What was the cast of Girls up to before the show?

Before they were cast in the acclaimed Emmy and Golden Globe-winning HBO show, Girls, Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, and Zosia Mamet were just… girls… albeit, girls who came from famous families with a few more privileges than most, but girls nonetheless. Join us as we take a look at what the girls were like before becoming involved with the hit show.

Lena Dunham graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, where she studied creative writing, and subsequently returned home to live with her parents in their NYC apartment.

After graduating, Lena wanted to get her feet wet in the world of film but also had to earn a living, so she worked in a children’s clothing store during the day and wrote furiously at night.She told Marie Claire, “”I would go to work from 9 to 6, go home, nap for two hours, then write from 8 to 2 a.m… There was an urgency to what I was doing. That’s where a lot of the creative ideas I am still working with began.”

Lena created a web series called “Delusional Downtown Divas” in 2009. She then released her first feature film, Creative Nonfiction, that same year.

In 2010, she released a film that she wrote, directed, and starred in, Tiny Furniture (trailer below), which is loosely based on her own experiences of graduating from college with a useless liberal arts degree and moving back in with her parents. For that film, she earned two Independent Spirit Awards. The executives at HBO were so impressed with Tiny Furniture that they offered her an unbelievable deal, which was to option anything she wrote, sight unseen. Judd Apatow, who was extremely impressed with Lena, offered to produce the show, and Lena wrote her first television pilot. The rest is history.

Allison Williams knew she wanted to be an actress since she was a child. Her parents, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams and Bloomberg EDU radio host and producer Jane Stoddard Williams, stipulated that before pursuing work as an actress, she had to obtain a Bachelor’s degree. So, although she signed with a talent agency while attending Yale University, she had to graduate before accepting any acting jobs.

After earning her Bachelor’s degree, Allison moved out to LA, with the intent to network, audition, and hopefully get her foot in the door. She passed around a video she made of herself singing “Nature Boy” to the tune of the Mad Men theme song (below), and film producer Judd Apatow saw it and thought she would fit the role of put-together Marnie Michaels, the foil to Hannah Horvath, on his new collaboration with Lena Dunham, Girls. It took only a few weeks of living in LA as a wannabe actress before Allison earned her biggest role yet.

In news that I’m sure is infuriating to many young actresses, Jemima Kirke, who plays Jessa Johansson, never dreamed of becoming an actress.

She went to high school at St. Ann’s in NYC with Lena, and her parents are Simon Kirke, the former drummer in the band Bad Company, and Lorraine Kirke, who owns Geminola, a vintage boutique that dressed many of the stars in Sex & the City.

Jemima went to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned her Bachelors of Fine Arts in painting. Her old friend Lena commissioned her to play Charlotte in her film, Tiny Furniture, and then to play free-spirit Jessa in Girls, a role that is extremely similar to Jemima’s real-life persona, except that in real life, Jemima is married with two children. But she is still an artist!

Zosia Mamet comes from a theater family: her mother, Lindsay Crouse, is an actress and her father, David Mamet, is an acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, and film directer. She has acted in a variety of roles with one of her most notable recurring roles before Girls being a lesbian photo editor on Mad Men. She had a nasty cold the day of her audition, and felt a little off as a result of the cold meds she took. She even told her agent that she had probably lost the part. Her intuition was wrong, though; producers liked her read so much that they decided to not only cast her as Shoshanna Shapiro, but to make her character a regular character on the show.