Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 4

Pilot

In early September 2010—less than six months after Tiny Furniture premiered at South by Southwest—HBO ordered the pilot episode of Girls to production. I was sitting at Corner Bistro with some friends when I got the call. I stepped outside so I could hear, sat down cross-legged on a bench, watching a couple of lesbians kiss across the street outside the Cubby Hole and girls in minidresses and headbands head for Beatrice Inn, as my executive Kathleen told me what this meant: We’d need to be shooting in November, which gave us two months to cast, hire crew, scout locations, build sets, and a million other things that hadn’t yet occurred to me since I’d never made anything outside my own house. It’s a testament to the power of youth—better than any drug yet created, all energy and zero side effects—that the onslaught of to-dos didn’t scare me. There was nowhere else I needed to be, no life to balance with work, and no desire—even for romance—that could supersede my obsession with making movies. I didn’t need to hang out. I didn’t need to sleep. Lately, I hadn’t even needed to eat. And if I loved making movies, then making TV, I figured, must be like a movie that never ends. And what could be better than that?

The hunt for our leads began immediately. We had just six weeks to cast Hannah, Marnie, and Jessa, plus Marnie’s simp of a boyfriend, Charlie, and Hannah’s unmoored fuck buddy, Adam. Then there was Shoshanna, a small but crucial role that skewered the SATC -loving upwardly mobile girls now dominating the Soho real estate market (she was meant to stay with us for an episode or so, but Zosia Mamet brought so much unexpected pathos that she became, arguably, the most lovable member of our permanent quartet). To help us build this group out, I was introduced to Jennifer Euston, a casting director who had a nontraditional eye, eschewing the anonymous prime-time pilot season faces that still dominated and leaning into a kind of specificity and realism that aligned with what I’d always done. (Never mind that I’d always done it because I had access to my dorm neighbors and family friends. One of the few compromises I wasn’t willing to make was to sanitize and anonymize the citizens of my little cinematic universe. I wanted to cast real people, with real faces that didn’t feel CW ready, and to their credit, no one ever asked me to do otherwise.)

I had played many versions of the same Lena-adjacent character in my work—I’d called her Georgia, Ella, Aura, all simple feminine names that seemed vaguely analogous to mine. They weren’t me, exactly—they were funhouse mirror versions, Lena if she’d ignored all her therapist’s advice and didn’t have the motor and compass of creative inspiration. In the Girls pilot, that character was “Hannah.” I assumed that Hannah would be played by a polished professional, so was shocked when everyone—from Judd to Jenni to the brass at HBO—casually mentioned that I would be playing Hannah, as if it had been discussed already. “I think they…cast me today,” I told my father over dinner, smiling nervously into our favorite Pakistani takeout. When my father—forever looking a gift horse in the mouth—asked whether I’d considered the effect this would have on my life, I’m sure I denounced him as roundly unsupportive and/or stormed into my room, which was still about fifteen feet from his. The next day, I gladly accepted the role I hadn’t known I was writing for myself, and off we went to find my counterparts.

Over the next month, I must have met more than 150 girls for the roles of our main quartet. We had casting sessions in New York and Los Angeles, not to mention the dozens of tapes we sorted through. Aware of the odd power dynamic of sitting across from all these young women—some of them young and vulnerable, others even younger but with the polish of years of professional work behind them, still others up to a decade older than me but “able to play early twenties”—I took an inordinate amount of time with every single one, giving notes, asking for additional reads. It didn’t matter if I’d felt from their first sentence that they weren’t right for the role. I knew that they spent the majority of their time being assessed and summarily dismissed by balding men and women who were too tired to remember feminism. I determined that my audition room would be a different kind of space, even if that meant that every casting session ran hours long. To this day, I’ll run into someone who came in to read for us on Girls, who tells me that the audition made her feel some sense of connection in a sea of cattle calls. They never have to remind me who they are. I remember them all.

Standouts from the process, whom we brought back several times, included people who are now household names like Elizabeth Olsen, Dakota Johnson, Cristin Milioti, and Amy Schumer. I recognized a woman named Allison Mack from Smallville; she wasn’t right for any of the roles but invited me via email to her “intimate women’s group” every week for the next year (there but for the grace of God go I).

