When it comes to celebrity talk Lena Dunham is unusually candid – especially if the subject is Woody Allen
• Lena Dunham
It's a curious thing, in 2014, to listen to a celebrity talk so candidly on subjects – Woody Allen, privilege and race – that an industry of publicists are paid to train the famous to avoid. But Lena Dunham's appearance on WTF with Marc Maron was a long time coming – she is a gift on these kinds of talky podcasts; always over-sharing, never short on opinion or charm – and there was a good deal to pick through, often unprompted, to give listeners a pretty faithful snapshot of Dunham's life at this point.
"What's painful for me is when the attacks become personal," she says, on being labelled "a privileged oppressor" by a college newspaper. "That 'you are a privileged girl. You are a racist. You don't understand real suffering.' Like, that's when it starts to feel like it's ringing in my head and like it's too hard." But Dunham is nothing if not earnest and over-therapised, so most sentences on the subject begin with "I feel like ..." and end with her reassuring listeners that she's "learned so much from this dialogue". It would be annoying if that level of heightened self-awareness wasn't what makes so much of her work so great.
For Dunham, her current level of success involves a lot of nausea, anxious puking "at least once a month" and very specific headaches "on my right frontal lobe". It's all very Woody Allen you think, just as, 35 minutes in, Dunham unexpectedly lets rip.
"In the latest Woody Allen debate I'm decidedly pro-Dylan Farrow and decidedly disgusted with Woody Allen's behaviour," she tells a surprised Maron. "The thing is to look at the actual evidence that exists in the world, which I think strongly suggests that Woody Allen is in the wrong." Whether it does or doesn't exist (and who, really, beyond two people, can ever know) is left unquestioned, with Dunham breezily concluding: "For me, I haven't wanted to watch his movies for a long time, partially because of who I think he is and partially because I think they got really bad." Ballsy, sure. But given the multiple parallels between their work, you can see why Dunham wants to stake her ground.