Lena Dunham on Too Much and her long-awaited return to TV: ‘I stepped back from acting after my body was dissected’ | OneFootball

Lena Dunham’s parents were telling her to be quiet long before the rest of the world was. “Bless them,” she says, “they didn’t want to say, ‘Can you please shut up?’ So they would say sotto voce because they thought it sounded nicer in Italian, which, to be fair, it did.”

Later, 23 and scarcely an adult, Dunham conceived Girls, the era-defining HBO comedy about a quartet of dysfunctional friends in Brooklyn who were stumbling through their twenties and trying to find themselves. At the centre of it all was Dunham’s aspiring writer Hannah Horvath. “I have work, then a dinner thing, and then I am busy trying to become who I am,” she’d tell her parents in the very first episode. The show was unflinchingly interested in the mess of youth: the arrogance, the terrible sex, the first abortions, the health anxiety – the lot. And because of its honesty, it was adored and attacked with equal zeal. Some tried to silence Dunham then, too. She was too vulgar, too candid, too naked. Simultaneously too woke and too narrow-minded.

Now, Dunham is 39. Girls ended almost a decade ago. And after an intensive metamorphosis – where she’s experienced everything from prescription drug addiction and chronic illness to a transatlantic move and finding love – she has emerged as a woman, an auteur, who is all grown up. And she can be as loud as she wants.

Next week, Dunham will unveil her much-anticipated return to television. It’s called, almost inevitably, Too Much – two words she’s been hearing all her life. “It happens to women,” she says. “It’s about your appetite for food, your appetite for life, your wants, your needs, your desires, and it comes in lots of forms, whether you’re told you’re ‘too much’ or ‘messy’ or ‘needy’ or ‘a lot’. What’s ironic is that calling someone ‘too much’ is a really easy way to diminish them.”

Dunham, with her usual chestnut hair dyed black and straightened smooth, is speaking from a London hotel room the morning after the show’s UK premiere. Her voice is unmistakably her. There’s the surprisingly high pitch. The upward inflexion that makes statements sound like questions. “Thank you? For noticing everything?” she says, when I recount an especially excruciating sex scene in the new show. But the mile-a-minute sprint at which she used to speak has slowed to a considered stroll. She is intentional, choosing each word with care. “For all the Girls premieres I was in my twenties, so I was terrified and anxious,” she says, scratching her chin with a long, manicured nail. “So just being able to actually enjoy it this time and be present was really nice.”

No wonder she had nerves. When Girls was on television, discourse about Dunham’s appearance was rabid. Howard Stern called her “a little fat girl” on national radio. One newspaper described her as a “pathological exhibitionist”. “Having my body dissected was a reason that I chose in general to step back from acting a little bit more and focus on my writing and my directing, and also just make different kinds of choices as an actor,” she says now.

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Husband-and-wife co-creators Luis Felber and Dunham, with their leading duo Will Sharpe and Meg Stalter (Netflix)

Too Much is a reflection of Dunham in a new stage of life. She co-wrote it with her husband, the British musician Luis Felber, whom she met after she broke up with New York and fell for London. She has previously said that, when she met Felber, she was “dazzled by just how much baggage two people could bring to the table”. So she put it in a romcom – with jeu-de-mot episode titles like “One Wedding and a Sex Pest” and “Enough, Actually” – which is honest about “all of the stuff that’s trailing behind” the characters. The resulting series is a tale loosely based on Dunham and Felber.

It follows Jessica, a garrulous New Yorker from a family of intensely co-dependent Jewish women, who is brutally dumped by her boyfriend – as she puts it, “as if I was on fire!” – and moves to London for a fresh start. There, she meets Felix, a grungy, repressed, rollie-smoking British musician (sound familiar?), and the pair grow to love each other, against an intoxicating soundtrack of Funkadelic and Cate Le Bon. A friend of mine recently described Girls as a “feelbad show” where all the characters are “awful” to each other. Too Much, on the other hand, is like buttered toast. Warm, comforting and oozing love, but with a little bit of crunch. The unlikely couple are played by Meg Stalter and Will Sharpe: she of the best comedy in years, Hacks, he of Channel 4’s Flowers and season two of The White Lotus.

“I’ve always felt connected to Lena,” Stalter tells me separately. She, like Dunham, has carried a playfulness with her from childhood into adulthood. “A lot of the time, women are supposed to be a certain way and not loud or weird or strange, and I fought to not get rid of that part of me.” It’s a trait she mines for her comedy skits on TikTok, and for her scene-stealing turn as a talent agent named Kayla in Hacks. Casting Stalter in Too Much was, in some ways, the closest thing Dunham could have done to casting herself. First of all, there’s that unvarnished zaniness they share. Then there is the occasional difficulty in knowing where they end and their characters begin. During the Girls era, Dunham’s loudest detractors struggled to distinguish between Dunham and her creation. No, Dunham didn’t – as so many claim – insist she was “the voice of her generation”. Hannah, though, absolutely did. Today, sitting opposite Stalter and a gentle, comparatively quiet Sharpe, I am not entirely sure if Stalter has stolen Jessica’s wardrobe, or vice versa. She wears a baby-blue boob tube emblazoned with the word “IRRESISTIBLE”.