When it came to Marnie, I imagined a rather literal interpretation of Audrey—a bespectacled but seductive Jewess with a self-aware snark. Audrey was the kind of girl who every man found gorgeous but assumed they were the first to ever feel that way. She had an ineffable quality that was hard to find in a professional actress—who, as I would quickly learn, were sorted into two categories: funny or beautiful. If the beautiful ones were even a little bit funny, it was all anyone talked about. If the funny ones were a little bit beautiful, no one cared.

For Marnie, I zeroed in on oddball brunettes. Audrey was an oddball and a brunette, ergo Marnie would be, too. Throw some glasses on the right woman, and we’d have twins. But it was Judd who taught me the lesson that sometimes you find someone deeply unexpected and you write toward them, rather than pushing an actor toward the part that’s on the page. He has a savant-like ability to understand what combinations of people will yield a tense humor, and that bell rang when he saw a video of Allison Williams, a recent Yale grad, singing a mash-up of the Mad Men theme song. “This could be really funny,” he said. “Seeing you with someone so normal. After all, Hannah’s weird. Jessa’s weird. You can’t all be weird.”

I was skeptical—she looked like an Abercrombie model and had been out of school for all of three months. The fact that her father was a famous newscaster didn’t factor in—I grew up in a family that literally never turned the news on (unless we were at my grandmother’s, because she was pretty horny for Dan Rather), so Brian Williams’s celebrity was all but nonexistent to me. The issue was the vibe: I was sure from watching her that she’d have a musical theater affect and a suburban sense of non-humor. But by the end of the improv we did in the audition, she was talking about farts and braiding my greasy hair. I felt, immediately, a cozy tension between us, the kind of loving antagonism you have with a friend you can’t remember ever not having been annoyed by and dependent on. We had our second girl.

The folks at HBO were as bewitched by Jemima as anybody, but there was an issue: She was days away from giving birth. I mentioned HBO’s interest, and she acted shocked, offended almost, that I’d even mention the idea of her working four weeks after having her first child. (In my defense, at twenty-four I had very little sense of what it entailed. I assumed it popped out and then you passed it around to whoever might like to hold it, and that two or three times a week, you changed its diaper.) But behind the affront to her maternal dignity, I could see something else—a gleam of desire, and the first hint she was feeling that she might be missing out on more than indie sleaze dance nights at Don Hill’s or the occasional hit of black tar heroin.

Jemima had something that can only be described using the incredibly irritating term je ne sais quoi, a fragile confidence, a restlessness rooted in knowing she would never be happy. Jemima’s mix of Iraqi Jewish and British heritage gave her a hard-to-define specificity, haunted doll eyes, and a mouth that threatened to overtake her face if she wasn’t careful. She was slim but solid, with pert little breasts and a butt that filled out her ’70s Levi’s in a way that made men catcall even when she was nine months pregnant (and just describing her, I sound as perky as them—thus is her effect). After six weeks and so many tapes (even checking London, Toronto, Chicago), that I began to hate the scenes I had written for the character, I went back to Jem on a wing and a prayer (and HBO’s blessing): “What if we made your days really short, and gave you an extra trailer for breastfeeding, and paid for a nanny. The actual show, if it even goes at all—which it probably won’t—isn’t going to shoot for a year. This is five days. How hard could five days be? We’ll do it together.”

She’d been a mother for three weeks and was already starting to sense it wasn’t just all-encompassing love and homemade bread. It was long stretches of maddening repetition, shit and piss and chapped nipples. She wasn’t even twenty-five.

“Fine,” she said, shrugging. “But you better write me some really good sex scenes.”

Zosia came to us on tape, just days before our deadline. Jenni had seen her on Mad Men and requested a tape, saying, “I love that funny little thing.” In the video she sent, she was funny, but she was also strong and profoundly beautiful, her shoulders held high, her sandy hair falling down. Later, she would tell me that she’d been afraid to send the tape, having been down with the flu and full of cold medicine. But all I saw was someone who wasn’t simply playing a caricature but channeling, as if she’d tapped into the vein of this currently half-baked character and the blood would not stop flowing. So much of who Shoshanna became is down to this profound connection, which even Sudafed could not dampen.

The boys of Girls proved less hard to find (probably, I realize now, because they weren’t the point, and therefore, we could fuck around and find out). Christopher Abbott came in during our very first casting session and gave an audition so funny and perfectly odd that he was the first person cast. It was Judd who suggested we write a role for Alex Karpovsky as a skeptical elder who highlighted the absurdity of the girls’ values system. He was cast based off his standout work in Tiny Furniture —Judd loves a grumpy, funny man—and was surprised to learn he wouldn’t need to find a couch to crash on for the shoot but would, in fact, be put up in a real live hotel.

