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Louise Thomas
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Lena Dunham has explained why she has cast another actor as the lead in her new TV show, saying she does not want her own body to be “dissected again”.
The writer, director and actor, 38, shot to fame playing millennial New Yorker Hannah in Girls from 2012 to 2017.
While playing Hannah, Dunham performed numerous sex scenes and nude scenes, and there was much discussion among viewers and in the press about how radical it felt to see a “normal” body on screen.
There was plenty of criticism, too, with accusations that Dunham was showing too much of herself. The New York Post condemned what it called her “pathological exhibitionism”.
In 2025, her new series Too Much will arrive, starring Meg Stalter (Hacks) in the lead as Jessica, a US expat in London.
Speaking to The New Yorker in an interview on Tuesday (9 July), Dunham – who lives in north London with her husband, the musician Luis Felber – acknowledged that the show references her own life.
“Totally. I can’t escape it,” she said. “It’s about an American woman in London who has had a bad breakup in New York and is confused, meeting a recovering punk musician and trying to figure out if they can make a life together. It’s not a huge leap.”
She said she knew “from the very beginning I would not be the star of it”, adding: “I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around Girls at this point in my life. Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again.”
Dunham said it was a “hard choice” to “admit that” to herself, saying: “I used to think that winning meant you just keep doing it and you don’t care what anybody thinks. I forgot that winning is actually just protecting yourself and doing what you need to do to keep making work.”
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She added: “No matter what people may think, I got into this because I wanted to be an artist. I actually was never a person who – as much as people may not believe this, because of the way that my work is structured and what it’s about – was unbelievably interested in attention.”
Singing Stalter’s praises, Dunham said people would be “blown away” by her. “We know how funny she is. But, then, when she enters a dramatic scene, you’re, like, Oh, we got a little Meryl Streep on our hands!”
Too Much also stars Will Sharpe (The White Lotus) as Felix, the love interest of Jessica.
