![]() ‘I always thought there was something crude or superficial about caring how people responded to me, so I tried hard to act as if I didn’t notice’: Lena Dunham. “In many ways, she did as much for me as seven years in therapy.” Her work “made me ask myself: ‘Can I maybe say those things, too?’” she continues. “She feels like THE trail blazer when it comes to stories about modern women,” exposing them in ways that are “ugly and confrontational, weak and beautifully surprising” and also very funny. “And not to sound like a total cheeseball, but totally ‘inhabiting your artistry’ and totally ‘presenting your id’, to me, is the job of an artist.” Billie Piper, who plays the mother in Catherine, Called Birdy, tells me Dunham’s art has “shaped” her. About the purposeful blindness? “I think to keep producing work that is compelling to you and honest, you do have to have a certain kind of blindness, you do have to sort of forget that people are going to see it.” She pauses for half a second, maybe less. They will certainly find a reason to be enraged about your movie about a 14-year-old with her period and a crush on her uncle.’” “They were like: ‘You’re insane.’ They said: ‘You have learned nothing from your time in this business – you have a purposeful blindness. When she told her parents (the artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham) that she thought this medieval-period film about periods could be her most commercial project to date, they stared at her. “If I was afraid of the world before, it certainly hasn’t given me any more reason to be less afraid today,” she says. “Absolutely not.” And yet, here we are.ĭunham is in New York, vaping discreetly in a small, bright study, talking in full singsong paragraphs punctuated briefly by chuckles. ![]() ![]() Is she ready to re-enter the discourse? “No,” she says firmly. 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. 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. 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. 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. “I want to make a movie about a medieval child who gets her period.” She smiles at me, somewhat primly. Something feminist with guns maybe? Something radically erotic? A romcom perhaps, with nipples in it? No, she said. ![]() I t 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. ![]()
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