Adam Driver awkwardly avoided commenting on Lena Dunham’s description of his behaviour as ‘feral’ on the set of Girls while promoting his new film Paper Tiger at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Oscar-nominated actor, who had his breakthrough on the HBO TV show before going on to Star Wars, was also accused by show creator and co-star Dunham of punching a hole in his trailer wall and throwing a chair.
When asked at a press conference, attended by Metro, about Dunham’s comments in her new memoir, Famesick, Driver quickly responded: ‘I have no comment on any of that.’
He then quipped, ‘I’m saving it all for my book!’ as laughter broke out.
However, in the ensuing commotion, while another journalist was called on for a question, he then turned to a producer sitting next to him and claimed: ‘I don’t even know what she’s talking about.’
Driver played emotionally fraught actor Adam opposite Dunham as main character Hannah in all six seasons of the show, which followed a group of young women navigating their 20s.
Writing in Famesick, Dunham described Driver during this period of time as ‘something feral’ and a ‘half-man, half-beast’.
She also said that he was occasionally violent and difficult to work with, alleging that he threw a chair at the wall next to her while they were running lines, punched a hole in his trailer wall because he hated his haircut, and on another occasion, screamed in her face.
According to Dunham, Driver told her, ‘I hope you know I’ll always love you,’ when he wrapped his final scene for Girls in 2016.
But she said that she ‘never heard from him again’ after that.
‘At the time, I didn’t have the skill to… It never entered my mind to say, “I am your boss, you can’t speak to me this way”,’ she later told The Guardian.
‘And, at that point in my twenties, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that.’
In James Gray’s Paper Tiger – one of only two American films playing in the main competition in Cannes this year – Driver plays well-connected ex-cop Gary in 1980s New York, who unwillingly plunges his brother Irwin (Miles Teller) and wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) into danger with the Russian mafia as part of a new consultancy proposition.
Johansson was unable to make it to Cannes as she’s busy filming The Exorcist reboot, instead sending a note to be read out after failing to pick up director Gray’s FaceTime call during the movie’s standing ovation at its premiere on Friday night.
Driver praised co-star Treller for ‘keeping the mood light’ while on set as they joked about what struck each other the most as scene partners, with this being their first film together.
Teller immediately quipped, ‘Adam’s taller,’ and admitted he was used to usually being the biggest person on set at 6’1”, but ‘my hand felt very small when he shook it’.
Marriage Story actor Driver then shared of Teller: ‘He’s prepared, he’s available, he’s on time, and he’ll go anywhere that you want to go and try anything, and he keeps the mood light. It doesn’t get too heady or dark, and it keeps the room in the moment.’
After saying that he ‘couldn’t run fast enough to work with him again,’ Teller then asked: ‘You remember when you almost sent me to the hospital?’
In a playful exchange, Driver responded that he didn’t ‘know that we should talk about that’ before Whiplash star Teller revealed that he’d been left with a scar that also made it into the movie.
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