While Lena Dunham has had her fair share of troubles, there's no doubt that she's one of the most successful young women in Hollywood. Although, part of her success has to do with talking about her real-life struggles and putting them into an artistic format.
This is not unlike Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm creator Larry David, who's taken some of his real-life embarrassments and put them into his sitcoms. For Lena, HBO's Girls has been the highlight of her career, so far at least.
The show, which ran for six seasons, made her both a star and an A-list writer/director/producer. This makes it all the more ironic that HBO actually fired her from another show before her Girls days. Here's what happened.
Being Fired From Mildred Pierce
Lena has spoken about being fired from Mildred Pierce, an HBO mini-series on a couple of occasions. Most famously, she went into detail about the show in an interview with Bill Simmons as well as on The Howard Stern Show in February 2017.
"It's an amazing success, as far as I'm concerned, for somebody your age when you think about it," Howard Stern told Lena Dunham, one of the celebrities he once fought with but has since become friendly with.
Howard went into detail about Lena's career while interviewing her. He spoke about how she started out making student films, including Tiny Furniture which ultimately won her a job with Girls. But at the same time, she was doing a little bit of acting on the side.
"But there was a point when you got a role on an HBO series," Howard said, leading Lena into the story about being fired.
"I believe you're talking about Mildred Pierce," Lena said, immediately becoming embarrassed.
For those who don't know, Mildred Pierce was a 2011 mini-series based on James M. Cain's novel and starred Kate Winslet.
"You said it was such a disaster that you were on Mildred Pierce and you were shooting a scene and while they had you out there doing the scene, you heard them auditioning other people," Howard said to Lena and his massive SiriusXM audience.
"They auditioned extras and I was sent home," Lena admitted. "The funny thing is, the producer ended up producing, Ilene Landress, ended up as a producer of Girls. The person who was downstairs auditioning other people for my part ended up as a producer on our show."
Howard asked Lena why in the world she would ever hire Ilene Landress as a producer on her show after she did something like that to Lena. But Lena said that she really didn't know what was going on back on the set of Mildred Pierce. This is because it was her very first set that she was ever on aside from the ones inside her own house.
Why Was Lena Fired In The First Place?
Of course, the next logical question is to ask why Lena was fired in the first place.
"I show up that morning. They put me in hair and makeup as a nurse from the 1930s and the big problem that [director] Todd Haynes, one of my favorite filmmakers, had only seen me audition for a different role," Lena explained, saying that he actually wanted someone else for the nurse role and that actor was unavailable, so he ended up being stuck with her.
So, already the cards were stacked against Lena. Things weren't looking good.
"I showed up. I had no idea what [I was doing]. I had asked my mom for advice, which was the worst idea. And I said, 'Look at these lines with me.' And she said, 'They're hiring you to be yourself. Just go there and be yourself.'"
"No, they are hiring you to be someone else," Howard laughed.
"They're hiring you to be a nurse from the f***ing 1940s."
The result was Lena reading lines that were meant for a completely different time period in the same voice and mannerisms as you see her do as Hannah Horvath on Girls.
It just didn't work... In fact, it was downright atrocious given the context of what Mildred Pierce was.
Initially, a dialect coach was brought in to help her, but as soon as this happened, this actually terrified her. The result was Lena completely shutting down.
"'Fired' might be [a] rough [word] but I got sweetly dismissed from the one day I acted on Mildred Pierce," Lena Dunham said to Bill Simmons in 2014. "They told me it was a three-day shoot and halfway through the first day, they were like, 'We got what we needed!'"