From The Archive: When Vogue Met A Young Lena Dunham Before ‘Girls’ Went Global

Meet the Girls, the four faces of the next television phenomenon. Possibly you’re familiar with them already. Maybe you’ve picked up an American magazine lately and read an essay debating the show’s excruciatingly vivid sex scenes. Or you “know someone” who has illegally downloaded its 10, half-hour episodes and hasn’t shut up about it since. Maybe you spied the show’s writer, director and lead actress, Lena Dunham, on the arm of Hamish Bowles at the Met Ball last May. She wore an emerald-green duchesse satin gown by Wes Gordon and Schiaparelli-pink Stella McCartney shoes. He said she was the “funnest date, like, evah”.

Or maybe you were already a fan of Dunham’s work. Perhaps you loved her 2010 film Tiny Furniture, a coming-of-age comedy shot on a tiny budget which garnered a tiny clutch of colossally influential fans, like comedy producer Judd Apatow who phoned Dunham after seeing it and offered to help with the series she was developing with HBO. “It blew my mind,” says Apatow. “So funny and sweet and delicate – everything I like in comedy.”

Still bemused? Don’t be. Next month, Girls arrives here, and its characters – Jessa, Hannah, Shoshannah and Marnie – will soon be as common to your everyday conversation as the cast of Mad Men, The Killing or, God forbid, the sacred Wire. You’ll be analysing their hairstyles, their relationships, their attitudes and their bodies. You’ll finally dump those tired old girlfriends Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte you keep revisiting on late-night repeats and make way for these younger hybrids. Girls will amuse, annoy and inspire devotion in equal measure. But you’ll have an opinion about it.

Girls is sensational, partly because it’s hilarious, in a wry, grown-up, brilliantly observed way, and partly because it’s helmed by Dunham, the kind of creative wunderkind who makes you wonder what the hell you’ve been doing all your life. Dunham started writing as a child, became the cult star of a series of short Youtube films she made at college, directed her debut film aged 21, and counted the late Nora Ephron as a mentor (Ephron was similarly inspired to write to Dunham after seeing Tiny Furniture). When we meet, she has only just celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday, yet since Girls first aired in America, she has found herself designated spokesperson for the modern female condition.

“The fascinating thing is I’ve never been taken seriously in my life,” says Dunham over scrambled eggs at a corner table in Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel. “Up till Girls, the biggest scandal I’d ever been involved in was at the school newspaper, when I was editing and somebody plagiarised. Mind you, that was really bad. Really bad.”

Girls tells the fairly everyday story of four 20-something kidults negotiating life, career, love, sex and dwindling finances in New York, and its leading ladies are exactly the types of girl you will recognise if you’ve spent any time in a hipster heartland like Williamsburg in Brooklyn (or Hackney), or if you hang out with quasi-employed creative types. Hannah, the show’s central character, played by Dunham, is an aspirant writer: “I think I may be the voice of my generation,” she announces to her parents in the first episode, mid trying to persuade them not to cut off her monthly allowance (unsuccessfully, as it happens, because she is high on opium tea at the time). “Or at least a voice,” she adds. “Of a generation.”

Hannah’s flatmate and best friend is Marnie – the straight one – elegantly suffocating in a loving but dull relationship and desperately seeking her purpose in life. “She’s the kind of friend who’s a little bit obsessive, a little bit controlled,” says Allison Williams, the demure 24-year-old actress who plays her. “She wants to give advice whether you want to hear it or not. Very loyal. Very intense.”

Then there’s Shoshannah, a naive savant rich in self-help homilies but dirt-poor in life experience. She’s played by Zosia Mamet (a part-time musician and the daughter of writer David Mamet and the actress Lindsay Crouse), who pronounces her screen alter ego “busy, complex – and fucking hysterical”. And lastly, there’s the bohemian of the quartet, Jessa, a charismatic beauty with an English accent, played by Jemima Kirke, the type of woman who, according to Dunham, “has never had a bad hair day in her life”.

What makes the show unusual is its honesty. The Girls are selfish. They are horrible to boyfriends who adore them and chase after crappy boys who treat them crappily in return. They take drugs. They drink. They screw up interviews by making inappropriate rape gags. They seduce married men. They schedule lunch-hour abortions for their friends and then get cross when that friend is “so flaky, she can’t even turn up in time for her own abortion”. What they do is shocking. Until you remember that young women simply do shocking things.

“I felt like treating a group of women this age as a viable group to chronicle was sort of political in its own right,” explains Dunham, of whether she set out to “say anything” with Girls. “We’re 25. It’s going to be messy for a little while. You can’t hold someone accountable for what they do at that age unless it’s truly sadistic. Besides, 20s-somethings are kind of like puppies. They fall down the stairs and then bound back up.” She pauses for a nanosecond. “I suppose I hoped that, even though we don’t talk about it overtly, we would start some kind of conversation about reproductive rights. And something I actively hoped also was that showing a more complicated range of bodies in women and men would be something of a conversation starter, because I’d been sobered by the perfection of the principal forms that we see on American television.”

