Jessica Miglio/HBO
It sounds like an episode straight from hit TV series Girls.
Lena Dunham has just returned from a group holiday to India with her mother, photographer and designer Laurie Simmons. Prompted by a close friend who happens to be an Indian arts and culture expert, Simmons thought it would be a good way for mother and daughter to see India together. “It was fascinating and enchanting and not exactly a relaxing vacation but an important thing to have done,” says Dunham in that flatline New York drawl. “It sounds like such a cheesy thing to say but it’s an important perspective shifter and it was some very valuable time with my mother.” And, she deadpans: “I was travelling with a number of people over the age of 60, which has its real benefits and its challenges.”
Dunham is on the line from the back of a New York cab. If Woody Allen were reborn today as a twentysomething girl searching for her lot in life, he’d probably look and sound a lot like Dunham. Take her attitude to travelling with her mother. “I wouldn’t say I’m the world’s most adventurous traveller and my mother has a more gregarious travel spirit than I do, so she’s a really good person to go abroad with.” Simmons is reportedly quite adventurous. “Not hiking-up-a-volcano adventurous, but she’ll eat the strange things, she’ll venture into the weird backalley stores, she’ll talk to the stranger, but she also has good streetwise instincts, so I’d say she’s a seasoned and intelligent traveller.”
Strange foods aside, Dunham is pretty fearless herself. In Girls, the white-hot HBO television series she writes, directs and stars in, there aren’t many places she won’t go. Wrangling a concussed naked parent, seducing a sexual harasser, cracking AIDS jokes while having a gynaecological exam – this is definitely not the mysteriously funded-Manolos, non hangover- inducing Cosmopolitans, searching-for-the-one territory of Sex and the City, to which it was initially so often compared.
The second season
they’re starting to go:
‘Oh my God, we’re still so stunted,
is this just our lives?’
Yes, it is about four young New York women, would-be writer Hannah (Dunham), preppy art gallerist Marnie (Allison Williams), free-spirited nanny Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and wide-eyed innocent Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), all well-educated and somewhat privileged, but their world is grubbier, funnier and with much more cringe-worthy bad sex. Much more.
The show was hotly anticipated when it debuted early last year. Dunham had been tipped as an indie “one to watch” after the cult success of her two web series Delusional Downtown Divas and Tight Shots and her independent films Creative NonFiction in 2009 and Tiny Furniture in 2010, which both premiered at the acclaimed South by Southwest festival. That Hollywood comedy Midas Judd Apatow was on board as executive producer gave it even more cred.
And it was just as good as everyone hoped. Late last year it was nominated for five Emmy awards, including outstanding directing, writing and acting for Dunham.
Series two goes to air in the US and on Foxtel’s Showcase this month and Dunham couldn’t be happier with it. “The first season the girls felt like they were justified in some of their confusion because they’d just gotten out of college. The second season they’re starting to go: ‘Oh my God, we’re still so stunted, is this just our lives?’”
Although she’s not giving much away, it’s clear the foursome continue to attempt to navigate careers, sex, life, love and, most importantly, friendship. “The show for me has always been about the friendship between women,” she says. Friendships in your 20s are perhaps the most complex: more important than ever, yet still riddled with teenage angst and with a dollop of work, marriage and, perhaps, children thrown into the mix.
Dunham agrees: “You start to have to re-examine the friendships and see which ones – not to sound mercenary – but which ones are useful to you and which ones are going to help you be the person you want to be. And the scary thing is that it’s sort of a judgement day and not all your friendships survive your 20s.”
It’s something that Dunham herself is dealing with, with her life changing so dramatically in the last two years. She clearly loves what she is doing and the people that she is meeting along the way, but she admits, albeit reluctantly, there are challenges. “I’m 26, so, of course, there’s a time when I feel like: ‘Shouldn’t I just be drunk in a pit somewhere waiting to spiritually develop?’ In my most exhausted moments those are the kinds of thoughts I have. But for the most part, I feel insanely lucky.”
