Girls star Andrew Rannells says he spent so much time focusing on himself that he inadvertently steered clear of the Emmy-winning HBO show’s biggest on-set drama.
“Maybe I’m selfish, or maybe I’m self-centered,” Rannells, 47, admitted on Obsessed: The Podcast. “But I didn’t really have that much interaction, so I don’t really think about it that much.”
In her new memoir, Famesick, Girls creator Lena Dunham alleged that co-star Adam Driver, 42, had acted aggressively towards her on set, throwing a chair and punching a wall near her head on separate occasions. Dunham, 40, also alleged that he went off-script during “carefully blocked” sex scenes, hurling her body “this way and that.”
Rannells, who starred as Dunham’s character Hannah’s gay best friend, Elijah, in the HBO comedy for six seasons, has dodged loaded media questions about the allegations by tapping into his own self-centeredness.
“I was so focused on what was happening with me,” the Book of Mormon Grammy winner confessed. “That’s such a terrible thing to say, but it actually is true.”
“Adam was off doing a million other things, and we didn’t really have that many scenes together. He’s always been really great with me,” Rannells said, who guessed they had just two scenes together across the entire show. “It’s not like doing a play where you’re backstage together. You just don’t see each other.”
With the whirlwind of drama surrounding his Girls co-star, Rannells attempted to create some controversy of his own.
In an interview with Andy Cohen, the actor revealed that he had tried to spread rumors of an affair between him and Driver, but they never gained any traction. He redoubled his efforts on Obsessed: The Podcast.
“Adam and I were f---ing the entire time,” he sarcastically declared. “I was f---ing Adam Driver for the entire six years. Let’s share that. I mean, that’s the truth.”
In his new film with Allison Janney, 66, Miss You, Love You, Rannells has enjoyed moving away from the large, drama-filled ensemble casts of his previous projects.
“For myself, I’ve been a part of mostly ensemble stuff. I’ve never been the lead of anything, and she felt the same way,” he said of the Oscar winner.
To avoid distractions while filming with The West Wing star, Rannells said they shot the movie like a large-scale theater production.
“We felt like we should just learn it like a play, and then do it that way,” he said. “We could do whole stretches of dialogue, pages and pages, we could do it at one time. And it really freed us up to find a lot of things that maybe we wouldn’t have if we were like grappling with, ‘How do we do this?’ and ‘What’s my next line?’”
In the new HBO film that focuses on the unlikely pair grappling with overwhelming grief, Rannells still returned to his Girls roots, where he was often shirtless.
“In other times, I would have thought about the shirtless part a little more specifically. With this one, I felt like this is a character who is probably not so concerned about the shirtless part,” he said.
For similar scenes in Girls, which he notes were “frequent,” Rannells would “not drink water” and “do crunches the day before” his big scenes.
“With this one, I was like, well, he’s probably not like that concerned about that. He’s still doing pretty well for himself,” he said.
Miss You, Love You streams on HBO Max on May 29.
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