With the exception of Kirke, the Girls do look surprisingly normal; Dunham is especially shambolic in person – it makes up for her almost Orson Wellesian levels of creative precocity. Rather than being gym-hewn and bleach-toothed, she’s soft and pear-shaped, spilling out of her flimsy Jill Stuart playsuit, her gold nameplate necklace jangling for attention against the murky blue tattoos that scroll around her arms. Dunham, who is naked in Girls almost as often as she is dressed, and rarely revealed in the most flattering light, seems to enjoy a brilliantly uncomplicated relationship with her body. But that doesn’t mean she’s not aware of her shape.

“I really do think a lot of my personality was formed around the issue of gaining some weight when I was a teenager and having to navigate a body that wasn’t tiny and cute any more. It’s interesting,” she adds, “the sort of defences that a girl has to build. Like, at high school, I was very much into body modification. I dyed my hair and got tattoos. There’s a real rockabilly look that a bold chubby girl will go for that I was really trying to corner the market in.”

Dunham talks. And talks. And talks. She talks so fast, in such frank, curiously modulated sentences, that keeping up with her can feel somewhat aerobic. “I have a tendency to lose my voice,” she explains breathlessly at one point. “It could be because I talk so much. Sometimes, I feel very fatigued after a conversation in a way that I think is not healthy…”

In many ways it’s impossible to extrapolate the real Lena Dunham from the characters she plays on screen. Girls is no exception. Both she and Hannah are creative writing graduates. Both are witty, observant and curious, and both have a propensity to fall in love with inappropriate boys, although Dunham no longer goes for characters like Adam the actor/carpenter/reprobate loner Hannah sees in the show. “I used to like arty weirdos who lived in vans,” she says. “Now I like creative, entertaining, self-actualised people with funny haircuts. And friends.” Her current boyfriend, James, has lots of friends. “It’s been a revelation,” she nods.

The cross-identification is further complicated by the fact that so many of her friends and family crop up in her work, generally playing her friends and family. Kirke, who put her career as an artist on hiatus to shoot Girls, is a typical example. The two have known each other since they were eight. “I was obsessed with her,” says Dunham. “She and her sisters were always famous for being beautiful and cool – you’d hear rumours about her 13-year-old sister dancing in her pyjamas on a tabletop at the Beatrice Inn. And I was, as I described to you, chubby and hanging out in my basement bedroom all the time, and just, like, ‘If I could get that girl to be my friend, it would be a miracle.’”

Kirke still has that same magnetic allure, which is exploited brilliantly in Girls, where she plays a beautiful simulacrum of her youthful self, but she is no longer as free a spirit; now married, she had a baby just before shooting the first episode of Girls and will shortly have another. Many friendships wouldn’t survive such a gruelling schedule. “Lena and I still get along as well as we did before,” observes Kirke. “We fight a little bit more because we’re around each other so much, and we sometimes butt heads in our work relationship, but I’d say we're even closer now.”

There is a strong sense of familial loyalty among the Girls crew, something undoubtedly fostered by Dunham, who is intensely involved with her family. “My parents and I are a little cult,” she says matter-of-factly; she also has a younger sibling (whom she adores). “It’s not unhealthy but it’s definitely enmeshed.”

She still talks to her parents – Carroll Dunham, a painter, and Laurie Simmons, a photographer and designer – several times a day, sometimes several times an hour. And ’twas ever thus. “I would say I was precocious,” she says of her childhood, “but I was not mature. I was not independent at all.” In fact, she moved out of her parents’ house only two weeks ago. “I tried to do it before and it went horribly,” she admits. “But I think this time it’s for real.”

Immature or not, Dunham has become a fiercely independent player negotiating an incredibly tough industry entirely on her own terms. “She's spectacular,” says Apatow, who made his name as a television producer at around the same age. “Making a show like this is like walking into a buzzsaw, and when you’re young and ridiculously talented, people instinctively want to attack you because it seems so unfair to the rest of us. But Lena is a fully formed voice.”

Dunham is currently directing the second series of Girls, a project whose storylines have been guarded like “state secrets”, even though she maintains there’s actually not all that much to reveal. That said, she has big plans for her Girls. “Unless you have them develop at a rapid rate, you start to feel like you’re writing a parody of your own characters,” she says, perhaps mindful of the terrible stereotypes that came to dictate those Sex and the City antecedents. “You know, my artistic life is shifting rapidly, and I want to feel I can try new things and test my boundaries. And that’s really exciting because I feel like I’m allowed to do that.”

And with that she has to leave, to have her make-up done for Vogue, and finish tweaking the script for tomorrow’s location shoot, and take a couple of calls from LA, and arrange a quick casting, and write another scene, and direct her Girls. And call her parents.