You may not be able to call up Lena Dunham to meet for drinks, but you can have that smart, candid conversation with her that you've been dreaming of — vicariously, anyway. In a recent sit-down interview with Grantland, Lena opens up about her Brad Renfro crush, loving women's tennis, dealing with backlash, and what it was like to learn that her boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, used to date Scarlett Johansson [1]. Lena also hilariously shares which Girls character she's most like in real life according to a recent BuzzFeed quiz [2], and spoiler alert: it isn't Hannah. Watch the full interview above, and check out some of the best quotes below.
- On her musical preferences: "That's like my genre — women with guitars and pianos of the 1990s. That's where my true musical passion lies, and everything else kind of springs forth from that."
- On her sports career: "I took lessons until I could have the tennis skirt, then quit. I wanted the skirt, and then I was out. Same with ice skating. I ice skated until I got the dress, and then I quit."
- On the heartthrob posters that once plastered her room: "Brad Renfro, Jared Leto [3], Donnie Darko Jake Gyllenhaal [4] . . . The biggest obsession — like, crazy — was Jimmy Fallon [5]."
- On finding out that Jack dated Scarlett: "Old Loves [6] [on Tumblr] is my passion. I check it like once a week. That's how I kick back on a Friday night . . . I was going through it, and I saw my boyfriend and his girlfriend from high school . . . I'm not jealous."
Source: Getty [7]
- On backlash over her scenes with Patrick Wilson: "There was crazy Internet stuff of people being like, 'This was unrealistic. This was masturbatory.' And so I both had to take the position of like, 'That's not true. There are plenty of couples who don't have a one-to-one looks ratio by traditional standards.' And I also had to still internally feel that Patrick Wilson's one of the most attractive men I've ever seen in my life, and even fake kissing him is a surreal experience."
- On getting fired from an HBO show: "I got sweetly dismissed from the one day I acted on Mildred Pierce, the HBO miniseries. They told me it was a three-day shoot, and then halfway through the first day, they were like, 'We got what we needed.'"
- On the Vogue photoshop controversy: "I was kind of scared to see the untouched images. I was like, 'Maybe I'm delusional in this, and I don't look how I think I look.' And it was like, they smoothed a line here and shaved off a part of my neck. It was the most minimal retouching. I felt completely respected by Vogue. I felt like, 'Thank you for removing the one line from my face because I'm 27 years old and shouldn't have that there.'"
- On Jezebel's call for the untouched photos: "That was messed up. I think Jezebel can be really smart and funny, but I think it's just like, once you've been attacked in that way, it's hard to enjoy . . . It felt gross."
- On the lack of female showrunners: "Networks and studios still seem to be almost pathologically incapable of understanding that women make up 52 percent of the planet."