Lena Dunham Recalls Adam Driver’s ‘Aggression’ On Girls Set

Lena Dunham is reflecting on her somewhat turbulent working relationship with Adam Driver.

The two actors played the on-off couple Hannah and Adam in the hit 2010s comedy Girls, which Lena also wrote and directed most episodes of.

In her new memoir Famesick, the Bafta winner wrote candidly about what life on set with the Star Wars actor was like, recalling that he could be prone to aggressive outbursts.

As reported by Variety, Lena spoke about the first sex scene she and Adam shot together, which she directed, recalling how their “careful blocking went out the window”, resulting in her co-star “hurl[ing] me this way and that” as they filmed.

“Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment, unsure of what had happened,” she admitted. “Had I lost directorial authority, allowed the scene to go off the rails, not given proper instructions? Would I be removed from my command post immediately?

“It wasn’t that I felt violated – and I also wouldn’t know if I had, as there was little in my sexual life that I hadn’t allowed to happen, and for no pay. But I felt that something intimate, confusing and primal had played out in a scenario I was meant to control.”

Lena went on to share another memory of working with Adam, in which he “hurled a chair at the wall next to me” in temper when she struggled to recall her lines in a rehearsal.

“Late one night, as we practised lines in my trailer, I found that mine were suddenly gone,” the Too Much star claimed. “I knew I’d written them. I’d known them only minutes before.

“But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer – until finally, Adam screamed, ‘FUCKING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE’.”

She also alleged that he once got so upset about a bad haircut that he punched a hole in his dressing room wall, and once cut off contact with her for three weeks when she tried to show him Girls’ pilot episode (in the past, Adam has made no secret of his disdain for watching himself on screen, and infamously once cut a radio interview short when they tried to play footage from one of his projects).

As Lena put it, she and Adam “fought often” throughout their working relationship, and he could be “short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing”, as well as “protective” and “loving”.

HuffPost UK has contacted Adam Driver’s team for comment.

Adam played his namesake, a self-centred struggling actor, in all six seasons of Girls, for which he earned three consecutive Emmy nominations.

In the years since, his most notable performances have included playing the villainous Kylo Ren in the rebooted Star Wars trilogy and Oscar-nominated work in the films BlacKkKlansman and Marriage Story.

Lena, meanwhile, has gone on to helm the comedy Catherine Called Birdy, the first episode of the hit drama Industry and the 2025 Netflix rom-com Too Much, in which she also had a minor acting role.