‘I was terrified back then ... I could be present this time’

‘Girls’ launched Lena Dunham and she's back with rom-com ‘Too Much’. Ellie Harrison talks to the writer, plus lead stars Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe, about a London-set love tale

- Ellie Harrison

Lena Dunham’s parents were telling her to be quiet long before the rest of the world was. “Bless them,” she says, “they didn’t want to say, ‘Can you please shut up?’ So they would say sotto voce because they thought it sounded nicer in Italian, which, to be fair, it did.”

Later, 23 and scarcely an adult, Dunham conceived Girls, the era-defining HBO comedy about a quartet of dysfunctional friends in Brooklyn who were stumbling through their twenties and trying to find themselves. At the centre of it all was Dunham’s aspiring writer Hannah Horvath. “I have work, then a dinner thing, and then I am busy trying to become who I am,” she’d tell her parents in the very first episode.

The show was unflinchingly interested in the mess of youth: the arrogance, the terrible sex, the first abortions, the health anxiety - the lot. And because of its honesty, it was adored and attacked with equal zeal. Some tried to silence Dunham then, too. She was too vulgar, too candid, too naked. Simultaneously too woke and too narrow-minded.

Now, Dunham is 39. Girls ended almost a decade ago. And after an intensive metamorphosis - where she’s experienced everything from prescription drug addiction and chronic illness to a transatlantic move and finding love - she has emerged as a woman, an auteur, who is all grown up. And she can be as loud as she wants.

Next week, Dunham will unveil her much-anticipated return to television. It’s called, almost inevitably, Too Much - two words she’s been hearing all her life. “It happens to women,” she says. “It’s about your appetite for food, your appetite for life, your wants, your needs, your desires, and it comes in lots of forms, whether you're told you're ‘too much’ or ‘messy’ or ‘needy’ or ‘a lot’. What’s ironic is that calling someone ‘too much’ is a really easy way to diminish them.”