The actress and star creator of the 2000s confesses that she suffered verbal aggression from a castmate

BarcelonaWhen she was only 23 years old, Lena Dunham sold her first series, Girls, to HBO Max. The dramedy about a group of four friends living in New York was one of the shows that marked television in the second decade of the 2000s and its protagonist and creator was very often also the subject of all kinds of articles and criticism, often for her physique. Now Dunham, who will turn forty in May, has just published a memoir, Famesick (it will be published in Spanish in September), in which she reviews not only the impact that sudden fame had on her but also her relationship with her castmates on the series and the many health problems she has suffered throughout her life.

One of the people who comes off worst in the book is Adam Driver, an actor now very popular after starring in the last trilogy of Star Wars and for having won critical acclaim with more auteur projects. Girls, however, was the project that launched him to fame: he was an unknown actor who landed on television after a career in the marines, a corps to which he enlisted shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. In the series, he played Adam, the on-again, off-again boyfriend of the protagonist, Hannah, played by Dunham. Their relationship was dysfunctional and full of ups and downs. Behind the cameras, Dunham assures that the relationship was no better, but almost worse. Although the actress was technically Driver's boss, he often intimidated her and had violent reactions.

One of the most uncomfortable episodes described by Dunham was while filming the first season. She asserts that while they were rehearsing, he lost control because she forgot her lines. "When I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer, until finally, Adam yelled: 'Say something, damn it!' and threw a chair against the wall next to me. 'Wake up, damn it!' he told me. 'I'm tired of watching you stare,'" Dunham recalls. The actress and screenwriter writes that she didn't tell anyone about the incident. In an interview with "The Guardian, she adds that, although technically she was Driver's boss, she didn't know how to handle the moment. "At that point, I didn't have the ability to... it never occurred to me to say: 'I'm your boss, you can't talk to me like that.' And, at that point in my twenties, I still thought that this is what great male geniuses do: tear you apart," confesses Dunham, who was 25 years old during the first season.

Dunham recounts that she excused Driver's bad attitude because she associated it with the intense creative connection they had, especially during the first season of the series. "I believed that the intensity of his anger towards me, an anger that could make him spit and throw things, was proportional to the intensity of our creative connection," she says in the book. "One day in his dressing room, while he was apologizing for a slight I didn't remember committing, he came close to my face and whispered: 'Never forget that I know you. I know you really well.' 'What do you know?!' I yelled. 'You don't go to parties. You love animals. And you hate being whispered to.' And he was right," she recalls.

Despite the intimidation and volatile reactions – once he punched the wall of his trailer and made a hole in it –, Dunham acknowledges that there was an attraction between them and that they were once close to crossing a red line and getting involved. She, however, stopped it. "A part of me knew – a wise part of me, a brave part of me – that if we crossed any line, returning to work would be tinged with humiliation, that I would be minimizing any authority I still had, and that, no matter what, my heart – hurt, but surprisingly not yet broken – would crack," she reflects. A month after that moment, Driver got engaged to his girlfriend, to whom he is still married.

Dunham also explains that when they filmed the last scene of their two characters, she and Driver had barely spoken for three years. Despite this, after that day of filming, they experienced a kind of reconciliation, as he ended up expressing his affection for her. On the way back home together, he said goodbye to her, telling her: "I hope you know that I will always love you." In the book, Dunham says she has never spoken to Driver again.