Then there was the role of Adam. In my character description, I had written “Taylor Kitsch vibes.” (A girl can dream.) I imagined someone delicately pretty but all-American, who would make Hannah feel like she had won the lotto just by touching him and therefore accept any form of bad behavior, from STD transmission to spanking (nothing I wrote was quite as dark as the reality of what the real-life Adam and I had been into, so I was always shocked when people found it disturbing and surprising nonetheless). Given my demand for a Tim Riggins look-alike, when Adam Driver walked into the room—all ears and nose, gangly and pigeon-toed, lurching toward the audition chair like a reanimated corpse in a silent film—I was…confused. I tried to shake his hand, and he only grunted.

“Just wait,” Jen whispered, sensing my vague alarm.

He dispensed with small talk, starting the scene before action was even called. In the seat beside him, I watched as he transformed, transmuted, lit up, became something feral yet knowing. The first time he laughed—a high-pitched cackle, like a hyena’s mating call—I nearly fell out of my seat. When a moment in the script called for a half-hearted hug, he bit my shoulder instead. All of this is on tape—me trying to maintain my composure and remain in character as this boy morphed into half-man, half-beast. I didn’t understand what he was doing, exactly, but I had the rare feeling that I was standing in front of someone who was at the very beginning of an ascent, who—whether I cast him or not—couldn’t remain a secret for long. If I’d even seen him walking down the street—eyes down, hands shoved in pockets—I would never have forgotten, not just because of his unusual look but because of the way he commanded space, an odd trick since he seemed—when he wasn’t acting—to want to melt into the floor.

All I could say, when the scene ended, was a weak “It’s crazy that your name is Adam and the character is named Adam, too.” But he was done talking. He just left.

He had an unusual history, Jen explained—he’d been in the military before being accepted by Juilliard, and had been doing off-Broadway theater for the last year. “Don’t mention it to him,” she said. “I’m not sure he likes to talk about it.”

At his callback, I was mortified when I realized I had—probably subconsciously—put my grandmother’s World War II dog tags on that morning, something I rarely did. When he sat down beside me to read the new scenes, he reached out and touched them with a surprising gentleness, nodding, then began. His second read was no less gripping, and I also felt myself stiffen, begin to engage as an actor in a way I never had before. I’d always performed in a way that was naturalistic bordering on lazy, but Adam forced me to make new, almost panicked choices. I didn’t just want what he brought to the show. I wanted what he brought out of me.

When the second set of scenes was done, he left with as little politesse as he’d come in with, and we all just sat there, dumbfounded. That day, we sent his tape to Judd, who showed his wife, Leslie, just to confirm we weren’t insane.

“Oh,” she said. “Of course.”

Temporary offices were set up in Queens’s famed Silvercup Studios, which had been home to Sex and the City before us. Our executive producer—Ilene S. Landress of Sopranos fame, a no-nonsense woman who reminded me of someone my mother would have gone to high school with, the kind of gal who can scare a contractor—set about schooling me in every aspect of production I didn’t know, which was, really, all of it. Considering Ilene had worked with everyone from David Chase to Martin Scorsese, she was surprisingly gentle about my virgin status. When it was time to interview first assistant directors, I had to take her aside and ask: “What do they do?”

“That should be your first question to them,” she said. “See if you like their answer.”

I interviewed three first ADs—a cool lesbian with a shag haircut, a paternal guy with a ponytail, and an aging gay man who spoke openly about the former crack addiction that nearly derailed his career and ruined his teeth. Obviously, I picked him.

HBO’s one concession to my indie status was to allow me to bring my cinematographer Jody along, jumping him into the union so that he could legally do the job. He and I would be partners in making this leap, and we committed to holding on to our cinematic aesthetic no matter what was thrown at us, to making the show look more like Cassavetes than Friends.

On the door of my office, they stuck a piece of paper that said Lena Dunham, Writer and Director, The Untitled Lena Dunham Project.

