For weeks, Adam Driver has avoided commenting on allegations made about his on-set behaviour by Lena Dunham in her hit new memoir, Famesick.
But at a press conference for Paper Tiger at the Cannes film festival on Sunday, the actor briefly broke his silence when asked by the Guardian about Dunham’s account. “I have no comment on any of that – I’m saving it all for my book,” he responded, provoking laughter in the room.
In Famesick, which topped the New York Times bestseller list after its release in April, Dunham describes several difficult experiences while working with Driver on Girls, the HBO comedy-drama that ran from 2012 to 2017 and helped launch his career.
Recalling a late-night rehearsal, Dunham wrote that Driver became “verbally aggressive” after she forgot her lines during a scene and “hurled a chair at the wall next to me”.
“I remember doing a fight scene with Adam and how scary it was to meet someone so totally present with such absence,” she wrote. “Late one night, as we practised lines in my trailer, I found that mine were suddenly gone. I knew I’d written them. I’d known them only minutes before. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer – until finally, Adam screamed, ‘FUCKING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me.
“‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’”
Dunham also described filming the characters’ first sex scene, claiming that “careful blocking went out the window” when Driver “hurled me this way and that”.
“Stunned, I couldn’t speak for a moment,” she wrote, “unsure of what had happened – had I lost directorial authority, allowed the scene to go off the rails, not given proper instructions?”
Driver, now one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors, has received Oscar nominations for his performances in BlacKkKlansman and Marriage Story. He has not previously responded publicly to the claims in Dunham’s memoir.
At the Cannes press conference, attention soon shifted back to Paper Tiger, the director James Gray’s 1980s-set crime drama starring Driver and Miles Teller as brothers drawn into a dangerous scheme involving the Russian mafia. The Palme d’Or contender also stars Scarlett Johansson, who missed the premiere and press conference because of scheduling conflicts.
Gray used the event to deliver a broader critique of modern American capitalism, describing the unchecked dominance of the market as “devastating”.
“My own view of the world today is that when you cannot monetise integrity, when the idea of being a good person doesn’t actually make you money, what happens?” he said. “You get someone like the current American president, who is a symptom of what I’m talking about, totally transactional. This ethos becomes everything. The only thing that matters is to make a lot of money.”
Gray said he set the film in 1986 because it represented “the beginning of the moment in which the market became God”.
Javier Bardem also invoked global political leaders at Cannes while discussing toxic masculinity during a press conference for The Beloved. He condemned what he called the “big-balls men” mentality embodied by figures including Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu.
