Lena Dunham Rises Again: The ‘Girls’ Creator on Netflix’s ‘Too Much,’ Hollywood’s ‘Merciless’ Body Shaming and Whether She’d Revive the HBO Classic

Lena Dunham is sitting in bed, draped in a pink tulle gown fit for a princess, reading a book about torture.

It’s a prop for our photo shoot, which is taking place in an eccentrically decorated hotel suite in Tribeca, but she’s too curious not to flip through the pages. Intrigued, Dunham’s brown eyes widen: “Oh my God, it’s literally a collection of drawings of torture,” she says as the photo and glam crew explode in laughter. “I thought it was going to be like, ‘I’m tortured by this love affair.’” She puts down the book and, in need of a vibe switch, requests that Rihanna’s “Anti” be played straight through.

“I’ve never been happier!” she declares as “Consideration” rings out. “Now I’m zoned in.”

The same could be said of Dunham’s life at the moment. While preparing for the July 10 launch of her Netflix series “Too Much” — her first major TV outing since “Girls” — she’s in her hometown of New York City for the summer to direct a Natalie Portman rom-com, “Good Sex” (also for Netflix), and to hold workshops for the “10 Things I Hate About You” Broadway musical she’s writing with Carly Rae Jepsen. A New Yorker for most of her life, the 39-year-old writer-director-actor has been an expat for the better part of five years now, primarily living in London with her husband — the British musician Luis Felber — and their gaggle of animals (five cats, two dogs and a pair of pigs, though the latter are with her parents in Connecticut until she figures out their immigration). Happiness suits her, and after the roller coaster that was her 20s (and a bit of her 30s), it’s been hard-won.

Dunham first caught Hollywood’s attention at 23 with her indie feature “Tiny Furniture,” which she directed and starred in, a semi-autobiographical tale about an aspiring screenwriter going through a Manhattan breakup. That led to a mentorship with Judd Apatow and a first-look deal with HBO. Out of that combination, she created “Girls,” her groundbreaking HBO series about the lives of millennial women in New York City that positioned her as the Carrie Bradshaw of the 2010s. Whereas “Sex and the City” was created and run by middle-aged men, “Girls” was a show about 20-something women, told through Dunham’s singular voice. Though “Girls” addressed similar themes — four women discovering themselves through their careers, friendships and sex — its raw, messy-and-proud presentation was something audiences had never seen.

Since “Girls” coincided with the early years of social media, every episode would launch millions of hot takes, with outrage often directed at Dunham about the show’s unflinching sex scenes, its privileged perspective and even her own body. Dunham was not one to back down, leading to several firestorms concerning comments she’d made about abortion, race, sexuality and more. Still, by the time she turned 30, and “Girls” wrapped after six seasons, Dunham emerged a memoirist, an accomplished director and, as her character Hannah Horvath says in the show’s pilot episode, a voice of her generation.

But it’s not only millennials who relate to (and project onto) “Girls.” More than a decade after its premiere, the show has experienced a major resurgence, especially among members of Gen Z (like myself). There are countless TikTok accounts devoted to posting edits of the show backed by popular songs (Charlie and Marnie’s relationship set to Charli xcx’s “Party 4 U,” anyone?); memes (like Hannah sending her first tweet — “all adventurous women do” — and Adam saying “good soup”) and even a fan podcast, “Girls Rewatch” (which Dunham has seen clips of, thanks to her friend Emily Ratajkowski, and calls “very funny and insightful”).

I’ve watched “Girls” at every pivotal point in my adult life: struggling to fit in freshman year of college, as my dad drove me cross-country to move to L.A. and after a devastating breakup there left me without a place to call home. When Variety presented me with the opportunity to move to London two years ago at the age of 23 — the same age Dunham was when she wrote the pilot of “Girls” — I asked myself, what would Hannah Horvath do?

“You can handle so much more than you think you can,” Dunham says, as if speaking both to me and her past self. “And it’s an amazing moment when you realize that a lot has happened and you are still yourself — you still wake up every day, you still engage with life!”

To be in Dunham’s presence is to get a glimpse into how her mind works. During the shoot, she gives a tour of her finger tattoos (they include a green dollar sign that has since faded into a blob, her mother and father’s names and “Hollywood forever”) and animatedly discusses the latest season of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” (Mary Cosby is “iconic”). But by the time the shoot wraps and Dunham and I finally get to our interview, we have only 45 minutes before she needs to leave for a dinner with Elliot Page (whom she’d love to see lead a rom-com).