Seeing the words on the door, I felt a unique mix of pride and terror—it hadn’t occurred to me until very recently that twenty-four-year-old girls very rarely got shows. When they did, they didn’t get to act in, direct, or produce them. Some part of the job was given to an expert, a boss, a luminary. If I failed at this, if I acted flighty or foolish, it wasn’t just my future on the line—I knew enough to know that every step forward would be a step for womankind, and every step back would be another excuse to resume the status quo. I didn’t say this aloud but took it on like a quiet oath—one, I now realize, I have carried forward, that has fueled my shame every time I failed, flailed, or fucked up.

Inside the windowless office at Silvercup was a gray plastic folding table, a corded phone with a guide to the extensions of all my colleagues, sheafs of casting photos, architectural plans for the apartments being built on the stages downstairs, and revised pages of our script. I knew that someone with a sense of the process would not waste a bit of spare time crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s. But often, when I closed the door, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I would sit there alone, wondering how a person with a sign like that on their door used their time. I dabbled in drinking espresso, something I had always equated with grown-ups. I bought a leather jacket and a cashmere scarf to bundle my thinning frame. At night, I fell asleep curled in a ball over my covers before my parents had even made it home, so tired from the business of pretending I knew what was going on.

A few weeks before we started shooting, I woke up with a burning sensation in my pelvis. I felt fluish and slow, and emerged from my room at six a.m. to find my father in the kitchen. “Something is really wrong with me,” I told him, reminding myself of that scene in Little Women when Beth realizes she got cholera from holding the poor people’s baby. Then, I promptly collapsed.

My parents called my Aunt Bonnie—a blond emergency room doctor who is unusually good in a crisis and clued in to every New York ER the way certain Hollywood types can get restaurant reservations anywhere. She fast-tracked us through the crowd at Saint Vincent’s, where a student doctor did an ultrasound of my belly and informed me that I was suffering from “acute colitis.” She wasn’t sure whether it was a one-time incident, or the beginning of something chronic. I didn’t tell her that I’d been essentially shutting off my hunger signals, or at least dulling them, with canned energy drinks and diet supplements, but I knew that I’d been treating my digestive tract like a clogged drain I was snaking. She ordered 10 mg of morphine, some antibiotics, and a follow-up colonoscopy. My mother brought me a plain turkey sandwich and placed her cool hand on my forehead, muttering “poor baby” in a way she hadn’t since I was very small.

Back at home, in a morphine haze and with my fever coming down, it occurred to me that I hadn’t contacted anyone from work to tell them what was going on. Preproduction waited for no woman, and just as fear gripped me and I prepared to check my texts—would I be punished? Fired?—the landline rang. I heard my mother answer: “Hello, Jenni. Yes, she’s here. She’s been in the hospital. Colitis. SHE’S TWENTY-FOUR AND GETTING A COLONOSCOPY; WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD.”

A few days later, I drank a vat of salty lemonade, shat my guts out for twelve hours, and then my mother and I took a cab uptown to my colonoscopy. I remember being asked to curl into the fetal position, then waking up and seeing the doctor—not much older than me—check in on me in my recovery bay. He was wearing his street clothes, a backpack on.

“I LET A GUY IN A BACKPACK PUT SOMETHING UP MY ASS? I THOUGHT THIS WAS A MEDICAL FACILITY.”

My mother apologized, explaining, “She’s under a lot of pressure at the moment.”

Afterward, she took me to a diner for a plain turkey patty. “You’re still coming out of anesthesia,” she said—unusually concerned. Concern was my father’s domain, so when it came from her, I listened. “You shouldn’t be up and walking around.”

But we had a chance to scout the Carlyle, and if we wanted to shoot there, we would have to make it this afternoon to look around. I didn’t question the urgency—who was I to question anything? I’d told my colleagues what was happening. And they’d told me where I needed to be, and when. And so I hopped into a scout van. I watched the city rush by; it looked romantic and vast in a way that it only can if you’re a tourist or you’re on a powerful sedative.

In the Carlyle, I did my best acting—nodding seriously as I regarded beds and doorways, finishings and furniture. The only concession to my condition was that every ten minutes, I had to push past whoever was in my way to get to the nearest fancy toilet, where I’d cling to the walls, gasp, then clean myself up, throw icy water on my face, and walk back into a room I was supposed to be in control of.

Looking back, this was another first—the first time I chose to ignore my body’s noisy signals in favor of this thing I wanted so badly. It seemed that the film industry was made up of people ignoring their basic human needs—sleep, time with loved ones, a reliable schedule, no domain over what they ate or where they went or when they peed. But who could blame them, when the trade-off was the chance to make magic, to play pretend for a job?

