Lena Dunham is stepping back from several projects, including her upcoming Netflix series “Too Much,” to avoid the body shaming she experienced during her time on “Girls.” In a recent profile with The New Yorker, Dunham, 38, explained her decision, stating, “I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around ‘Girls’ at this point in my life. Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again. It was a hard choice.”
Dunham co-created “Too Much” with her husband, Luis Felber, and it wasn’t a difficult decision to cast Megan Stalter in the lead role. Dunham knew she “wanted” Stalter from the start. However, after facing public scrutiny over her appearance while starring on “Girls,” which aired for six seasons on HBO, she didn’t want to put herself front and center again. “I used to think that winning meant you just keep doing it and you don’t care what anybody thinks,” she admitted. “I forgot that winning is actually just protecting yourself and doing what you need to do to keep making work.”
While Dunham remains the creator and executive producer of “Too Much,” she emphasized that Stalter was perfect for the role, inspired by her previous work. “She’s unbelievable; I think people are going to be so blown away. We know how funny she is. But, then, when she enters a dramatic scene, you’re, like, ‘Oh, we got a little Meryl Streep on our hands!’” Dunham praised Stalter’s ability to bring complexity to her character, adding, “There’s an openness to Meg’s presence that I think goes a long way. She has whatever the opposite of resting bitch face is. She has resting angel face.”
In addition to stepping away from the TV screen, Dunham revealed she is also no longer involved in the “Polly Pocket” movie, which is set to star Lily Collins. “I’m not going to make the ‘Polly Pocket’ movie. I wrote a script, and I was working on it for three years,” she said. Dunham reflected on the success of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie and felt that her involvement in “Polly Pocket,” another iconic Mattel brand, wouldn’t have the same impact. “I felt like, unless I can do it that way, I’m not going to do it. I don’t think I have that in me,” she confessed. “I feel like the next movie I make needs to feel like a movie that I absolutely have to make. No one but me could make it. And I did think other people could make ‘Polly Pocket.'”
A “Polly Pocket” movie was officially announced in July 2023 following the success of “Barbie.” Dunham, who had been attached to the project since 2021, was set to write and direct the film while Collins would star and produce the project.
On a recent afternoon, I met Lena Dunham at a brasserie called Soutine in London, not far from her home in North London. “This place is like my out-of-house office,” Dunham said as she settled into a brown leather banquette at a corner table. The restaurant was nearly empty, save for a few customers lingering over tea. “I think I like it here because of its inherent Tribeca-ness,” Dunham said. “I was, like, O.K., this place makes sense to me.”
Dunham grew up in Tribeca, the daughter of two artists, painter Carroll Dunham and photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons. She has a tattoo of the Odeon’s neon sign. “On my butt, or I would show it to you,” she said. Since 2021, Dunham has been spending most of her time in London with her husband, British Peruvian musician Luis Felber, enjoying a relatively low-key expat existence.
Dunham didn’t flee New York; work initially brought her to the U.K. But being in London ultimately offered her the freedom of a place where “you don’t feel that you are being in any way hemmed in by other people’s perceptions,” she said. “Girls” was an inescapable subject of millennial discourse during its six-season run. Dunham, who wrote the pilot at 24, became a controversial and constantly discussed celebrity. Even after the show finished, debates about Lena Dunham—her body, her politics, her love life, and friendships—were inescapable.
At the same time, Dunham was grappling with an addiction to prescription drugs and several illnesses, including endometriosis, which led her to have a hysterectomy at 31, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a connective-tissue disorder. London provided an opportunity to reset and get back to work.
Dunham is involved in various new projects. She co-stars in the new film “Treasure,” opposite Stephen Fry, playing the willful daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She is currently acting in a major motion picture she cannot yet discuss, although she mentioned it involves the English countryside. She is almost done writing a new memoir, which she has been quietly working on for years. She is producing several new shows and films under her production banner, Good Thing Going. And “Girls” fans rejoice—she is at work on a new semi-autobiographical comedy series, “Too Much,” which will debut on Netflix in 2025.
Co-created by Dunham and her husband, the show stars Megan Stalter as a thirtysomething American woman who moves to London and falls in love with a British musician, played by Will Sharpe. Though the story closely references Dunham’s own life, she was reluctant to cast herself in another leading role. “Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again,” she said.
The morning we were set to meet, Dunham experienced an EDS flareup the day before. We had planned to walk around St. John’s Wood and “look at beautiful Georgian buildings,” but she didn’t feel up for a lot of strolling. So we sat at Soutine for several hours, eating avocado salad and potato rösti. Dunham ordered an oat-milk latte, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a bottle of sparkling water, all at once. She has been “happily sober” since 2018. She wore a frilly pink satin dress covered in tiny bows and a pair of gray cotton ballet flats—”granny house slippers, but make it chic,” she said. She had long, candy-colored nails, which she drummed softly on the table as she spoke about her recovering workaholism, her love of British rom-coms, her adult friendships, and the novel pleasures of a low-drama lifestyle.
Another topic under discussion was the recent resurgence of “Girls” thanks to a new Gen Z audience, who view the show as a nostalgic glimpse into New York’s recent past. Dunham is amused by the revival but doesn’t engage much with it; for one thing, she doesn’t read social-media comments anymore.
Source: The New Yorker, Getty Images, Shutterstock
