On April 14th, Lena Dunham’s autobiography Famesick hit shelves. In it, she discussed her first hit HBO show, Girls, including some disturbing stories about former co-star Adam Driver.
Dunham created, wrote, starred in, and directed the 2010s phenomenon at just 23 years old. This youth and inexperience, predictably, led to some situations getting out of control.
On the show, Adam Sackler (Driver) is Hannah Horvath’s (Dunham) on-again-off-again boyfriend. She claims that while shooting all 6 seasons of Girls, Driver was “spectacularly rude to her.” In Famesick, she recounts him throwing a chair at the wall next to her and screaming in her face. Even allegedly going full Kyle with punching holes in his trailer’s walls.
Dunham’s Reaction
“At the time, I didn’t have the skill to … it never entered my mind to say, ‘I am your boss, you can’t speak to me this way.’ And, at that point in my 20s, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that,” she tells The Guardian.
To be fair, throwing chairs is deemed inappropriate behavior in most workplaces. Even when the person you’re throwing it in the direction of is your boss.
“Young men are allowed the grace of learning how to behave, and the expectation isn’t that they’re going to do really brilliant work and then also be kind to everyone and listen to everybody, and remember everybody’s children’s names, you know,” she previously states in the interview. “I did things on Girls like saying, ‘I don’t think we should go 10 minutes late because people might be hungry.’ And that doesn’t occur to men running sets, because they’re given the freedom to just be creative and have a stormy mood, and go into a room and rethink something and come back out. But as a woman, you have to perform grace all the time, in a way that I’m only just now starting to unbuckle from. But: I also care a lot about having a set where people are happy, and feel free and heard and unafraid. Largely because I don’t want people to feel some of the ways that I felt.”
The Issue With Hollywood
Unfortunately, Hollywood is littered with stories of on-set abuse by male cast members. Actress Busy Philipps has similar remarks about former Freaks and Geeks co-star Jame Franco.
“He felt like he wanted his character to be one way. He had had a discussion with the producers that he came from an abused family or something, and so he didn’t want his girlfriend — I played his girlfriend — to ever physically hit him,” Philipps said in 2016 on Watch What Happens Live (via Variety). “I never knew this conversation existed, and in an improv, I smacked him on the thing, and he was like, ‘Don’t ever touch me,’ and grabbed me and shoved me to the ground. It was an overreaction by a 19-year-old dude. And it was weird and people’s agents had to be called and he had to apologize to me.”
Her instructions for the aforementioned scene were to lightly hit Franco on the chest. She has addressed the matter several times since, including her 2018 memoir This Will Only Hurt a Little, but claims that the two were able to work it out as adults.
While Driver has yet to respond to Dunham’s claims, the point still stands about abusive behavior on sets. Artists, especially actors, need to be in touch with their emotions. But to do it at the expense of others’ health and safety would not stand in almost any other industry. So why does Hollywood seem to have such an issue holding people accountable for such behavior?
Philipps is still being criticized for calling out Franco, despite several other claims backing her up. Hopefully, Dunham’s remarks, if true, will be taken a bit more seriously. It’s time for this kind of rampant behavior in the industry to stop.