She puts her drive to write, direct and act – all at the same time – down to the need to tell her stories, and she gets a kick out of people finding comfort and humour in them. “I want to keep making honest things that will fill a hole in those people’s lives, keep connecting to this audience that I’m so grateful for and keep delivering things that feel like they don’t necessarily fall into the Hollywood mould, which can I think be a little destructive to women.”
Indeed, for all her goofy, carefree charm, there’s a take-no-prisoners revolutionary within Dunham. “I’ve always thought of myself as a little politically ignorant, because I was a bad history student and I’ve always subscribed to the newspaper with the best intentions and then end up watching my favourite TV show, or painting my fingernails or organising my photo album,” she says. “But the fact is, I think that I am more political than I ever gave myself credit for, because a lot of the issues that most concern me would be political issues. Women’s rights, marriage equality, general human rights, human kindness and being honest about what women are subjected to in the media, and those are political issues.”
One of the hot-button issues in the show has been Dunham’s unabashed nudity. Metres of newsprint have been dedicated to her realistically pear-shaped figure and her confidence in baring it regularly. She’s fascinated by the reaction – and even more determined to continue it. “We’re going there because we recognise that it’s an emotional encounter and we want to follow the character into that situation,” she says. “I don’t want to watch the show when there’s a conveniently placed bedsheet. It’s not a desire on my part to strip down so the nation can see me. It’s just about a desire to present something realistically. I wouldn’t be like, hey guys, I’ve kind of gotten my point across, you’ve seen my breasts, I’m gonna quit. As long as I’m doing this show, in for a penny, in for a pound.”
In this appearance-obsessed era, her fearlessness is breathtaking, yet she shrugs it off. “I’m scared of a lot of things. I’m the worst hypochondriac, I’ve got a fair amount of social anxiety. I’ve got all of that going on, but this is not brave … It’s brave to jump off a cliff and save your friend who’s drowning, it’s not that brave to take your shirt off if taking your shirt off isn’t a big deal to you.”
This is so aggrandising and stupid,
but I have this Joan of Arc feeling, like,
I’ve got this job that I was given, I have to do it,
“That being said, there are times when I’m scared by continuing to put my work into the public, or I’m scared by the reaction or I’m scared by the act of making the things that are revealing the ethics of my psyche. But I just do it because I’m like, I’ve already started, and this is my lot in life.”
There is a steely determination beneath her drive, something that she admits she doesn’t fully understand. “It’s not like God has spoken to me, and this is so aggrandising and stupid, but I have this Joan of Arc feeling, like, I’ve got this job that I was given, I have to do it, even if people tell me not to do it.”
She felt the full heat of those naysayers recently when she filmed a public service announcement in support of Barack Obama in the lead-up to the US presidential election. Entitled Your First Time, the tongue-in-cheek ad was aimed at her young female audience and compared voting for the first time to losing your virginity. It raised the ire of ultraconservative Republicans, who dubbed it “disgusting”, “out of touch” and “sexualising the voting process”.
At the time she laughed off the outrage with a swift online repost: “It tickles me no end that while my Twitter feed was blowing up with conservative hate, I was literally hanging out in a pile of bisexuals.” And even now she’s unrepentant. “I do feel if you’re in a serious, intense political climate like the one we’re facing … if you’re a person with a strong set of beliefs about what our country’s best move is, and you have any kind of platform, it’s your obligation to share it.” Regardless, it taught her one thing: “Politics are the most hot button issues, really. It makes Charlie Sheen look like nothing. Politics makes people crazy.”
In case Dunham wasn’t busy enough, she recently signed a book deal reported to be worth more than US$3.5 million with Random House, for her first book tentatively entitled Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned. She describes it as the book her Girls character Hannah wishes she was writing. “Instead of a straightforward advice book, it has strands of advice, varied in personal essays about painful misadventures and odd experiences and tiny triumphs,” she says. “It’s a really exciting way to tell stories that are so internal and so personal that they might be hard to express cinematically.” She’s relishing writing it, particularly because she can do it anywhere, anytime and entirely on her own. “Making movies is super-collaborative and at the end of the day you wish that you would never have anybody ever speak your name again.”
Given her increasing profile, her unquestionable talent and her unrelenting fearlessness, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
Published in Vogue Australia February 2013
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