“I feel terrible that time was crunched,” she says, curling up next to me on a quilted couch as her glam squad dissipates. Now cozy in sweats, she starts to take off her makeup, peeling fake lashes off one by one as she recounts how the poster girl for being single in New York City ended up married in London.

“There’s something very magical — even when it’s lonely — about discovering who you are in a different place,” Dunham says. She first spent time in Wales in 2019 to direct the pilot for HBO’s “Industry,” and then relocated to London the next year to helm her Bella Ramsey-starring medieval comedy “Catherine Called Birdy” for Amazon. After a high-profile breakup with music producer Jack Antonoff in late 2017, and dissolving her production company with “Girls” co-showrunner Jenni Konner, Dunham needed a change. But moving away from her entire family and basically everyone she knew wasn’t exactly an escape.

“I’d have days where I’d realize, I haven’t seen anyone that I have a real relationship with,” Dunham says. “You feel crazy for doing it, you’re not making friends and you miss everyone. I missed my kindergarten teacher and people I hadn’t even seen for 20 years, because it was so new.”

Eventually, London became home. However cliché it may sound, an ocean away from anyone who really knew her, Dunham found herself. So much so that she’s longing for London now, in the place she knows best in the world.

“I am very overwhelmed being back in New York, and I do keep finishing the day feeling like I ran a marathon,” she says. “It’s interesting to realize that I am very homesick, even though I am technically in the place that I grew up.”

In a completely foreign land, Dunham also found love. After a brief stint back in the States during the pandemic, Dunham returned to London in January 2021 to shoot “Catherine Called Birdy.” She planned to stay for three months, but three weeks into production, she was set up on a blind date with Felber.

“I didn’t know much of Lena,” Felber says over Zoom from the couple’s London flat, admitting he’d never seen “Girls” (though his mom and sister were obsessed). “The moment we met, it was that sort of cheesy, beautiful thing of automatic connection. Neither of us were expecting that.”

After that first date, Dunham “made the decision to see what happened” and stay in London, she recalls, blushing. Eight months later — yes, they moved fast — they were married in an intimate ceremony in Soho.

Her newfound love and life sparked a creative reawakening. “In my 20s, I had never had anything even resembling writer’s block. I didn’t even know what it was. But post-‘Girls,’ I felt run-down and unsure of what I wanted to make,” she says. “And then one day, I just woke up to a real creative fervor.”

Dunham wanted to write something that was an homage to the romantic comedies she grew up loving, like “Notting Hill” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” but one that didn’t gloss over how hard it is to actually make a relationship work. “You have to try — you don’t just fall into each other’s arms,” Dunham says. “Once you’ve gotten together, the biggest challenge to get past is yourself. And I had certainly found that in my case.”

She also needed an outlet for the comedy that comes out of, as she puts it, being a “brassy American broad” abroad. Faced with the reserved nature of most British people, Dunham stuck out like a sore thumb. “I tend to ask lots of questions, and if someone is open to hugging, I will usually hug them — and sometimes I have trouble modulating the volume of my voice,” she says. “All of those things, people seem to almost find suspicious.”

The show’s title comes out of this contrast. When Dunham and Felber first started dating, he would tell her that she was “too much.” Offended, Dunham thought that he was calling her annoying or overbearing, when in fact the phrase was lost in translation: In the U.K., it’s a term of endearment, which Felber eventually told her means “just enough and a little bit more.”

Dunham pitched Felber the idea of creating a show together just a few months into dating, which she acknowledges was “inappropriately soon.” Luckily, he matched her energy and came on board as co-creator in addition to providing the show’s original music.

Both in their mid-30s, Jess (“Hacks” standout Megan Stalter) takes a job in London after the breakdown of a relationship she thought would last forever, while Felix (“The White Lotus” star Will Sharpe) is a struggling musician whose past trauma has left him with an alcohol dependency and fear of commitment. After Jess and Felix meet at his sparsely attended pub gig the night she’s moved to London from New York, they form an immediate, unexpected connection. Then the complications start — Jess can’t ignore the scars of her past relationship, and Felix’s struggles with addiction and commitment come back to haunt him. During the 10-episode first season, we see them fight, fuck, make mistakes and make up, as flashbacks let viewers in on what’s really holding them back. Though Dunham and Felber each put a bit of themselves into Jess and Felix, Dunham insists that viewers not see “Too Much” as a by-the-book retelling of their romance. “It’s certainly not quote-unquote based on a true story, but like everything I do, there is an element of my own life that I can’t help but inject.”