Before we could shoot, Judd explained, we would need to have a table read. I had seen one once before, at Judd’s office in Los Angeles, for the film The Five-Year Engagement. That had seemed impossibly glamorous—Jason Segel and Emily Blunt, making dozens of comedy writers laugh maniacally. Afterward, there had been a conversation where people pitched ideas. “I’m just spitballing here,” Jason said before he tried out a concept of a big set piece, and I assumed he’d made up that phrase, so I even laughed at that (that happened a lot in the early days: a comedy writer would use a term of art—for instance, calling a double joke “a hat on a hat”—and I’d assume they were a genius, making it up on their toes).

I was told to invite anyone I thought might have something valuable to say, but I could only think of my parents and Noah Baumbach, with whom I had enjoyed a single lunch. All of them declined, but Noah did call me the night before and say, “My only pitch is that you don’t have to listen to anyone.” Easy for you to say, I remember thinking—I didn’t know much, but I was already well aware that in addition to our actual jobs, women have to do the emotional labor of at least acting like we are listening to everyone—but I now see that he was giving me a small gift, a seed of resistance required to survive your work being analyzed and disassembled.

They set up a long table in an empty soundstage at Silvercup. Allison was forty minutes early, and we paced nervously, snacking on the provided fruit and leaning on each other like sorority sisters waiting for our brother fraternity to arrive at our mixer. Adam strode in five minutes beforehand and went right to his seat, opening his script to indicate that he wasn’t there to make friends. I met Zosia for the first time, who arrived off a plane in an oversize cashmere sweater, her hair hanging nearly to her butt, with a loose California ease so unlike the Shoshanna she’d delivered in her tape. Jemima was thirty minutes late, texting me again and again with more and more aggressive punctuation that her cab was stuck in traffic, as if it was somehow my fault.

We read the script. The audience, mostly comedy writers I’d never met, laughed in a way that felt generous but not excessive, polite but not joyful. The words I’d written, which had flowed with such ease and landed with such precision alone in my bedroom, often felt clunky and dissonant. I wandered the room afterward, trying to discern anything I could from Judd, Jenni, or our executives, who all chatted about show business news I wasn’t aware of and smiled at me with the “you did it” enthusiasm of parents after a middle school choral concert.

A few hours later, Judd sent an email that felt more ominous than any I’d ever received: “Think there’s a lot of work to do.” I had edited the pages, painstakingly considered each comma, and yet—even with a skilled group of actors, all lined up behind our very official name placards—moments I had known in my heart would soar and surprise had fallen undeniably flat. Judd summoned Jenni and me to a suite at the Trump SoHo (it was a very different time) for two days of focused work.

But what began feeling like being paged by airport security ended up being the moment I fell in love with television writing. Sprawled on couches, eating burgers and fries and mini-pizzas and crudités, we considered what the pilot lacked—a moment that could send Hannah reeling and into a new life. The pilot, at that point, was predicated around Hannah being demoted at her internship, her sad non-relationship with Adam, and a chaotic old friend, Jessa, returning to the city under mysterious circumstances. But there wasn’t a change, a shift, that could set up the thesis of the series: You’re thrust into adult life long before you know how to live it.

I don’t remember how we landed on the idea of Hannah’s parents cutting her off, only that suddenly it was the idea. It made us all laugh, the absurdity of trying to convince your parents to give you one more shot at greatness and realizing they already know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you will not be great—at least, not unless they kick your fucking ass. I riffed on some of the moments my parents had tired of me, remembering a night Sara served us opium poppy tea at her apartment by the on-ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge, and I got so high and so sick that I went home and demanded my parents please cut my dress off with a pair of scissors (they refused). Hannah, I mused, could get high on legal opiates available at a flower market, and tell her parents that she was the voice of a generation (the stupidest idea one could have about oneself, but natural if you’ve ever taken Intro to Beat Poetry).

“Or a voice,” Jenni chimed in. “Of a generation.”

