Everything Lena Dunham Shared About Adam Driver in Her New Memoir

Lena Dunham is opening up about her complicated relationship with her “Girls” co-star Adam Driver in her new memoir “Famesick,” out April 14.

Dunham, who created and starred “Girls,” which aired from 2012 to 2017 on HBO, played Hannah Horvath, a chatty, self-absorbed writer in her 20s. Dunham describes Driver, who played Hannah’s volatile on-again off-again boyfriend, Adam, as “verbally aggressive” and “physically imposing” on the show’s set.

Dunham, who was 25 when “Girls” premiered, alleges in her memoir that the Oscar-nominated Driver, 42, once threw a chair in anger when she forgot a line. She also alleges Driver ignored her “careful blocking” for their sex scenes and instead “hurled” her around.

Dunham, 39, alleges the pair’s “creative connection” sparked such “intensity’ between them, they came close to “crossing a boundary” together.

TODAY.com has reached out to Driver’s rep for comment and has not heard back at the time of publication.

Read on to learn about Dunham’s allegations about her behind-the-scenes relationship with co-star Driver.

Dunham Detailed the Volatile ‘Intensity’ of the Pair’s ‘Creative Connection’

Dunham describes an “intensity” between her and Driver that began in Season 1.

“I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me. He could be short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing. He could also be protective, loving even,” she writes in ‘Famesick.”

“I reasoned that the intensity of his anger at me, anger that could make him spit and throw things, was proportionate to the intensity of our creative connection,” she writes.

“One day in his dressing room, as I apologized for a perceived slight I couldn’t remember committing, he got close to my face and hissed, ‘Never forget that I know you. I really f—— know you.”

Dunham felt as though she and Driver were creative “partners” and ended up handing over control to him.

“I ran decisions by him that weren’t his to make. We rehearsed on weekends in his spare white living room, even when the scene was easy and didn’t require it,” she writes, adding, “He hugged me tight in the morning and again at the end of the day.”

On one occasion, Dunham was overcome with emotion when she “looked up to see him smiling at me with something so tender, it felt like it could only have been love.”

So “disarmed” was she by Driver’s tenderness, she dropped her glass of water, she writes.

Driver Threw A Chair When Dunham Forgot a Line

Dunham recounts how Driver once allegedly became so angry at her for forgetting a line while the pair rehearsed he “hurled a chair at the wall next to me.”

“Late one night, as we practiced lines in my trailer, I found that mine were suddenly gone. I knew I’d written them. I’d known them only minutes before,” she writes. “But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer — until finally, Adam screamed, ‘F—— SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE F— UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’”

Dunham “didn’t tell anyone” about the chair incident, she writes, but remembered all her lines “correctly after that.”

Driver Ignored Dunham’s Directions For Sex Scenes and ‘Hurled’ Her Around

Dunham, who also directed many episodes of “Girls,” also alleges that Driver ignored her directions for the pair’s sex scenes.

Driver, she writes, tossed the “careful blocking” she designed for the scenes “out the window” and instead “hurled me this way and that.”

“Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment, unsure of what had happened — had I lost directorial authority, allowed the scene to go off the rails, not given proper instructions?” she writes.

Dunham continues, “It wasn’t that I felt violated — and I also wouldn’t know if I had, as there was little in my sexual life that I hadn’t allowed to happen, and for no pay.

“But I felt that something intimate, confusing and primal had played out in a scenario I was meant to control.”

Dunham and Driver Nearly ‘Crossed a Boundary’ Despite Driver Being in a Relationship

Dunham alleges she and Driver nearly slept together during one weekend when his girlfriend — now wife — Joanne Tucker was in Cincinnati performing in a play.

Driver “came over almost every night,” she writes. “I was still frail and fawning, a careful and terrified version of myself — and maybe he liked me most that way. Maybe it made his heart go out to me, or maybe it just leveled the balance of power.”

Toward the end of the week, she writes, Driver called her.

“You still home alone, Dunham?” he allegedly asked her. “Okay. I’m riding down to you. But I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.”

When Driver arrived, he phoned Dunham but she didn’t pick up.

“It felt as simple as ignoring your doorbell, as pretending to be asleep, as impossible as stopping your blood from flowing,” she writes.

“But some part of me knew — some wise part of me, some bold part of me — that if we crossed whatever boundary we were threatening to cross, the return to work would be tinged with humiliation, that I’d be minimizing any authority I still had, and that, however it went, my heart — bruised but improbably not yet broken — would crack.”

A month after the incident, Driver called Dunham to tell her he was engaged. Driver and the actor Joanne Tucker married in 2013.

“It was absurd to be heartbroken, to have thought I meant anything, that I occupied any role beyond distraction. I was his scene partner, sure — and so when we were in a scene, his attention was piercing, his presence all-consuming,” she writes.

“But in life? It would never be me who kept him in line. I didn’t have the chops. Even at work, I couldn’t do it, in the one place I was meant to make the rules.”