Lena Dunham on new Netflix series Too Much, and a role for her favourite Irish actor

Lena Dunham tells Esther McCarthy how she created a character in Too Much especially for the Irish star

Thu, 10 Jul, 2025 - 21:00

Lena Dunham was just 26 when her drama series Girls became a global sensation, heralding her as one of the most exciting new onscreen voices. Its frank and funny account of sex and sexuality in New York City was an audience and critical hit.

Now Dunham is swapping the Big Apple for London in her new series Too Much, a tale partly inspired by finding love in her own life. After meeting and marrying British musician Luis Felber, Dunham has spent much of her time in Britain - and love, sex and culture clashes form the backbone of the Netflix series, which she co-created with her husband.

Aiding and abetting her in the new series is Irish actor Andrew Scott, who has a starring role Too Much and put lead actress Megan Stalter on the radar of Dunham. Scott, who had become a fan of Stalter’s social-media postings, showed them to his pal and told her: she is your soul twin.

“I love Andrew,” says Dunham. “He's a really close friend. He's a brilliant collaborator - we’d worked together on Catherine Called Birdy. He's actually the person who showed me Meg's videos originally, and made me want to work with her.”

Along with high-profile guest stars including Naomi Watts, Richard E Grant, Rhea Perlman and Stephen Fry, the Irish actor appears as a successful but cranky writer-director whose ego needs stoking.

“I wrote this role for Andrew, and just it felt as though he would do an amazing job playing this guy who’s self important and sort of tragic,” says Dunham. “He does an amazing job of being melancholy and hilarious and a total sexist, but also being kind of tender and delicate, and I love him in the show, he just kills me.”

Too Much centres on Jessica (Stalter), a twentysomething reeling following a painful break up with her boyfriend, who’s now dating a stunning influencer (Emily Ratajkowski). Working in TV production, she decides to swap the Big Apple for a job in London, where she meets Felix (Will Sharpe) a musician who may or may not be her Mr Darcy.

While the series is a work of fiction, there are many nods to Dunham’s own experiences - she now spends much of her time in the UK after meeting Felber, who is her co-creator on the series.

“Honestly, when we started working on it, we hadn't been dating for very long,” says Dunham. “I just thought he was so funny. I said: ‘I'm gonna write this show. Will you create the characters with me? Will you be my British eyes that let me know if I'm hitting the notes right?’

“I loved working on it with him. I loved having his voice in it. Most of the characters are not based on people in our lives. But the grain of it, the nucleus of it, did come from our experience of meeting and trying to navigate each other's unique programming.”

Dunham, who had long had an interest in British comedy and culture - she’s a huge fan of Bridget Jones and rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral - felt the culture clash could form the basis of a comedy.

“I was just thinking about the idea of a kind of noisy, intense American woman. I actually think an American woman would probably feel much more at home in Ireland,” she observes, on hearing this writer’s Irish accent.

“There’s an openness and a willingness to play in Irish culture. You're not shocking anyone in Ireland - that's already a part of the sense of humour and the banter. I do have the experience of Irish people as being very playful, very warm, very energetic.

“English people are too when you get there, but it can take a little while to crack the facade. There are a lot of unspoken rules in certain areas of British culture that I just did not have access to. I would do something that I thought was completely normal, like I once said: ‘I have to go pee’. Someone I worked with was like: ‘You know, you don't have to say what you're going to do. You can just say you're going to the ladies room’. I was like, if the image of a woman peeing is this alarming, you don't want to know what's going through my head all day,” she laughs.

“Of course, I've met some really hilarious, bawdy, ballsy British people. A lot of the British people I thought kind of stiff turned out to be hilarious, bawdy and ballsy. It just again took a second, and I felt like there was a lot of code I had to crack. When the idea of it happening via a romantic relationship came in, that's when I really thought: ‘Ok, we’ve got something here’.” The many hilarious episodes that follow indicate that Dunham has another major hit on her hands. There is heart, too - with Too Much, the writer and director leans into the rom-com, a genre she says she loves because its about hope.

“I loved Bridget Jones so much. It was so influential for me. As a teenager, my favourite book was Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, which was like a teenage Bridget Jones.

“Bridget Jones came out at a moment where I was just looking for examples of what adulthood was going to look like - Sex and the City was that for me, and Bridget Jones was that for me. Obviously Sex and the City is very aspirational, although there is so much realism in the female friendship and in the complexity of dating.

Lena Dunham on set during the making of Too Much.

Dunham says the Bridget Jones character felt like a real woman. “I didn't know what stones were, so I didn't understand that she was actually quite thin, quite young, and not eating too many calories. What I think it captures so well is that's not a defect. What it captures so well is when you're a woman in your early 30s, and you don't realise how beautiful you are. You don't realise how special you are. All you see is the candy bar you ate, or the skirt that was too tight, or the person who looked at you strangely at work.

“Nora Ephron has this quote where she says: 'If I'd known what I looked like in a bikini when I was younger, I would not have taken it off until I turned 36'. I feel the exact same way. I'm 39 and I should have been in a bikini full time till three years ago.”

Ephron’s observation leans into, Dunham says, the core element she loves most about rom-coms. “For me, romantic comedies are not about the idea that you need to be in a couple to be a fully formed person. They're really about the idea of self-acceptance and finding someone who accepts you and mirrors you in a way that makes you feel appreciated and lovely."

Dunham stresses that Too Much is not about couplehood being an ideal. “It's about the idea of self acceptance, wherever you find it, and having people who allow you to be yourself in your life. The best rom-coms, whether it's When Harry Met Sally, or Four Weddings and a Funeral, that's really what they're offering, a sense that there is a place in the world for you, and that's really what we wanted to do.”