Lena Dunham opens up on 'nightmare' of early fame: 'I was made to feel my body was unacceptable...'

Bang Showbiz on Apr 30, 2025

Published in Women

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Lena Dunham was made to feel that her body was "unacceptable" in her early days of fame.

The 38-year-old actress found mainstream success when she created, wrote and starred in the HBO series 'Girls' but upon its 13th anniversary on Wednesday (30.04.25), she took to social media to reflect on the "nightmare" that came with being in the spotlight.

She wrote on Instagram: "At 25, you don't realize what a little kid you are (for any 25 year olds reading this, no matter how much you've done or seen, I'm sorry to inform you that you are still very young!) I felt, for all intents and purposes, like I knew my way around- but I was a fawn, shaky on my legs, uncertain on the icy forest floor. The feedback that came at me- at least the feedback I could hear- was about all the ways that young body was unacceptable."

"On the one hand, it was a nightmare because it confirmed everything I thought I knew, affirmed all the 7th grade ghosts living in my head. But it also forced me to accept, swiftly and gratefully, the ways in which to live in a body is to dance constantly with our collective fear and disgust at fallibility, mortality and imperfection. There is almost nothing that scares us more than the truth of what our bodies are, and that- even with all these modern tools- their fate is so often out of our control.

However, the 'Treasure' star eventually became "grateful" for everything as she realised that even though her body has been "an object of scorn", she started to believe that looks are not important.

She said: I didn't know how grateful I would come to be for it all. As a result of my years dabbling in the comments section, the shifts in my human form- aging, illness, scrapes and scars- haven't rattled me like they could have. This body had already been an object of scorn and so the rest of the road smoothed out before me.

"I no longer believed that being thinner, taller, or tanner would save me. No hair mask or control top briefs were coming to fight on my behalf. I was alerted to the fact that the only shield we have is our voice, our art, our dreams, our relationships."