But this time around, Dunham didn’t feel drawn to playing her on-screen avatar, opting to take a smaller role as Jess’ sister, Nora (who is going through a messy divorce with, hilariously, Dunham’s “Girls” co-star Andrew Rannells). Instead, Dunham found something in the Ohio-born Stalter that she didn’t see in herself. “She has an innocence and manners that are not very New York. She’s not a nihilistic or cynical person, and I would like to be more that way,” Dunham says. “Meg just has this quality where no matter what she’s doing, no matter what she’s saying, you believe her.”

Dunham had never seen “Hacks,” in which Stalter plays the world’s most annoying nepo baby assistant, but while filming “Catherine Called Birdy,” Andrew Scott — who stars in the movie and has a cameo in “Too Much” as a pretentious director — showed her the comedian’s social media videos, calling her Dunham’s “spiritual sister.”

Then, without having met Stalter, Dunham began writing “Too Much” with her in mind, and the two eventually connected over Instagram, followed by Zoom. Dunham offered her the role before even pitching the show to Netflix.

Calling herself “the biggest ‘Girls’ fan,” Stalter initially reacted in disbelief. Now, she calls Dunham a friend and mentor. “We feel like two kids that are telling secrets and laughing, and just able to be our childlike selves together,” she says. “And that made it really interesting to be directed by her, because I feel so connected to her.”

Casting Stalter’s tortured-musician beau proved a bit more difficult, but when Sharpe’s name entered the mix — he’d had a memorable, Emmy-nominated turn as a heartthrob tourist in a messy marriage in Season 2 of “The White Lotus” — Dunham was intrigued.

“Will has never really played what he is, which is a British man in his mid-30s. So I didn’t know what to expect,” she says. “And he showed up at this coffee shop and he was wearing a beanie and a little bomber jacket, and I was like, ‘Well, there he is!’”

Sharpe is a writer and director in his own right, and Dunham says he had “remarkable” notes about Felix — so when scheduling got complicated, she did everything she could to make it work. “I just thought, I need this person’s insight in my orbit,” Dunham says. “He said to me at one point, ‘I’m really sad, because it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work out.’ And I just wrote back to him — I almost probably scared him away — like, ‘I’m a witch, and I really do think it is.’”

Sharpe feels fortunate that Dunham’s spell was successful. “She has such a vast, storied brain, is such a good decision-maker, and you know what every shot is for,” he says. “She just lets it sit in this quite human, slightly messy way, which is such a fun space to play in.”

While Felix’s roadblock stems from unaddressed trauma, Jessica can’t get over her ex, Zev (played by Michael Zegen). He’s a character anyone who’s spent time in Bushwick will find familiar: A pretentious Pitchfork writer, he incessantly puts Jess down for her taste (even though his bar mitzvah theme was Weezer). “Don’t make me feel stupid for loving things,” she tells him in one episode.

Dunham is aware that people will draw comparisons between Zev and her previous relationships, but she’s adamant that he’s an “amalgamation” of “every ex-boyfriend.”

“You want to be reasonable about people’s curiosity while also saying, there’s nothing to see here,” she says. “I always joke, there’s like 10 men who thought they were Adam [in ‘Girls’]. And the guy who actually Adam was based on, I have a feeling has absolutely no idea. A real Adam wouldn’t know.”

At this point, Dunham has to leave for dinner. “Would you mind riding with me?” she proposes.

Making small talk in the elevator, she asks how old I am. “Oh my God, you’re a baby!” she exclaims when I tell her I’m 26. “When I was 26, I was like, ‘I’m old, and you can’t tell me nothin’.’ But you should feel that way. Your entire life happens when you don’t take advice.”

Once we’re buckled into the back seat of her town car, she proceeds to give me advice. “Things feel huge,” she says, “and they should, but a big lesson from ‘Girls’ is that things change over time. They all pass.”

It’s clear that Dunham has changed too. Though she’s still bubbly and approachable, making jokes and witty observations at a mile a minute, there’s an air of humility that can only come from growing up — and having everything about you examined under a microscope. I ask about her sudden rise to fame after “Girls” premiered in 2012.

“When fame came, I felt like, ‘I have to play this out,’ because attention on the thing you make is going to let you make more,” she says as we make our way toward Union Square. “I just was very unguarded. I didn’t understand the difference between journalists and friends, between public and private, what you keep for yourself, what you share. There was so much that I didn’t get.”

Dunham has always been outspoken, even when her remarks have come back to bite her. Though still candid, she’s now more careful with her words, protecting herself. It’s helped that she’s dialed back on social media — besides a “lurker” TikTok account, where she mainly indulges in videos about teacup pigs and fashion. On Instagram, she uses an intermediary to post and comment. “It’s made my mental health 110% better,” she says.

