Adam Driver deflected a question about Lena Dunham’s explosive memoir at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday with a single, dry line that drew immediate laughter from the press room. “I have no comment on any of that. I’m saving it all for my book,” the two-time Oscar nominee said plainly, when asked about allegations Dunham made against him in her recently published memoir Famesick.
Famesick chronicles Dunham’s experience creating and running Girls, the HBO series that ran from 2012 to 2017, in which she and Driver played an on-again, off-again couple. The book went viral upon publication after Dunham described Driver as at times “verbally aggressive” on set. In one account, she writes that during a late-night line rehearsal in her trailer, Driver screamed at her and threw a chair against the wall when she forgot her lines. “I said my lines correctly after that,” she added.
Dunham’s portrait of Driver is contradictory rather than purely accusatory. She describes him as “condescending and physically imposing” but also “protective, loving even,” and writes that she reasoned his intensity toward her was proportionate to the depth of their creative connection. In a follow-up interview explaining her decision to include the accounts, Dunham told People that her goal was never to cast Driver as an outlier, but to capture honestly “how complex and confusing those first experiences of trying to be a boss were” when she was just 24 years old.
The Cannes question landed the morning after Driver’s new film had already secured its place as one of the festival’s most celebrated premieres. James Gray’s Paper Tiger, a 1980s Queens-set crime drama in which Driver plays an ex-cop drawn into a Russian mob crisis alongside Miles Teller, received a 10-minute standing ovation at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, with Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore among those on their feet.
Colleagues who worked with Driver on Paper Tiger have spoken warmly about the experience. Scarlett Johansson, who plays Teller’s wife in the film, told the Hollywood Reporter ahead of the premiere that she would have “loved to have had even more scenework” with Driver, adding simply: “I love working with him.”
Famesick ends the Girls chapter on a melancholy note. Dunham writes that on their final day of filming, Driver told her “I hope you know I’ll always love you” — and that she never heard from him again.
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Driver has not addressed the memoir’s claims publicly beyond Sunday’s quip, leaving the door open — with a hint of mischief — for a response of his own choosing, on his own schedule.
