Lena Dunham: ‘Guys, I’m Really Not as Bad as Everyone Thinks I Am’

“Girls” has come and gone, but Lena Dunham is here to stay. The controversial actor/writer/director speaks about her new show “Camping” in a Rolling Stone interview, getting candid after having it pointed out that her character on the upcoming HBO drama is much more private than she is: “She is, and I feel like I learned from watching her that there’s a way of going about this fame thing that’s less about proving [something],” she says.

“I tend to go around being, ‘Guys, I’m really not as bad as everybody thinks I am!’ And it seems her philosophy is, ‘I don’t need everybody to acknowledge my whole deal because I know what my deal is.’”

“It’s the only way I know how to process,” she says of injecting her own life into her work. “It almost feels like things haven’t happened to me until they’ve happened to another character before my eyes.”

As for writing middle-aged characters, Dunham says it wasn’t a challenge. “It’s funny to have accidentally become the face of millennial ennui. I actually feel not even middle-aged but elderly in my disposition: ‘Do I still have anything left to offer this world? Is that all there is? Am I over the hill?’ The British version of Kathryn is obsessed with her menopause and her body, so this was a natural extension. When we started writing, I was facing down the barrel of my hysterectomy, and when we finished, I had just had my hysterectomy.”

Read the full interview — which includes Dunham’s assertion that “Camping” star Jennifer Garner is the most charming person in American history — here.