Lena Dunham on Girls, love and why she doesn’t want to look like a model
Lena Dunham doesn’t want to talk about being naked anymore. Sure, as the director and star of HBO’s award-winning series Girls, it’s her decision to strip down so often… But that doesn’t mean she wants to psychoanalyze it during every interview.
“If I could abolish one question, it would be ‘Why are you naked on TV so much?’ I don’t know. Use your imagination,” Dunham said.
That also might be why Dunham elected not to go nude for her feature with Playboy. Rather than reveal skin, Dunham opened up about some big subjects (i.e. hopes for her show) and some miscellaneous topics (i.e. the most unusual thing in her purse, which happened to be a metal spoon).
Anyone who’s caught a few minutes of Girls knows it can be scandalously blunt and visual. Although Dunham maintains her primary goal is to be educational, she does enjoy being a provocateur.
“It’s not interesting for me to make art about things we’re all okay with,” Dunham said. “I make art to explore our darker areas.”
Among those dark areas are a lot of sexual themes, which she believed weren’t well represented in the media.
“I felt that the depictions of sex I had seen on television weren’t totally fair to young women trying to wrap their brains around this stuff,” the 26-year-old explained.
In order to shine light on the human condition, Dunham is also adamant about portraying multidimensional characters. Many of the roles in Girls are based on women that Dunham knows in real life. By including these characters in the show, Dunham said she isn’t trying to “eliminate men from the picture.” She’s just trying to paint a more complete one.
“It’s important for me to create fully formed characters who don’t feel just like good guys, villains, creeps or sluts,” Dunham said of the men and women on her show. “I want it to feel real.”
In terms of the men she is drawn to in real life, Dunham said she used to fall for bad boys with hearts of gold, “Though they often ended up not having a heart of gold.” Now she is more attracted to someone who is interesting and open.
“If I can get excited imagining funny things he did as a kid, there’s a pretty good chance I’m in love with him.”
Although she didn’t talk specifics, Dunham is proudly dating Jack Antonoff, the guitarist of Fun. She previously spoke openly about their relationship with Interview, saying there seems to be some unspoken rule among celebrities that they shouldn’t talk about their romances. (Note: If there’s one thing to know about Lena Dunham, it’s that she’s not too keen on following rules.)
She’s also happy not to have the “babest” body. When asked by Playboy what she would do if she woke up in a Victoria’s Secret model’s body, she said her first reaction would be to wonder which enemy dragged her to the doctor.
“There would be all kinds of weird challenges to deal with that I don’t have to deal with now,” Dunham explained. “I don’t want to go through life wondering is people are talking to me because I have a big rack.”
That being said, she would be willing to deal with a model body if it meant a Ryan Gosling type wanted to ask her out. And, in that one way, Lena Dunham is just like the rest of us.
