Girls star and creator Lena Dunham is telling all about the co-star she alleges threw a chair and punched a wall near her head behind-the-scenes of her hit HBO series.
Dunham, 39, writes in her new memoir, Famesick, that Adam Driver, 42, was “something feral” on set, according to The Independent. In one incident she describes in the book, Driver threw a chair at the wall when she struggled to get her lines out during a rehearsal.
“When I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer—until finally, Adam screamed, ‘F---ING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE F--- UP,’ he told me,” she writes. “‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’”
Dunham adds that she “didn’t tell anyone” at the time.
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative for Driver for comment.
Driver played Adam Sackler, Hannah’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, for all six seasons of the show from 2012 to 2017. He went on to earn Oscar nods for his roles in 2018’s BlacKkKlansman and 2019’s Marriage Story, and play Kylo Ren in the Star Wars universe.
Dunham also described acting in intimate scenes with the Driver, who she alleged was aggressive and would “hurl me this way and that.” Dunham alleged that even after “carefully blocking” those scenes, she was still “afraid that when I turned around, I would find I was suddenly in a full-penetration 1970s porno,” she wrote. “But after a few mimed thrusts, I called cut.”
More about Driver in the book included a time Driver allegedly punched a hole in the wall because he didn’t like his haircut, and another when he screamed in her face, according to the site.
Over the weekend, Dunham told The Guardian of the behavior she described in the book, “At the time, I didn’t have the skill to… it never entered my mind to say, ‘I was your boss, you couldn’t speak to me this way.’”
Though Driver told her, “I hope you know I will always love you,” after wrapping the series’s last episode, Dunham writes in the book that she “never heard from him again.”
Dunham said she even contemplated not working with male actors again after the experience: “I had lots of amazing men in my life,” she told The Guardian, “but there were years when I thought: Couldn’t I just make things that only had women in them?”
