Girls creator and series star Lena Dunham is explaining why she decided to finally reveal the allegedly “feral” behavior of her former co-star, Adam Driver.
Dunham spoke to People about her decision to share her account of Driver’s behavior over the six years they worked together on the show. “It was an attempt to capture that [relationship] in an honest way, and also really talk about how much being around this very talented, charismatic, complex, and powerful person affected me in ways that were really positive and in ways that were a bit harder,” she told the site.
“The goal was never to make Adam seem like he was in any way the outlier of the show, but just to talk about how complex and confusing those first experiences of trying to be a boss were,” she continued.
In her memoir Famesick, Dunham recalls several instances in which Driver had allegedly acted aggressively. Dunham writes that he threw a chair and punched a wall near her head on separate occasions, and also alleges that he went off-script during “carefully blocked” intimate scenes, hurling her body “this way and that”.
“Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment, unsure of what had happened,” she wrote, detailing one experience working on a sex scene with Driver. “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? 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.”
Dunham describes Driver as “something feral” and “half-man, half-beast” in the book.
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative for Driver for comment.
Driver played Adam Sackler, the on-again, off-again boyfriend to Dunham’s character Hannah, for all six seasons of Girls from 2012 to 2017.
She told People that she hadn’t intended to single him out. “For better or worse, it was all of our first jobs. I think Adam went on a very specific ride because he had the ride of the show and then also the ride of becoming a major movie star at the same time,” she said. Driver became a global movie star in the middle of the show’s run after he was cast as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise.
“So he was on these two tracks, and he’s a very, very serious work-focused private person. So I have a lot of empathy for that,” Dunham told People.
Dunham writes in Famesick that she never spoke to Driver again after the show’s run ended. But she told the site that she looks back fondly on the relationship despite her accounts of it.
“It was a really rich creative dynamic in which we were able 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 kind of played out in our scenes together and one that played out in life.”
