Lena Dunham Is Always Trying to Have It Both Ways
After bragging about casting Adam Driver because he bit her in an audition, she's now outing him as a violent chair thrower in her latest memoir.
I once saw Adam Driver live on Broadway in Burn This. He had this raw, electric charisma that was apparent even from the nosebleed seats. The whole play takes place on a set designed to look like an apartment, with a front door leading to the stage wings, so you can’t see who’s on the other side of it. During one scene that begins with Driver’s character offstage, there was a knock on the door. I will never forget how the entire audience inhaled audibly with the sheer anticipation of seeing Adam Driver again. It turned out to be a different character at the door, at which point the entire audience audibly exhaled in what I can only describe as sheepish disappointment.
This charisma is why Lena Dunham cast Driver as Adam in Girls, the on-again-off-again toxic love interest to her own character, Hannah, as Dunham explained to Variety in an interview a year ago.
“He walked into our amazing casting director Jennifer Houston’s office. It was our first day of casting. We had read barely anyone. And he walked in and it’s the same thing he does in every room, on every screen,” Dunham told Variety in July of 2025. “The energy in the room just changed. He is so committed . . . Like he completely changes the space around him. And I remember in the audition, he really cheekily leaned over and bit my shoulder and there’s this moment where I can’t contain what I’m feeling as a director, and I look at everyone else and I’m like, Oh my God, look at him.”
Just look at her face when she’s describing this moment:
You can actually watch that moment live. Driver’s audition for Girls is somehow on YouTube:
So it’s kind of awful that she is now trying to rewrite her relationship with him and cast herself as the victim of the very thing she wanted from him, the very thing she chose him for.
Dunham’s (second) memoir, Famesick, came out today, and it’s full of insider gossip about the industry she inhabited—including her co-star Adam Driver. I haven’t read it, but there are a lot of excerpts circulating online, and I was shocked to see Dunham describe herself as the victim of Adam Driver’s aggression in Variety.
Driver allegedly was “verbally aggressive,” “hurled” Dunham around, and threw a chair at the wall near her during rehearsals.
While filming the first sex scene, Driver allegedly threw Dunham’s directions out the window, “and he hurled me this way and that. 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?” Dunham 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.”
A sex scene in which Dunham was ignored, dehumanized, and lost control sounds a lot like sexual assault, though Dunham also writes “it was the rare situation where, in the lack of boundaries, there was a safety.” What she fails to mention is that pushing boundaries, bringing his own charisma into the room, and changing the calculus for everyone around him is exactly what she hired him to do—by her own admission. He got the job on Girls because of his aggressive sexual initiative—literally biting her. Yet now, Dunham wants us to think she was aggrieved by his “primal” energy because it undermined her as a director.
She also describes other scenes in which Driver was infuriated with her. Driver allegedly shouted at her while running scenes, “FUCKING SAY SOMETHING” as he “hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’”
Yet, despite all this violence, 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,” writes Dunham. When Driver told her he was engaged, she felt “heartbroken.”
There is something deeply unfair in being compelled by someone’s energy—his primal, masculine, uncontainable energy—hiring him to do a job because you were so impressed by it, then five years later writing a tell-all book portraying him as violent, inconsiderate, uncontrollable.
It feels like Dunham is trying to have her cake and eat it too: She created a character played by a man she deeply admired—only to recast the very things she admired about him in a gross and negative light, at a time when such allegations can destroy a man’s career.
Worse, Dunham is now apparently horrified to learn that other women want the very thing she got rich and famous portraying in the show.
In an interview with the New York Times, Dunham insisted, “I didn’t write Adam’s character to be a romantic hero, and by the end, everyone was like, ‘I want a boyfriend like that. I want a boyfriend who throws two-by-fours and spanks me,’ and that is not what I was going for, but it was certainly a lesson in: What we desire cannot be untangled from what we have been through and what we fear.”
She wrote a hit show depicting a woman in love with a complicated man, yet now she is judging women who . . . can imagine falling in love with a complicated man? Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Her 2026 self apparently has nothing but contempt for the women who made her show a success, who made her rich and famous.
I’m not saying that the character Adam Driver plays is a paragon of masculinity. What made Girls great was how complex the characters were. I’m saying that Dunham very effectively commercialized Driver’s charisma, which she recognized as attractive back in the day—only to turn around and portray him as toxic and violent.
What message are men supposed to take from all this?
It’s pretty clear: Aggressive sexual charisma is the thing women want from you, but if you have it and if you use it, they will portray you as psychotic, violent, angry, and out of control.
Good luck with that!
It’s hard to recall now, but back in the day, before the #MeToo era, talking about the intersection of desire and disgust, eroticism and power, was something you could be rewarded for in the culture—hence the immense success of Girls. But in our current prudish era, the only currency is victimhood—hence throwing Driver under the bus.
this is reductive, check ur own misogyny
Lena Dunham sexually molested her own sister. And bragged about it in her autobiography. I'm not listening to anything this Jabba-the-hut sex offender has to say.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/05/lena-dunham-statement-abuse-claims
EDIT: see also here https://archive.vn/qacxw