not — couldn’t remain a secret for long,” she writes. In his callback, Dunham writes, Driver’s acting style “forced me to make new, almost panicked choices. I didn’t just want what he brought to the show. I wanted what he brought out of me.”
Later, when they were filming their first sex scene, Dunham says she tried cracking a joke and, instead of responding, Driver did push-ups over her body. Once cameras were rolling, he was “a man possessed.” Dunham describes him shouting “filthy improvisations” and says he “hurled” her around without regard for the blocking they had previously established. “It wasn’t that I felt violated — and I also wouldn’t have known if I had, as there was little in my sexual life that I hadn’t allowed to happen, and for no pay,” Dunham writes. “But I felt that something intimate, confusing, and primal had played out in a scenario I was meant to control.” The two silently acknowledged each other with a nod afterward, which to Dunham meant that they were promising to “do what was required to make these scenes surprising, to make them true, to make them sing.” “It was the rare situation where, in the lack of boundaries, there was a safety,” Dunham remembers.
During the filming of Girls’s first season, Dunham experienced a dissociative episode. One day, while rehearsing lines with Driver, she writes that he flew off the handle when she forgot her lines. “[W]hen 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,’” Dunham recalls. She writes that she “didn’t tell anyone” about the incident, but that she said her lines correctly afterward.
Alleged chair throwing aside, Dunham writes that she and Driver “felt like partners” while filming the first season. They spent time together rehearsing on the weekend, he hugged her often, and one time he smiled at her in his kitchen “with something so tender, it felt like it could only have been love” and told her, “You really don’t know how beautiful you are, do you?”
The pair also “fought often,” according to Dunham. “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,” she writes. “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.” (Wisely, Dunham notes in hindsight that no one likes being whispered about.)
At one point, Dunham remembers spending a week alone at her parents’ apartment after Girls’s first season had wrapped and she was writing season two. She writes that Driver — whose “eyes would flash with anger when I described mistreatment by one of the random guys I was dating” — visited her almost every night. One night, he told her he was coming over, but, he said, “if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.” Dunham says she didn’t answer when he called. “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 writes. A month later, he was engaged to his girlfriend.
After his engagement, Driver disappears from the narrative a bit, save for an offhand mention of him punching a hole in his trailer because he “hated his new haircut.” He reemerges in the book as Dunham recalls filming their final scene together, at which point, she says, they had “barely spoken in three years, for reasons I could not explain and didn’t really want to analyze.”
However, when they were filming Hannah and Adam’s good-bye scene in the diner (during which Dunham had an untreated broken elbow), the two shared a tender moment once again. “All I know is that between takes, we kept crying, eyes locked,” Dunham writes. “It felt, for just a moment, like he was saying sorry. 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.”
That night, the pair shared a ride home, which Dunham says that they never did despite living so close together that she could see him and his wife watching TV from her window. “In the car, he held my hand in silence,” Dunham writes. “When we reached our block, he took me in his arms. I let him kiss my cheek, my forehead.” She then told him, “I know we’ve had our hard moments, that we are really different people. I’m sorry if the way I am ever wasn’t good for … the way you are.” Driver then told her that it was “just as it needed to be” and added, “I hope you know I’ll always love you.” Dunham says that she never heard from Driver again.
While promoting the book in an interview with the New York Times, Dunham looked back on what she wrote about Driver, saying that, in describing their early connection, she was trying to convey “this feeling that we were entering this adult professional phase where we were still moving through the world in this youthful way, ripe with possibility and not saying what we felt and trying to read each other’s signals — and then having an adult awakening.”
It is helpful to remember that Dunham was 25 and Driver was 27 while they were filming season one. Maybe that explains a lot of this?
The Cut has reached out to Driver’s representative for comment and will update this story if we hear back.
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