Lena Dunham awkwardly dodged questions regarding her previous working relationship with Adam Driver after she revealed Driver was prone to violent onset outburts in her new memoir, “Famesick.”
“You write in the book about so much, but partly about a complicated relationship you had with your co-star Adam Driver,” Jenna Bush Hager said during her Wednesday interview with Dunham, 38, on the April 15 episode of “Today With Jenna & Sheinelle.”
“You were his boss. You were the director of this television series. Moments where there was violence or anger, moments where there could have been romantic feelings,” Bush Hager continued, before asking, “How does it sit with you now?”
Dunham began to expertly steer clear of the question about her sometimes stressful “workplace dynamic” by telling the hosts she wanted to avoid sharing any materials that were not “useful, potentially, to the reader” in her book.
“I think I wrote about a dynamic that a lot of young women can understand in the workplace,” Dunham shared.
“I spent eight and a half years writing this book, so I was super intentional with every word that I put on the page and then you come on live TV — with cool glamorous girls like you — and are asked to rehash it in a way.”
“I really want people to read it in context and understand it in the totality. … It’s as much about my experience of coming to some kind of understanding of my own power as a boss than it is about anything else,” she continued.
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Bush Hager’s co-host Sheinelle Jones then switched gears, probing Dunham for a specific answer about whether she ever thought she and Driver would cross paths again later in their careers.
“When you were in that season [of life], did you ever think that you guys would still communicate again?” she asked. “Or that you would stay in touch?”
Dunham was quick to cleverly sidestep the question with an answer revealing her feelings toward the entire “Girls” cast.
“I, in the book, really share that there were a lot of magical moments and our entire cast has a sort of bond that I don’t think can ever be broken,” she said.
Dunham previously made headlines earlier this week after an excerpt from “Famesick” was published by The Guardian. In the small section of the memoir, she writes that Driver — who played her on-again, off-again boyfriend Adam Sackler on “Girls” — was “spectacularly rude” to her while working together on the show.
In one incident, she reflects about the time he threw a chair at the wall next to her. She also alleges that he punched a hole in his trailer wall, and that he would scream in her face.
“At the time, I didn’t have the skill to … it never entered my mind to say, ‘I am your boss, you can’t speak to me this way,’” the series creator and showrunner told the Guardian of the interactions in her interview.
“And, at that point in my 20s, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that,” she continued, referring to her dad, painter Carroll Dunham.
Dunham’s “Famesick” was released on April 14 and is currently available for purchase.
