Actor Adam Driver shuts down question about clashes with actress Lena Dunham
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Adam Driver was at the Cannes Film Festival to promote the new crime thriller Paper Tiger.
PHOTO: EPA
CANNES, France – American actor Adam Driver batted away accusations about aggressive behaviour on the set of the television series Girls (2012 to 2017) on May 17, saying: “I have no comment on any of that. I’m saving it all for my book.”
Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed and acted in the series, accused the Star Wars sequel trilogy (2015 to 2019) and Marriage Story (2019) actor of being rough with her during their first sex scene.
He “hurled me this way and that”, she wrote in her new memoir, Famesick, which was released on April 14.
“It wasn’t that I felt violated,” Dunham wrote, but that she felt she had “lost directorial authority”.
Another time, the 40-year-old alleged, Driver “hurled a chair at the wall next to me” when he grew angry at her for forgetting her lines during a rehearsal, and swore repeatedly at her.
The hit show Girls, which ran for six seasons until 2017, was about a self-obsessed writer Hannah and her boyfriend Adam, played by Driver, and their on-off toxic relationship.
It often seemed to mirror Dunham’s own life.
Driver, 42, is married to actress Joanne Tucker. He shut down the issue when he was questioned about it at the Cannes Film Festival, where he is starring in American film-maker James Gray’s new crime thriller Paper Tiger.
The gripping drama about an ordinary family that falls in thrall to the Russian mafia in New York is in the running for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.
Gray, director of films such as The Yards (2000) and Ad Astra (2019), said the “crisis of masculinity” – a recurring theme at the festival – was nothing new. “Sophocles was talking about it 2,500 years ago.”
“What is recent is the idea of the strong man without flaws. That’s the last 100 years. That’s the thing we have to get away from and bring back the complexity of what it means to be a human being. That’s what I’ve tried to do,” he told reporters.
Gray, 57, also said his film was an indictment of the often “transactional” nature of the United States.
“Like the current American president, who is a symptom of what I’m talking about. Totally transactional. You know, how can I make the most money?
“This ethos becomes everything, and what does that do to our souls? If you tell young people it doesn’t matter whether you’re a good person or not... it leaves them adrift,” he said.
Which is why, Gray said, he set the movie in the mid-1980s. “It was the beginning of the moment in which the market became god.” AFP
