Lena Dunham Allison Williams at Television Academy - H 2014
APA sold-out crowd at the Television Academy’s Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre in Los Angeles Thursday night listened in as Lena Dunham, creator and star of HBO’s Girls, took a break from the writers room to speak with co-stars Allison Williams, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke, Andrew Rannells and executive producer Ilene S. Landress about the making of one of the most-talked-about shows on television. As fans eagerly await the season’s penultimate episode, which will air this Sunday, here are 10 fun facts revealed during the event about the inner-world of Girls.
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1. Allison Williams would love to star in Frozen on Broadway.
On the topic of what has been called her “Disney princess voice,” Williams told THR that she is “obsessed with Frozen” and admitted, “I’ve already emailed my agents to say, ‘When they adapt it to Broadway, which is in like 11 years, I’ll probably be too old for Anna, but…!’ ”
2. The most common gift sent to the cast members of Girls is a vibrator.
Williams reported that “vibrators on vibrators on vibrators arrive on set” along with other sorts of sexual paraphernalia. “If I used all the vibrators we got on set, I would die,” stated Dunham.
3. Hannah’s obsessive-compulsive disorder was written into the show when Lena Dunham’s real OCD symptoms cropped up during the shooting of season one.
The responsibility of writing, directing and starring in her show’s first season produced such anxiety that Dunham noticed her old habits were creeping back in. The writers said to her, “let’s use that,” and wrote the issue into Hannah’s storyline.
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4. The London-born Jemima Kirke is often criticized by fans for having a poor British accent.
And when they’re not questioning her accent, they’re approaching her on the street to say, “You look like that girl from Girls,” to which she likes to reply, “Oh really? What’s her name?” until finally admitting it’s her.
5. During the shooting of the Bushwick party scene in season one, real hipsters imitated the extras playing hipsters in order to steal sandwiches and fake beer from the set.
Mamet reflected with a chuckle on how quickly the once lawless-seeming Brooklyn neighborhood has changed since then — so much so that it’s now where she calls home.
6. Lena Dunham was completely wrong in predicting people’s reactions to the episode “One Man’s Trash.”
“My only fear of that episode was that people would be bored, not that it would prove a scandalous thing,” Dunham said. Of course, anyone who saw her on that ping-pong table with Patrick Wilson knows how that turned out.
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7. No two sex scenes on Girls are alike … or smell alike.
Rannells described his sex scene with Allison Williams in season two as “my first time being naked … and that close to a vagina,” to which Williams added that they were at least wearing lotion that smelled like birthday cake. Dunham then interjected, “Not to be disgusting, but when I do sex scenes with Adam Driver, it smells like a men’s locker room.”
8. There is only one criticism Lena Dunham doesn’t think is valid about Girls.
When asked which of the show’s criticisms make sense to her, Dunham replied, “I think all of them make sense” and that “you owe it to yourself and your viewers to take those criticisms seriously.” But she was quick to add, “except the thing about how all our parents are famous,” insisting that being born to two semi-obscure artists did not automatically earn her a show on HBO.
9. Though the season finale is titled “Two Plane Rides,” no one actually gets on an airplane.
Apparently the episode title came from a line of Williams’ that was ultimately cut. When asked, on a scale of 1-10, how worried we should be for the fate of Hannah and Adam, Dunham replied, “You should be at an eight of worried for the characters all the time.”
10. The possibility of a Girls movie lives on.
In light of the upcoming Veronica Mars movie, when asked if Girls will ever see its own theatrical release, Landress responded, “Sure. Why not?” She then added the caveat, “…if Lena and Jenni [Konner] and Judd [Apatow] have something left to say.”
Right now it’s hard to imagine a time when they won’t.
