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In 2011, Lena Dunham found herself cast in the Kate Winslet-led period drama, “Mildred Pierce.” An amazing platform for a young actor — however, Dunham herself believes that she was doomed from the very beginning. In an interview on The Howard Stern Show, she shared that she hadn’t been the director’s first choice. “He wanted my friend, Merritt Wever, and she was unavailable … Someone went, ‘How about this girl?’ and he was like, ‘Okay, that’s a different chubby girl, that seems fine,'” she recounted. Being second choice was the least of Dunham’s worries, though.
After being cast, Dunham asked her mother, Laurie Simmons, for advice — something she later regretted. Simmons told her, “They’re hiring you to be yourself. Just go there and be yourself.” Here’s the thing: they hadn’t. “They’re hiring you to be a nurse from the f***ing 1940s!” Dunham laughed in retrospect. After sounding a little too much like her Millennial self, a dialect coach was called in, and one of the producers began auditioning extras for her part. “I had true dissociative anxiety. I remember thinking, ‘If I collapse right here, they’ll have to take me home in an ambulance, and that will be better for everyone involved,'” she joked.
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Ultimately, Dunham was featured in the show, briefly. In a clip shared by Huffpost, she can be heard saying, “Temperature is rising, Dr. Collins, it’s 104.” Small wins, right?