By the end of those two days, we had a pilot that thrummed with fresh energy. I had gone from believing my father’s idea that great artists toil alone and Noah Baumbach’s insistence that I ignore the opinions of others to believing that there might be people who understood my vision even better than I did. I lay in bed, reading and rereading the new pages, but really just reliving the sensation of harmony I’d felt in that room. Maybe some people had felt that with their high school friends, or in their college improv troupe, or with their first love. I had only ever glimpsed that kind of connection in the safety of my nuclear family. This, I thought, was a new kind of family—one I had chosen, and one that had chosen me.

The first scene we shot for the pilot was Marnie and Hannah, waking in bed together in their shared Greenpoint apartment. The joke, as scripted, was that the camera pans up their legs—curled like lovers—only to reveal two best friends in tattered pajamas, the prettier one snoring with her retainer tucked into her spitty mouth.

It wasn’t until I was through hair and makeup and stepping onto the set—a perfect approximation of a shitty shared lease, cramped and full of kitschy attempts at self-definition—that I realized I had never acted in front of more than five people in my life, and I wasn’t sure I could. Looking around, I saw dozens of spectators, most of them older men—chatting easily about former jobs, munching on donuts, ready to unleash their technical expertise. Most of them weren’t here because they thought I had vision—they were here because they were making a union day rate. I didn’t have a cheerleading squad (at least not yet, though many of these guys would become like tough big brothers to me as the years went on). I was simply another actress on her first day, ready to either fly or flail. I felt, distinctly, like I was marching to the guillotine. Why hadn’t Marie Antoinette fainted on her way to the guillotine? (In fact, she had said, “Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose” after stepping on her executioner’s foot.) What would I say if I forgot my lines, lost my nerve, combusted?

“Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose.”

So I was ecstatic when three bells rang— a fire alarm, I thought, relieved: I had been, quite literally, saved by the bell.

But it was quickly explained to me by my assistant director that those three bells were not, in fact, a sign that all of Silvercup needed to urgently evacuate; it was the sound that indicated everyone should be silent to ready for shooting. He laughed and said, “It’s okay, honey, you get multiple tries. We’re not making theater.”

By that point, Allison and I had spent enough time together that she felt like someone I could turn to for comfort. And in her own blond ambition way, she was scared, too. But when we looked at each other, we could channel an intimacy and a sweetness that made it feel like we were, somehow, alone. This, I realized, was a huge part of acting—being able to create a quiet tender space where a room full of onlookers melts away, and you exist inside another world, a better world—a world where you knew the outcomes beforehand.

By the third take, we had relaxed enough to improvise, and—as the thrill of it took over—I jumped on her, straddling her and covering her face in good-morning kisses. But my move caused the bed below us to collapse. I didn’t yet understand that everything on a set is movie magic, that it looks real but is rigged to last for days, not years—to mimic life, not handle it.

I was, momentarily, mortified, remembering the time in ninth grade that I hurled myself onto a cute boy’s bed in a show of flirtatious ease that caused it to crash to the ground, and he said, “Okay, heavyweight.”

But no one batted an eyelash. They simply called for standby art department. Here, there was a guy for everything.

To prep for my first sex scene, I figured I needed a bikini wax. I couldn’t quite picture what the camera would see, but I knew I didn’t want Adam—a man whose very presence caused my face to flush—to glimpse even a hint of errant bush. The kind of woman who ran a show, who wrote herself sex scenes that she also needed to direct and control, was the kind of woman whose bikini line was slick as a seal’s. But also dry. But never flaky. I wanted a smooth, wet, dry, unflaky vagina with absolutely no sign it had ever grown hair that also didn’t look childish but also didn’t look chubby. Was that too much to ask from an aesthetician in a bejeweled T-shirt that said Don’t Hate Me Cuz I’m Beautiful, Hate Me Cuz Your Boyfriend Thinks So ?

Shooting in Midtown, production somehow got the waxer to come to my trailer. There, on the stained brown couch, the shutters closed to 54th Street, Svetlana ripped off every pubic hair I’d ever had, and some I’d never known about. It was my first Brazilian, something that violated all my politics and, it turned out, also violated my highly sensitive skin: I broke out in a rash that had the exact opposite effect I had hoped for, creating a lumpy, pinkened, peeling pubis that needed to be regularly treated with aloe just so I could sit down.

On the morning of the sex scene, I awoke sick with anxiety. I wished I had someone to blame, to complain to, a perverted male producer who was forcing this humiliation on me. But, as would be the case many times over the following years, the only person pushing me into these absurd positions—from behind, from above, from the left—was myself. While I had filmed sex scenes before, the intimacy of the crew—and our lack of knowledge about things like blocking and professional protocol—meant they were more like extended onscreen hookups with preordained limitations. The vibe was really very “let’s not touch each other’s genitals, and let’s forget this ever happened.”

