Lena Dunham Describes ‘Girls’ Intern Malia Obama as an ‘Angel’
“We weren’t like making her go get our coffee,” Dunham said. “But she wanted to do all the jobs. That was the cool thing.”
Former First Daughter Malia Obama is paving her own path, away from politics, in the film industry — beginning with her 2015 internship on HBO’s “Girls.”
What’s it like having the child of the commander-in-chief working for you? As Lena Dunham told Howard Stern on Monday, Obama wasn’t exactly fetching Starbucks for her staff.
Calling the future Harvard co-ed “an angel,” Dunham explained how Obama got the gig.
“She was interested, and she was interning at HBO, and they thought, ‘What if she comes a couple days a week to the set of “Girls”?’ She loved the show, and I mean, obviously, we weren’t like making her go get our coffee,” Dunham said. “But she wanted to do all the jobs. That was the cool thing.”
Still, she couldn’t watch any of the HBO hit’s unvarnished nudity.
“Does President Obama call you and say, ‘Look, this is something she’s doing, maybe don’t do the graphic sex scene?'” Stern asked.
“No, but we actually, because of her age at the time, we couldn’t do the graphic sex scenes around her if we wanted to,” said Jenni Konner, the “Girls” showrunner and Dunham’s production partner.
“She is so smart,” Dunham added. “I once asked her, ‘What’s your favorite movie?’ and she was like, ‘Well, do you want me to list by my favorite director, actor, or cinematographer?’ And I was like, ‘You are smarter than me, let’s just be done with that.'”
Dunham was a vocal surrogate for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who lost to Donald Trump in November’s contentious election.
“Will you let Barron Trump intern?” Stern joked of the conservative real estate mogul’s 10-year-old son.
“Honestly, Jenni and I are very against — we would never do any Barron shaming, and it remains to be seen. Barron Trump may be a wild Planned Parenthood advocate, and he and I may join forces in the future,” Dunham joked. “You never know.”
After five seasons and two Emmy wins, “Girls” will end its run this year.
“Why leave?” Stern asked of Dunham’s decision to end the series after Season 6.
“We had this very lucky thing that we never expected, which was that people talked about the show all the time, whether they liked it, whether they hated it. That’s how you and I met: You were sounding off on this sort of cultural phenomenon that was the show, and we were always pushing ourselves,” she explained. “We were never resting on our laurels and kind of always trying to do something new every single week. … I think that we really felt like we had this amazing opportunity to have had five years of constant conversation and engaged audiences on both sides of the aisle, and that we wanted to quit while we were ahead.”
“I get that,” Stern said. “Sometimes you go, ‘You know what, I just want to go out on top.'”
“I don’t want it to be like the 10th season, and we were all like dragging around strollers, and nobody cared,” Dunham quipped. “It was a story about our twenties, and I started writing it when I was 23, we shot the last season when I was 30. That kind of perfectly aligns with what the story of the show is.”
The final season of “Girls” premieres Sunday on HBO.
