The ‘Girls’ creator alleges her co-star hurled a chair at the wall next to her, screamed in her face, and punched a hole in his trailer. The timing is everything.
Lena Dunham’s new memoir, “Famesick,” arrives in bookstores today. It covers a lot of ground — her relationship with ex-boyfriend Jack Antonoff, her complicated partnership with producing partner Jenni Konner, her health battles, her relocation to London, and the overwhelming experience of becoming a television superstar at 25. But the passages generating the most attention, and the ones likely to have the most lasting impact, involve Adam Driver.
Dunham writes in the memoir that Driver was “something feral” on the set of HBO’s “Girls.” In one incident, Driver allegedly threw a chair at the wall when Dunham struggled to get her lines out during a rehearsal. She describes him screaming at her and hurling a chair at the wall next to her. She also describes him punching a hole in his trailer wall.
Dunham adds that she “didn’t tell anyone” at the time. In interviews promoting the book, she has elaborated on why she never confronted the behavior directly, noting that at the time, she internalized it as part of what “great male geniuses” do. She was his boss for six seasons of television. She was in her twenties. She didn’t push back.
Dunham explained in an interview with The Guardian that she didn’t feel prepared to address Driver’s behavior during the show’s six-season run. She told the outlet she spent years afterward wondering if she could make projects that “only had women in them.”
These are not small allegations. They describe a pattern of physically intimidating behavior — not a single moment of artistic frustration, but a sustained dynamic in which a subordinate actor repeatedly frightened and verbally attacked the woman who created his breakout role and served as his employer. And they arrive at a moment when Driver is one of the most respected actors working in Hollywood, a three-time Oscar nominee who has built a reputation on choosing interesting, unconventional projects with prestigious directors.
The allegations also don’t arrive in a vacuum. In 2021, Portuguese actress Lídia Franco accused Driver of physical aggression during the filming of “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” describing what she called an incident with a chair. Franco later walked back her comments, saying it was a “misunderstanding” and “not an assault.” But the original story lingered.
What makes the timing particularly loaded is the shadow this casts over the ongoing campaign to revive “The Hunt for Ben Solo,” the scrapped Star Wars film that Driver and Steven Soderbergh developed for over two years before Disney executives killed it. Just last week, Soderbergh told The Playlist that he has no interest in reviving the project under Disney’s new leadership, saying flatly: “If it was gonna happen, it would have happened.”
The fan campaign to save the film has been extraordinary — spanning billboards in Times Square, planes flying banners over Disney’s Burbank headquarters, missing-person posters across five continents, and charity drives. But the entire movement has been built around the premise that Driver is a passionate artist who was wronged by corporate cowardice. Dunham’s account introduces a complication that no amount of fan organizing can smooth over: the question of what it means to center a franchise campaign around a star credibly accused of workplace intimidation toward a female collaborator.
None of this means the allegations are proven. Driver’s representatives have been contacted by multiple outlets and have not yet responded publicly. People are complicated. Artists can be brilliant and also behave badly. These things are not mutually exclusive, and the conversation around them requires nuance rather than reflexive cancellation or dismissal.
But in the calculus of a company like Disney — one that has staked its brand identity on inclusivity and progressive values — the question of whether to build a tentpole around a particular actor is never purely creative. It’s reputational. It’s logistical. It’s about what the press tour looks like and what questions get asked in every interview.
Dunham didn’t write “Famesick” to torpedo a Star Wars movie. She wrote it to tell her story, as she has done with varying degrees of controversy throughout her career. But stories don’t exist in isolation, and in an industry that runs on perception as much as performance, the ripples from this one could travel further than anyone involved might have intended.
As for Driver, his next major project is “The Christophers,” the new Soderbergh film that’s currently making the festival rounds. The irony of promoting a film with the same director who tried to bring him back to Star Wars, while simultaneously being the subject of explosive workplace conduct allegations from the show that launched his career, is the kind of narrative knot that Hollywood usually reserves for its screenplays.