It was the days before intimacy coordinators, but I had a strong sense that I wanted the sex scenes to be safe and professional, more for the sake of the other girls than for me (I was already swollen and sore, so this could only go uphill). In our bathrobes, Adam and I dutifully blocked the scene, as I talked it out like a cheerleading routine—“Kiss for three beats, flip me for three beats, face over mine for two beats, then flip me again for two beats and cut.” He nodded, like a carpenter being given measurements. “Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh-huh.”

It was our first scene together, and we hadn’t spoken much save for an awkward sushi lunch I’d taken him to after a matinee of the Broadway show he was doing, in which he played a Victorian cad in a riding jacket. I’d offered him context about his Girls character, even a burned mix CD of songs that reminded me of the time in my life about which it was written. The most he offered was “I think he likes her, but when she leaves, he forgets about her.” That worked, too.

A kindly costumer entered my dressing room to help tape the nudity cover to my now-naked vagina (it just about covered the damage). It was a sort of thong with no waistband that went from above the pubic bone to the tailbone, held in place by some light adhesive and a prayer. And then, she asked me a question that haunts me to this day: “Would you like a Band-Aid for your butthole?”

As we readied ourselves for action, I tried to make a joke to Adam—something about the absurdity of miming sex in front of a bunch of guys who looked like a construction crew—but instead of listening, he began to do push-ups over my body. When the time came to call action, I took a deep breath—as if I were about to submerge for a deep dive. If Adam had been lackluster in rehearsal, now he was focused, as if the sex scene were a mission that had to be completed with as much vigor as basic training. As in his audition, when in character he was a man possessed. He would often shout filthy improvisations, seemingly unbidden. The same was true here, as my careful blocking went out the window and he hurled me this way and that. It felt so real, part of me was afraid that when I turned around, I would find I was suddenly in a full-penetration 1970s porno. But after a few mimed thrusts, I called cut.

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? Would I be removed from my command post immediately? It wasn’t that I felt violated—and I also wouldn’t have known 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.

But then I heard it—riotous laughter. Applause. Video village, delighted, aghast, confused, and thrilled by seeing something onscreen that felt uncharted. I nodded at Adam. He nodded back. It was in that moment that we made a silent agreement—we would do what was required to make these scenes surprising, to make them true, to make them sing. We would trust each other not to abuse the privilege. It was the rare situation where, in the lack of boundaries, there was a safety—he trusted me to write scenes that weren’t gratuitous, had something to say. I trusted him to try things, knowing that certain lines wouldn’t be crossed and others would be, but for the sake of the work.

I had heard through the grapevine that it was his twenty-seventh birthday, and so we had prepared to surprise him, at the end of the scene, with a cake. When we finished the final shot, I retreated to the dressing room, removed the nudity patch and butthole Band-Aid, put my clothes on, and told him to meet us back on set for a surprise. But before we could light the candles, I got word he’d exited through a back door.

Later, his agent would call Ilene with a stern bit of advice: “Never try and surprise him again.”

By the end of the five shooting days—somehow, you could become a different person over the course of a workweek, it seemed—I had gone from thinking “This probably won’t get picked up, but what an experience—a peek behind the curtain!” to “If this show doesn’t get made, my life will be over. This is the only recipe for my joy.” It wasn’t about success, or optics. It was that I could never remember being happier, feeling more hopeful or useful or embodied. That’s one of the ways Hollywood gets you—when making the work feels that good, you’ll do almost anything to keep at it. Much like drugs, you’ll keep at it even if it starts to feel bad.

I wanted to spend the rest of my life in headphones, watching a monitor, sitting on an apple box, shooting the shit in hair and makeup, puttering to the coffee machine to get some hot water, and being intercepted with a question.

One day my father visited set as I was directing Jemima on a Chinatown street—it was a simple scene, Jessa getting out of a cab to ring a doorbell. But seeing it—the street shut down, full of our trailers, me running up to Jemima with small notes, our whispered huddle, our smiles—reduced this usually stoic man to tears.

“There’s all this money, all this gear, but here you two are, doing what you’ve done together since you were little girls—play pretend.”