This girl isn’t here for the online chatter.
Lena Dunham is opening up about the public’s unsolicited opinions on her body while she was starred on the HBO Max series “Girls,” from 2012 to 2017.
“I expected that people would have a response to the kind of sex the show was depicting or the level of nudity, but the idea that my body, the shape of my body, would become such a hotbed for discussion? It was insane,” the actress, 39, said while speaking to The Times on Saturday.
“I can’t say I was never rocked, but I’m lucky enough that my thing has never been looking at a picture of myself and picking myself apart or feeling tortured about how I looked—it’s just not my area,” Dunham added.
“I have my own stuff I’m tortured about, but it wasn’t that.”
In 2013, Howard Stern called the Netflix star “a little fat girl,” and a year later, the magazine Jezebel offered $10,000 for the original picture of her Vogue cover to prove it had been retouched.
The writer also touched on Ozempic, a Semaglutide injection used to treat type 2 diabetes, which is now also being used for weight loss.
Dunham dubbed the current day and age an “Ozempiced-out moment,” while asking, “Does the body positivity movement still exist?” and noting, “I don’t know where it is.”
Once “Girls,” which followed a group of friends post-college, went off the air eight years ago, Dunham intentionally stepped out of the limelight.
She ended up moving to London in 2021 after her breakup with Jack Antonoff. Within six months, she met and married her husband, Luis Felber.
“Being on the ‘Girls’ set all the time was like living in a fake New York,” continued Dunham. “I spent my whole twenties pretending to go out in the city and pretending to live, so I didn’t actually know how to do it at all. When the show ended I didn’t know what direction to move in. I wasn’t young enough to be out and feeling fun and free.
“I felt fatigued, yet didn’t know how to mature [in New York]. I didn’t know how to grow up there. I remember my father asked, ‘Can you boil an egg?’ And me being like, I think so? You just put it in water?’”
She also “felt like all the maturing and changing that had been kept at bay by the experience of being in that cocoon of [‘Girls’] was suddenly happening at a speed that was overwhelming,” she confessed to the outlet. “It was a painful metamorphosis.”
Now, Dunham is back in the spotlight with “Too Much,” an autobiographical rom-com starring Megan Stalter.
Dunham stepped out for the red carpet premiere last week, stunning in a deep red gown.
“What a perfect London night- at my favorite building (The Barbican) with my favorites,” the star gushed in her Instagram caption. “So excited to share what we’ve made with our other favorites- you!”
Dunham’s latest project comes a year after she revealed she had pulled out of Mattel’s “Polly Pocket” movie.
“I’m not going to make the Polly Pocket movie,” she told the New Yorker. “I wrote a script, and I was working on it for three years.”
“But I remember someone once said to me about Nancy Meyers: the thing that’s the most amazing about her is that the movie she makes or the movie she would be making with or without a studio, with or without notes — that somehow her taste manages to intersect perfectly with what the world wants. What a f–king gift that is. And Nora Ephron, too, who was such a mentor to me, but always said, ‘Go be weird. Don’t kowtow to anyone.’”
The reason why Dunham didn’t cast herself as the lead in “Too Much” was simple. “I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around ‘Girls’ at this point in my life,” she said.