Like Dunham – and, I imagine, Stalter – Jessica is forever batting off accusations of being too much. This is a person who smashes her ex’s window to break into his home. Who says that, if she were a superhero, her power would be “eroding boundaries”. Who tries to chip into some girlie gossip about useless guys and kills the mood with, “Tell me about it, ladies! I mean, men are all psychotic rapists, right?” If that reminds you of something Girls’ Hannah would say, there’s more than a hint of Dunham’s breakthrough oeuvre in this new show. Girls stars, from Andrew Rannells to Richard E Grant, pop up everywhere in Too Much. And Dunham still has that knack for writing haphazard, tumbling pieces of dialogue for her characters which, once they sink in, you realise are actually quite piercing takes on the human condition. Any weird thoughts you think you and only you have ever had? Dunham’s probably had it, stripped it bare and put it on screen.

Speaking of which, there are lots of intimate scenes in Too Much. Given how often Dunham was condemned for her own nude scenes, does she have any fears about putting Stalter in a position of scrutiny? “Megan is so smart and so internet-literate,” says Dunham. “I don’t use Instagram – I write the captions, but somebody else posts them – so I’m not receiving all this online feedback. She’s so culturally alert and online that I feel like she knows what the world is offering. And what I love about her is she has such a funny, bright, ballsy way of taking it all in stride.”

Dunham recalls an interview in which Stalter was asked how she might feel if she experienced body shaming. “I start to give this very honest, sincere answer, and Megan just said, ‘If you want to leave a comment on my Instagram that says that I’m fat, let’s face it, you’re in love with me and you want to have sex with me.’” Her Stalter impression is spot-on, head thrust forward and tilted to the side. “I was like, that’s a perfect response. You have this covered. I was out here doing a full therapy session, and you are just like, we’re handling it and we’re moving on. She probably has to worry about me more than I have to worry about her.”

Stalter is similarly unruffled when I talk to her about it. “We all just focused on each other [when filming] and what we wanted to make, and not really on what anyone would ever think of it,” she says, with a shrug. (Sharpe, on the other hand, did have a bit of performance anxiety on set – about singing Felber’s original songs live. “It was really fun, but it was a slightly scary part of it,” he says. “I wanted to get it right.” )

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The unlikely couple fall in love to a soundtrack of Funkadelic and Cate Le Bon (Netflix)

Whereas a lot of the sex in Girls was, at best, uncomfortable, in Too Much, it is all about pleasure and understanding. Dunham says this is also something she’s learnt to write with age and experience. “I was in my twenties then, and I’d grown up with a certain expectation, watching films, of what my sexual life was going to be like,” she explains, “and then it wasn’t that. The world had begun to be so saturated by sexual imagery in porn and the expectations were shifting. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn, but it does change the way people are expecting you to behave in a natural sexual situation. And so I was just confounded, and I think Girls expressed a lot of that confusion, anxiety, and frankly, pain.”

Sex and nudity aside, a key criticism of Girls at the time was its lack of diversity. The show occupied a very specific milieu – one that was white and privileged. It did not reflect the multiculturalism of New York City. In 2012, Dunham tried to defend herself against this critique, explaining: “I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting.” Today, though, it is clear that she has thought deeply about why Girls sparked upset back then. “I think one of the profound issues around Girls,” she says, “was that there was so little real estate for women in television that if you had a show called Girls, which is such a monolithic name, it sounds like it’s describing all the girls in all the places. And so if it’s not reflecting a multitude of experiences, I understand how that would be really disappointing to people.”

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Dunham as aspiring writer Hannah in 'Girls' (Productions/Kobal/Shutterstock)

She says she “liked the conversation around Girls” because it was a vital one to have. Dunham is a producer on Too Much, so has strived to make sure that the series, which has a diverse cast and saw star Janicza Bravo guest-direct an episode, includes a range of perspectives and experiences. “The thing I have really come to believe is that one of the most important things is not just diversity in front of the camera, but it’s diversity behind the camera,” she says. “As a producer, one of my goals is to bring a lot of different voices into a position where they can tell their story.”

What Too Much does beautifully is expose the cultural chasm between Americans and Brits. Jessica has all the feelings and wants to express them at volume all the time; Felix is dealing with trauma and trying to squish it down like the contents of an overstuffed suitcase. This tension is the lifeblood of the show, as is Jessica’s discovery, through Felix, of British quirks and delights, from our confectionery (Jaffa Cakes) to our expressions (“Did you get a bollocking?”).

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Stalter and Dunham as co-dependent sisters in 'Too Much' (Netflix)

“We speak the same language, yet there are so many emotional nuances and social cues that you become accustomed to in your own country,” says Dunham. “When you move to a new place, it’s really challenging to distinguish [them]. You’re an adult now and yet you feel almost reduced to being a child again.” One of her favourite linguistic discoveries in the UK has been the phrase “on it like a car bonnet”. “I was like, what is a car bonnet? It’s the hood of a car. Who knew? In my mind I saw a frilly little gorgeous bonnet on a car.”

Earlier this year, Dunham wrote an essay in The New Yorker about splitting up with New York and making London her home. “London had a spaciousness I could not get over,” she wrote, “streets so wide that the buildings seemed to be stepping aside for me to pass… Here, I moved with ease, whether walking on Hampstead Heath or sliding into a black cab, greeted by a gruff ‘Oy! Where you ’eaded?’” She also told the magazine that being in the UK offered her the freedom of a place where “you don’t feel that you are being in any way hemmed in by other people’s perceptions”.

In other words, in London, Dunham isn’t really too much. She is, as Felix puts it to Jessica, “just the right amount and then a little bit more”.