She also has something other than herself to protect now: her marriage, the quieter life in London she’s worked so hard for, the future they’re building. Despite having undergone a hysterectomy eight years ago because of severe endometriosis, Dunham says that she and Felber are taking steps to build their family.

“I want to be a mother. I’m working on that, and I don’t want my kids to live in the secondary glare of whatever this is,” she says. “I want my kids to be proud of me and go, ‘My mom works really fucking hard, and she loves what she does.’ But I don’t want them to live in the spotlight, or even next to the spotlight.”

Still, Dunham wouldn’t rewrite her story. She’s applied many lessons she learned during “Girls” to “Too Much” — for example, the trenchant criticism about the lack of diversity in the “Girls” ensemble. Besides Sharpe being half-Japanese (similar to Felber, who is half-Peruvian), the “Too Much” cast features Janicza Bravo, who plays one of Jess’ colleagues and also directed an episode, as well as Adwoa Aboah as Felix’s ex-girlfriend and Prasanna Puwanarajah as his best friend and housemate.

“Everyone needs to have their consciousness raised when they’re young,” she says. “I happened to really learn a lot in my 20s on a pretty public scale. [‘Too Much’] is meant to be a representation of the London that I know, and so it was just a very natural thing to fill it with a range of people. Frankly, it’s just what’s interesting.”

Dunham is also grateful for the advent of intimacy coordinators. “I know it’s something that I would have been relieved to have on ‘Girls,’” she says. “There are some directors who think they don’t want someone to interfere between them and the cast — I welcome it, because it’s like having this referee and this safe space.”

Like “Girls,” “Too Much” doesn’t shy away from sex, and is a beacon of body positivity, defying Hollywood’s pervasive, insidious beauty standards. “Jessica’s body is not the story of the show, and it’s not the story for Felix — just like in my romantic relationships it’s not the story,” Dunham says.

And having experienced the backlash over being so open with her body, Dunham is fiercely protective of Stalter — because, as she puts it, “I probably wasn’t protective enough of myself.”

“I have been in Hollywood at every size,” she says. “I have been a sample size, I have had my body change because of life, illness, aging, menopause. And it is merciless wherever you are.”

Dunham continues: “If anybody has anything to say about any of my actors — I keep my mouth shut on most things these days, but try a bitch. I’m not playing around here. It’s the only time that I’m going to be taking my hoops out, ready to fight.”

I ask Dunham whether she thinks the world has become more accepting of seeing all types of bodies on-screen since — and perhaps because of — “Girls.”

“No,” she answers quickly. “I wish I could say yes, but I really don’t. I think we had this moment: Body positivity was here, and then it was gone. I obviously am not critical of anybody’s choice, whether it’s to use Ozempic — people should be allowed to have whatever body they feel comfortable in. But we cannot pretend that the bodies people want aren’t influenced, and we can’t claim it’s always for health reasons and not for aesthetic reasons.”

Dunham has come to accept that body shaming in Hollywood is “pretty inevitable.”

“But just because I’ve become used to it for myself,” she says, “doesn’t mean that I feel comfortable about it for anyone else.”

At a time when the whole world feels like it’s going backward, Dunham is adamant that she’ll keep advocating for her beliefs in her art, especially when it comes to the depiction of women — and their rights — on-screen. Even though “Girls” famously ended with Hannah deciding to go forward with an unplanned pregnancy, when asked about an abortion storyline in “Too Much,” she says: “It felt right for the story; it felt true. And I thought, there’s a way to talk about this and make it emotional and honest, but also not make it something that she needs to regret or feel shame about.”

“Obviously, after Roe v. Wade was overturned it became really important to me,” she continues. “And also living in England and the shock of them seeing what was happening, that was huge too. It’s alarming and terrifying.” Being in New York for the summer, she’s observed “people’s fear and their pain” about all the post-Roe abortion restrictions.

In order to find the correct tone for the show, and wanting “desperately” to portray abortion in a way “that’s not shame-based,” Dunham worked with Planned Parenthood, with which she had also collaborated on similar storylines in “Girls.”

“She’s not having a hard time because of the abortion,” Dunham says. “And the abortion is a choice she can make for herself to choose herself and to choose her life.”

These days, behind the camera is where Dunham feels most comfortable. “I’m not retired!” she says, but acting is “not where my head is right now.” She pauses a beat, adding: “I’m available; I’m considering. I know this is an industry magazine — listen, guys, I’m considering! But I’m not thinking that way.”

With her production company Good Thing Going, which she leads alongside partner Michael P. Cohen, Dunham is focused on writing and directing work that is uniquely her own. She also wants to pay it forward: Under her new creative partnership with Netflix, she’s helping develop several projects from first-time writers and showrunners.

