After five years out of the limelight, actor and director Lena Dunham is back. She talks about her hit series Girls – that made her both the voice of a generation and a lightning rod for criticism – and her new film
It was a decade ago, at the sharpest peak of Lena Dunham’s fame, while her show, Girls, was being heralded as a masterpiece and Dunham herself as the voice of her generation, when producers asked what she’d like to make next. Anything, they said. Something feminist with guns maybe? Something radically erotic? A romcom perhaps, with nipples in it? No, she said. “I want to make a movie about a medieval child who gets her period.” She smiles at me, somewhat primly.
That movie, Catherine Called Birdy, a comedy based on a YA novel, comes out this week and happens to coincide with the release of another film by Dunham, her first in 12 years. Sharp Stick is a more conventionally Dunham-ian project, in that a) it’s about an awkward 26-year-old’s sexual awakening, b) Dunham acts in it and c) reviews have tended to critique her rather than the film itself. In the five years since Girls ended, after years of rabid attention, she’s been relatively reclusive, emerging occasionally to report on a major operation, rehab or, last year, her “whirlwind” marriage at 35 to British-Peruvian musician Luis Felber. The attention she attracted, suffered, endured, was related in part to her lack of filter, which both contributed to the taboo-breaking telly she made and also meant the ways she navigated fame in her early 20s led to shock and sneers. Is she ready to re-enter the discourse? “No,” she says firmly. “Absolutely not.” And yet, here we are.
