Adam Driver has finally responded to the explosive allegations Lena Dunham made about him in her memoir, and he did it with exactly one sardonic sentence.
Speaking at a Cannes Film Festival press conference for his new film Paper Tiger on Sunday, the 42-year-old was asked about the claims Dunham made in Famesick, her recently published tell-all.
His reply was brief and dry: “I have no comment on that, I’m saving it all for my book.”
It was a masterclass in saying nothing while saying quite a lot.
The response came weeks after Dunham’s 416-page memoir landed with considerable force, containing a series of serious allegations about Driver’s behaviour on the set of Girls, the HBO series on which he played Hannah Horvath’s volatile on-off boyfriend Adam Sackler.
Dunham accused him of screaming at her in her trailer, hurling a chair at the wall beside her, and punching a hole in his own trailer wall.
She also claimed he ignored the agreed blocking during their first intimate scene, physically manhandling her in a way that left her shaken.
“Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment,” she wrote, describing the confusion and self-doubt that followed.
Dunham has been candid about why she didn’t confront him at the time.
Speaking to The Guardian in April, she said: “At that point in my 20s, 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.”
The memoir also ventured into more personal territory, with Dunham claiming she and Driver came close to having an affair a month before he got engaged to his wife Joanne Tucker in 2012.
She wrote that she pulled back when he arrived at her New York home, choosing not to cross a line she felt would make returning to work impossible.
Driver, she alleged, later acknowledged the moment to her, saying: “When my girl was away, I realised I’m no good alone. I need someone to keep me in line.”
The Cannes press conference where Driver made his comment was for Paper Tiger, James Gray’s crime drama in which he plays former police officer Gary Pearl.
