With the series “Girls,” Lena Dunham became a pioneer of the body positivity movement. Her roles are still personal. But she no longer wants to show off her body.
The Grand Hyatt Hotel at Potsdamer Platz is a bustling place during the Berlinale. Celebrities give their interviews here – and there aren’t enough seats for the film journalists waiting outside their rooms to be admitted to the interview. You get the impression that the more popular the festival star, the more people are hanging around on the grey five-star carpet in front of his door. A quick check before Hollywood’s Wonderwoman Lena Dunham arrives for her new film “Treasure”: all the seats on the floor are taken.
A real all-rounder
“Hello friends!” The 38-year-old actress-author-director-producer (you can safely say all of these things in one breath when it comes to Lena Dunham, because she is often all of these things in one person) appears in a lively mood and wearing a strapless gold dress. This allows a clear view of her various arm tattoos, especially that of Ferdinand the bull: a Disney character from 1938 who prefers to dreamily sniff flowers rather than run into others with his head bowed. And as she stands there and quickly hugs the German “Treasure” director Julia von Heinz, no, “has to hug her because she is so beautiful!”, as she explains to those present, you can see immediately: Lena Dunham is still not part of the perfect Hollywood artificiality formed by weight-loss injections – this is art, wrapped in a shell of real life.
Avant-garde in body positivity
In 2024, we should be over talking about other people’s bodies, especially when they don’t conform to what the entertainment industry calls normative beauty. But with Lena Dunham, we still have to do it because her body, or rather her physicality, is such an integral part of her career.
Especially at the beginning: “I was very young, just 23, when I wrote the pilot episode of ‘Girls’,” she says in Berlin, because even today the HBO series she created (in which she also directed, produced and played the lead role) is the benchmark against which her work to date is measured. “Girls” was the millennial answer to “Sex and the City” from 2012 to 2017: Here, too, four young women in New York search for love and themselves, but fail more fundamentally than Carrie Bradshaw and her friends because at least they were still successful in their jobs. The mid-twenties women from “Girls” were not suitable as glossy role models, they were too poor, driven by fears, and when they had sex, it was usually mediocre to bad. Dunham’s main character Hannah was not a clearly sympathetic character, but neurotic, know-it-all, egotistical: a series heroine who seemed to come straight from real life. Body and soul, in fact – when Hannah showed herself naked (and that happened often), she did so in the same unvarnished way as her audience would do in front of the television: in everyday panties, with a flabby belly and cellulite, far from immaculately lit.
You have to remember: The social media era was just beginning back then, “body positivity” wasn’t yet a hashtag, and female libido could at most be empowering, but not disappointing or even embarrassing. So the series was a provocation, it was hated as much as it was loved and gave a lot of impetus to the feminism of the 2020s, which no longer wants to hide any female truth, from menstruation to MeToo.
Cultural crossfire
And its creator? She suddenly found herself in the middle of a culture war and not only had to listen to misogynistic comments, but also be judged for every roll of fat. The fact that there are many autobiographical elements from Dunham’s life in “Girls” didn’t exactly help to separate the fictional character Hannah from the real Lena. While Adam Driver in particular, who had his breakthrough as Hannah’s boyfriend, was praised for his acting skills and passed on to Oscar roles, the women were believed to have all just played themselves. “People had more sympathy for Tony Soprano back then than for our characters,” says Lena Dunham – remember: Soprano was the name of the mafia boss in the famous series – and that has a lot to do with the fact that women are still expected not to expose their weaknesses, “but to chase the holy triad of beauty, productivity and sympathy.”
“Working life is not a short-distance race, but a marathon.”
The New Yorker tried not to let any of it get to her, she remained provocative, received a lot of shitstorms because she never held back with her opinion and just kept going; filming, writing – series, films, essays, a feminist newsletter, and in 2014 even her autobiography.
“I’m lucky that both my parents are artists,” she says in Berlin. “They told me: If you want to do this as a job, you have to do it for the work and for the experience and not for the response to your work.” She just wishes she had understood earlier that a working life like this is not a short-distance race, but a marathon.
At some point, her closest partner made this clear to her: her body. Otherwise, she might not have ended the high-speed phase of her twenties on her own. Lena Dunham has a chronic connective tissue weakness that occurs in painful bouts and affects joints and organs. She also struggled with unbearable endometriosis pain every month. Because nothing else helped, she had her uterus, which she affectionately called “Judy”, removed at the age of 31. This meant premature menopause and the end of her own desire to have children, a double blow for the body and psyche.
She also shared this pain with the world on Instagram photos: the walking stick she uses when she can’t walk, or sitting naked on the bed with her “RIP Judy” tattoo, which she got after her uterine surgery.
Time and space for yourself
Can someone who lives so publicly even find a more secluded existence? To do this, Lena Dunham had to leave New York behind and move to London. First for work, then she stayed for love – she has been married to a musician since 2021. The relaxed vibe of the British capital did what Dunham would not have thought possible – it calmed her down. Many things remind her of Tribeca, the part of Manhattan where she grew up, “With the difference that here I don’t feel like I’m being constrained in any way by other people’s ideas.”
With more breathing room, she also found new projects close to her heart for her production company, “Treasure” is one of them. The film is based on the novel “Too Many Men” by Lily Brett. Lena Dunham plays the US journalist Ruth, who travels to Poland with her father Edek (Stephen Fry) in 1991 to trace her Jewish family history. While Ruth packs her suitcase full of history books on the Nazi regime, Edek actually has no interest in dredging up the past again – as the only Auschwitz survivor in his family, he would rather concentrate on life than the dead.
Lena Dunham herself comes from a Jewish family with Eastern European roots. The film felt like a mission for her that she absolutely had to take on. “Even for my grandmother, who died in 2016. I didn’t know why, but I can say that I came home changed and gained a new perspective on my own Jewishness.”
Life writes the story
That’s obviously always the case with Lena Dunham: Life inspires art – and vice versa. Next year, her Netflix series “Too Much” will be released, about a burned-out American who moves to London to start over. For the first time, Dunham has decided not to play the lead role herself: “I no longer have the strength to allow my body to be dissected in public like that.” But should she develop projects that are less personal because of that? That’s out of the question. She was once asked whether she found it therapeutic to be able to process her own problems in a script.
Her answer: “Sometimes I feel like I only really understand what happened to me when I watch a character go through the same experience as me.”