“Similar to the way Judd helped shepherd her into the industry, she’s looking to do that now with a newer generation of writers,” Cohen says. “She walks the walk and talks the talk.”

The through line in everything she’s doing now, Dunham says, is joy. It makes sense, then, that many of her upcoming projects fall in the romantic comedy genre — first “Too Much” and then the “10 Things I Hate About You” musical and “Good Sex,” which started production this month. If the cast is any indication, she indeed could be stepping into the shoes of her late mentor Nora Ephron: Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo are on board alongside Portman, as well as Rashida Jones and Tucker Pillsbury (better known as singer-songwriter Role Model) in his acting debut.

Dunham pitched the movie to Ryan when they both attended her good friend Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” in London last year. “I decided, it’s now or never, and I’m going to shoot my shot. She couldn’t be a lovelier person,” Dunham says. And it worked: “Shout-out Taylor — thank you for that. She brings everyone together; she makes the world go round.” As for Pillsbury, Dunham scouted him via her secret TikTok. “He had this humor and essence that really felt like rom-com gold,” she says. “He’s giving early Brad Pitt, like when you saw him in ‘Thelma & Louise.’”

Despite many rom-coms flopping at the box office or going straight to streaming, Dunham isn’t worried. “I know that there’s an audience for it because I am the audience for it,” she says. And she has the investment to prove it: Netflix bought “Good Sex” out of the European Film Market in January for an eye-popping $55 million.

She’s also happy for the movie to premiere solely on the streamer. “I really just want people to sit on a couch with their moms and their besties and lean in,” she says. “I love watching other filmmakers fight for the theatrical-release element — but I don’t think this will live or die by that.”

Dunham is hopeful for a second season of “Too Much,” but notes that she tried to “stick the landing” with its finale because “we don’t always have control in the television industry of what our ending looks like.” Though that’s something she also prepared for with “Girls,” her mindset is healthier this time around.

“When I was younger, I thought nothing worse could happen to you than to make something that a) people didn’t like or b) didn’t work well,” she says. “But failing is not the worst thing.”

And though Dunham still can’t bring herself to rewatch “Girls,” its reentry into the zeitgeist has taught her an important lesson: The perception of art is always fluid. “Whatever the immediate response is feels so big and all-consuming, [but] it will change and grow and shift over time — and that part isn’t about you,” she says.

Would she ever revisit “Girls,” à la “And Just Like That …”? It’s not a no.

“If we had something to say that was really specific and it was a moment in their lives where we felt like revisiting it — like millennial women becoming mothers or stepping into menopause or going to live at old-age homes — I would always want to work with those people again,” Dunham says.

She’s even thought about what everyone might be up to, rattling off theories between fits of laughter. Even if she’s traded Brooklyn for Bloomsbury, the characters clearly still live within her.

“Shoshanna was married to, then divorced from, the mayor of New York City, and she runs an athleisure startup that’s zero-waste. Marnie — it’s third marriage. She still sings, but I think Marnie really needs to take it to sex and love addicts anonymous. Jessa is unvaccinated and lives on a boat in Croatia. Adam is a cult theater actor, and he’s probably living in Berlin, and Ray is still on city council and running his coffee shop and doing better than anyone. Elijah is the fourth lead on a sitcom, making a good amount of money and still looking for love in all the wrong places.”

Wait, what about Hannah? Dunham lets out a yelp as she realizes her own character slipped her mind. “Oh my God, I forgot about her!” she says. “She teaches at Bard and loves raising her son. She probably has a girlfriend who’s, like, a chef. And she’s less obsessed with being famous. That is where I feel that she would land.”

But until HBO comes knocking, Dunham is focused on her own revival.

“I never thought I would say something this mortifying, but I wake up every day really excited,” she says with a laugh. “I really don’t take for granted getting to do something for my job that allows me — as an oddball, chronically ill, weirdo woman — to put all of myself into something. And I just feel so lucky that I’m still getting to do it.”

Styling:  Michael Handler; Hair: Peter Butler; Makeup: Matin; Location: Warren Street Hotel; Look 1 (sunglasses): Jacket: Stella McCartney; T-shirt: R13; Sunglasses: Henrik Vibskov; Look 2 (bedroom wearing a pink dress): Dress & Coat: Aknvas; Shoes: Prada; Jewelry: Swarovski;  Look 3 (rinestone necklace that says TOO MUCH): Jacket and Skirt: Gabriela Hearst; Shirt: Marie Adam-Leenaerdt; Jewelry: Ali & Sterling Forever; Shoes: Saint Laurent