I was “too old” to care about Girls and to this day, I’ve never seen more than a few minutes of the show, here and there. I remember the discourse, both good and bad, and Lena Dunham’s new memoir has a lot of gossip about that time in her life. The parts of the book about her personal and professional relationship with Adam Driver have gotten a lot of attention this week. I think it’s worth framing this as… Girls was Driver’s big breakout, although he had been around and working in theater for years beforehand. But Girls changed his career in a huge way and I would have no issue with Lena taking credit for partially “discovering” him and changing his life. What I didn’t expect was for Lena to detail how she and Adam seemingly had a deep-yet-toxic affinity for one another which crossed several lines. Some of Lena’s stories about Adam:
Their first sex scene: 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.”
Driver screamed at her in rehearsal: 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, ‘F–KING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE F–K UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’” 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.”
Driver really f–ked with her head: “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 f–king 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.”
What in the world: 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.”
He helped her out sometimes: 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.”
I have to ask something though… at what point do we wonder if Lena is an unreliable narrator of her own life? We’ve seen it in real time, her problematic behavior in how she frames certain events and twists situations in bizarre ways. I actually believe that Driver was an a–hole and that he probably used his “Method acting” to treat Lena like sh-t. But I’m not convinced about the other stuff, like the nicer stories or that part about him wanting to spend the night. I don’t know. This book is not for me, I get that.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
