In the HBO show Girls, characters Hannah Horvath and Adam Sackler’s relationship was filled with intense emotional flare-ups and crushing heartaches, with the contention playing out across six seasons.
And the real-life dynamic between creator and star Lena Dunham and actor Adam Driver sometimes mirrored what was happening onscreen, Dunham has revealed in her new book, Famesick: A Memoir, according to Variety.
The multi-hyphenate wrote that while filming the beloved series, which ran from 2012 to 2017, she continually found herself on unsure footing around Driver, whose “anger could make him spit and throw things, was proportionate to the intensity of our creative connection.”
A representative for Driver did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
Dunham went on to list a series of incidents that occurred during filming, including early on in Season One, when they were shooting their first sex scene. “He hurled me this way and that,” Dunham wrote. “Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment, unsure of what had happened — had I lost directorial authority, allowed the scene to go off the rails, not given proper instructions? Would I be removed from my command post immediately?”
“It wasn’t that I felt violated — and I also wouldn’t know if I had, as there was little in my sexual life that I hadn’t allowed to happen, and for no pay,” she continued. “But I felt that something intimate, confusing and primal had played out in a scenario I was meant to control.”
Another time, while rehearsing in her trailer, Dunham said she was stammering over her lines when Driver allegedly lashed out, “hurl[ing] a chair at the wall next to me,” and screaming, “FUCKING SAY SOMETHING … WAKE THE FUCK UP … I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.”
Though Driver “could be short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing,” Dunham wrote, the actor could also be “protective, loving even,” recalling a time when Driver comforted her during a prolonged, anxiety-filled week.
She had been crushed when Driver said he had gotten engaged to his now-wife Joanne Tucker. “It was absurd to be heartbroken, to have thought I meant anything, that I occupied any role beyond distraction,” Dunham explained. “I was his scene partner, sure — and so when we were in a scene, his attention was piercing, his presence all-consuming. But in life? It would never be me who kept him in line. I didn’t have the chops. Even at work, I couldn’t do it, in the one place I was meant to make the rules.”
Dunham said that after wrapping the pair’s final scene in Season Six, a Brooklyn diner where their characters awkwardly ate soup, Driver told her that he’d always love her. She said they haven’t spoken since.
This story originally appeared on Rolling Stone.
