The millennial star Lena Dunham reveals a tempestuous relationship with Adam Driver

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 sorts of articles and criticisms, often for her physique. Now Dunham, who will turn forty in May, has just published a memoir, Famesick (it will be published here in Spanish in September), in which she reviews not only the impact that sudden fame had on her but also her relationship with her co-stars 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 latest 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 branch he enlisted in 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 claims the relationship was no better, but rather almost worse. Despite the fact that 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 they were filming the first season. She assures 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 shouted: '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 seeing you stare'," Dunham remembers. The actress and screenwriter writes that she didn't explain the incident to anyone. In an interview to the "Guardian, she adds that, although technically she was Driver's boss, she didn't know how to manage the moment. "At that moment, 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 moment in my twenties, I still thought that's what great male geniuses do: destroy you," confesses Dunham, who was 25 years old during the first season.

Dunham recounts that she forgave 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 rage towards me, a rage 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 I was apologizing for an insult I didn't remember committing, he came up to my face and whispered: 'Never forget that I know you. I know you for real.' 'What do you know?!' I shouted. 'You don't go to parties. You love animals. And you hate being whispered to.' And he was right," she remembers.

Despite the intimidation and volatile reactions – he once 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 on the verge of crossing a red line and hooking up. She, however, stopped him. "A part of me knew – a wise part of me, a brave part of me – that if we crossed any boundary, 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 shot the last scene of their two characters, she and Driver had barely spoken for almost three years. Despite everything, after that day of filming they experienced a kind of reconciliation, as he ended up showing her his affection. 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.