Adam Driver Shuts Down Lena Dunham Memoir Question at Cannes

Adam Driver had exactly four words for anyone hoping he’d weigh in on Lena Dunham’s memoir — and they landed with a laugh.

At the Cannes press conference for his new film Paper Tiger, the two-time Oscar nominee was asked about the pointed claims Dunham made about him in her book Famesick. His response? “I have no comment on any of that. I’m saving it all for my book.” The room erupted.

It was the kind of answer that’s hard to argue with — and even harder to follow up on.

What Dunham Actually Wrote

The claims in Famesick are not minor. Dunham, who cast Driver in her HBO series Girls — the role that first put him on the map — describes a complicated, often unsettling dynamic between the two during the show’s run. In one of the book’s more striking passages, she recounts a late-night line rehearsal in her trailer that turned volatile.

“I found that mine were suddenly gone,” she writes of her lines. “I knew I’d written them. I’d known them only minutes before. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer — until finally, Adam screamed, ‘FUCKING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’”

She also alleges he punched a hole in his trailer wall on another occasion, and describes him as someone who “could be short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing.”

But the portrait she paints isn’t entirely dark. Dunham writes that despite all of it, she and Driver “still felt like partners” during the first season, that she came to him for advice on decisions “that weren’t his to make,” and that she spent an “inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me.” “He could also be protective, loving even,” she wrote. The memoir also touches on an almost-moment between the two — a night when she’d told him he could come over while his now-wife Joanne Tucker was out of town, then pretended to be asleep when he actually showed up, fearing what crossing that line would cost her professionally and emotionally. Driver called her a month later to say he was engaged. They never spoke of it again.

Scarlett Johansson Has Nothing But Good Things to Say

While Driver stayed tight-lipped, his Paper Tiger costar Scarlett Johansson was a little more forthcoming — and her take was glowing.

“I love Adam as a person, and he is an absolutely extraordinary actor,” Johansson told People back in September 2025. “If I could make every movie with Adam Driver, I would.”

She echoed that warmth ahead of the Cannes premiere, telling The Hollywood Reporter that she would’ve loved even more scenes with him on this one. “I love working with him,” she said simply.

The two have history together — they played a divorcing couple in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, a film that gave us one of the most viscerally intense fight scenes in recent memory. Driver’s character punches a hole through a wall. Johansson’s character screams. It’s brutal and brilliant, and apparently took two full days to shoot. “It was exhausting,” Johansson told As If magazine in 2019. “But if I didn’t have as strong an actor as Adam to take all the stuff I was giving him, I would have been lost.”

That scene has since taken on a life of its own — the U.S. Department of Agriculture reportedly used footage from it to scare off a pack of gray wolves that had been terrorizing an Oregon farm’s livestock, according to the Wall Street Journal. When Johansson heard about it, her reaction was perfectly on-brand: “I’m glad we could be useful!”

Paper Tiger Is Already a Cannes Contender

In Paper Tiger, Driver and Johansson aren’t playing a couple — that role goes to Johansson and Miles Teller, who play Hester and Irwin Pearl, a happy family in 1980s New York whose lives unravel when Irwin accidentally witnesses Russian mob activity. Driver plays Gary, Irwin’s former-cop brother, who tries to broker a deal and only pulls everyone deeper into danger.

Johansson had warm words for Teller too, describing him as “so unexpectedly tender” on set. “I went away for a couple of weeks to do the press for Jurassic — I felt crazy to leave, but I had to go — and when I was gone, I’d get photographs of my makeup station from Miles, and he’d be like, ‘Where’s Hester?’”

The film is directed by James Gray, for whom Cannes is practically a second home — Paper Tiger is his sixth world premiere at the festival. It received a standing ovation at its Saturday night premiere, with reports ranging from seven to ten minutes of applause — either way, considerably longer than the reception for his last Cannes film, Armageddon Time, in 2022. Neon has already acquired U.S. distribution rights.

As for Driver’s book — well, we’ll be waiting on that one.