• Adam Driver deflected questions about Lena Dunham’s memoir at the Cannes press conference for Paper Tiger
• Dunham’s memoir Famesick claims Driver was “verbally aggressive” and once hurled a chair at a wall near her on the Girls set
• Paper Tiger, directed by James Gray and co-starring Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, received a standing ovation at its premiere
• Johansson has publicly praised Driver, saying she’d make every movie with him if she could

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.

The post Adam Driver Shuts Down Lena Dunham Memoir Question at Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• Lena Dunham returned to the Met Gala for the first time since 2019, serving on this year’s host committee
• She wore a custom red sequin-and-feather Valentino gown designed by Alessandro Michele, inspired by Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi
• The look is meant to represent blood splatter from the painting “Judith Slaying Holofernes” — yes, really
• Dunham’s return comes weeks after the release of her memoir Famesick, in which she detailed her turbulent past Met Gala experiences
• She and Nicole Kidman accidentally twinned in red sequins and feathers — Kidman in Chanel, Dunham in Valentino

Lena Dunham made her return to the Met Gala steps Monday night, and she did not come quietly. The Girls creator, 39, hit the carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a head-to-toe red custom Valentino gown — strapless, sequin-covered, draped in feathers from neckline to train, with a thigh-high slit and a pair of matching strappy Rockstud heels that felt like a full-on love letter to the 2010s. Bold doesn’t quite cover it.

The look was designed by Valentino’s Alessandro Michele, and the inspiration behind it is… a lot. Dunham told Vogue she wrote Michele a “long, elaborate fan letter” to secure the collaboration — and it worked. The two landed on Artemisia Gentileschi’s Baroque masterpiece Judith Slaying Holofernes as their jumping-off point, which Dunham described as her vision for the “Costume Art” theme. But Michele didn’t go the obvious route.

“I shared that inspiration with Alessandro,” Dunham told Vogue, “but because his brain works in the most magical ways, rather than leaning into the Renaissance garments or the swords or any of it, he was attracted to a particular blood spatter on the neck of Holofernes.”

So the gown — the miles of red sequins, the dramatic feathers grazing her chin — is meant to be the blood. Dunham herself confirmed it. Make of that what you will.

The reaction has been mixed, to put it kindly. Critics have pointed out that the design follows a frustrating pattern of dressing plus-size women in heavily embellished, feather-heavy silhouettes that prioritize spectacle over shape. Valentino had a rough night overall at the 2026 gala — the house also dressed Tessa Thompson (in a Yves Klein-inspired blue), Colman Domingo (a Basquiat reference), and Tyla (peacock-inspired), with varying degrees of success. Thompson, for what it’s worth, was widely credited with making her look work through sheer force of charisma.

Dunham, for her part, completed the ensemble with a pink-and-red polka dot manicure, a half updo, and understated makeup — letting the dress do the talking, for better or worse. The Rockstud slingback pumps she wore — platinum pyramid studs, squared toe, inspired by Roman bugnato architecture — are from Valentino’s pre-fall 2026 collection, a silhouette that’s been quietly making its comeback (Anne Hathaway wore them for The Devil Wears Prada 2 press; Dakota Johnson wore them to Valentino’s spring 2026 couture show). On Dunham’s foot at the Met? Firmly back in the conversation.

The Accidental Twin Moment Nobody Planned

Here’s the thing nobody saw coming: Dunham and Nicole Kidman showed up in nearly identical looks. Kidman, one of this year’s co-chairs, wore Chanel — also red sequins, also feathers — and the two were side-by-side in the cultural conversation all night despite never actually walking the carpet together. Kidman arrived early, as co-chairs do, alongside her daughter Sunday Rose Kidman Urban. The matching was entirely unplanned, which somehow makes it more entertaining.

The 2026 Met Gala, co-chaired by Kidman, Beyoncé, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour — with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as honorary chairs — centered on the exhibition “Costume Art,” curated by Andrew Bolton to explore the relationship between clothing and the body. The dress code: “Fashion Is Art.” Dunham’s spot on the host committee, alongside Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Angela Bassett, Zoë Kravitz, and others, made her return feel official — a full-circle moment for someone who grew up visiting the Met every Sunday with her family.

“Of all the places I’ve felt amazed to be in my life, the Met after dark on the first Monday in May is right at the top,” she wrote on Instagram back in December when her committee role was announced. “I love this theme — feels like it was tailor made for my passions, focused on the intersection of art and the body, and all the versions of what a fashionable body can be.”

What the Memoir Revealed About Her Complicated Relationship With This Night

The comeback carries real weight. In Famesick, her second memoir released April 14, Dunham wrote candidly about her history with the gala — and it’s not exactly a highlight reel.

In 2017, she wore an Elizabeth Kennedy gingham gown and platform combat boots, and was rushed to the emergency room later that night due to an endometriosis flare-up. She spent four days in the hospital. In the book, she describes the moment her father came to collect her: “Leaving the hospital a few days after the ball, my father carrying my gown in a massive trash bag, I saw my own face on the lobby television with a chyron below it, reading: ‘Lena Dunham Rushed to the Hospital From 2017 Met Gala.’ My father looked at it, looked at me, and didn’t say anything except, ‘Well, that happened.'”

Her 2018 attendance was even more surreal. She was on a 28-day leave from a rehab facility in the Berkshires, where she was being treated for a painkiller addiction. “The whole event felt like a fever dream — cameras flashing, people shouting names that weren’t mine, champagne I couldn’t drink circulating like a joke I wasn’t in on,” she wrote. “At midnight, I climbed into a black SUV and drove back to Massachusetts — Cinderella in her pumpkin. They made me drop my dress at the door to my room so they could search it for contraband.”

Her last appearance before this year’s was 2019, when she and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke wore matching Christopher Kane latex dresses for the “Camp: Notes on Fashion” theme. Then the invitations stopped. She wrote in Famesick that she simply “stopped being invited” — and left it there.

The memoir also covers her five-year relationship with Jack Antonoff, claims of erratic behavior from Adam Driver during the Girls years, and the anxiety of running a show while also starring in it. Ahead of its release, she told People what she hoped readers would take away: “I hope that the book makes people feel that whatever unique trip they’re taking, no matter what sort of peaks and valleys it has, that there’s value in it and that out the other side, [they] could feel good and even safe. Because I think there were moments where I imagined that I would never feel safe again, and I want to be able to say to people, I do now.”

Beyond the memoir, Dunham’s Netflix rom-com Too Much premiered last summer, and she’s currently in post-production on Good Sex, starring Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo, due on Netflix later this year.

So yes, the gown is divisive. Yes, the blood-spatter concept is a lot to explain on a red carpet. But after everything Dunham has been through at this particular event — the ER, the rehab leave, the years of not being asked back — showing up in the boldest red dress in the room, on her own terms, as part of the host committee? That part, at least, lands.

The post Lena Dunham Returns to the Met Gala in Blood-Inspired Valentino appeared first on Cream.