It’s definitely no secret that Lena Dunham puts a lot of herself into her work. Ever since she declared herself “the voice of her generation” on Girls (bold move, but Lena’s full of moves like that), she’s put herself front and center. As both the creator and star of Girls, it’s easy to watch and get confused about how much of the show is Lena, how much is her character Hannah, and how much is some weird in-between mash-up. That line got blurred a lot with Girls, but with Lena Dunham’s new show, Too Much, she’s made it very clear that it’s based on her real life, even though she’s not starring in it herself.
Too Much is “semi-autobiographical” and is based on Lena’s real-life experience moving to London and meeting her husband, Luis Felber. “A girl moves to England. She meets a musician. They fall in love. That was the exoskeleton,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
Lena explained that from that based-in-reality starting point, the rest of the show went “in directions [she] never could’ve dreamed.” But still, I can’t help but look back at what I know about Lena’s real life and compare it to Too Much. And, if my red-string timeline is correct, right before Lena moved to England, she broke up with her longtime partner, Jack Antonoff. And lo and behold, in Too Much, the main character Jessica (Meg Stalter) has a pretty terrible breakup right before she moves to England. So, is Too Much based on Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff? Let’s investigate.
Is Too Much based on a true story?
When did Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff date?
Before I dig into Too Much, a little real-life recap: Lena started dating celeb music producer Jack Antonoff in 2012, and they were really serious for six years, until their breakup in 2018. At the time, Lena wrote about the breakup for Vogue.
“We sat in our shared kitchen of nearly four years and quietly faced each other, acknowledging what nobody wanted to say,” she wrote. “That obsessive connection had turned to blind devotion, and the blinders were coming off to reveal that we had evolved separately (the least shocking reason of all and perhaps the most common). That anger wasn’t sexy or sustainable. That our hearts were still broken from trying so hard to fix it, but no longer uncertain about whether or not we could. The finality nearly killed me.”
Oof, it sounds like it was intense, and honestly, no wonder Lena moved abroad for something new after that. It would also make perfect sense to me if Lena needed to write that breakup into the storylines of Too Much. But, according to Lena, the ex-boyfriend character Zev in Too Much (played by Michael Zegen) is not supposed to be Jack Antonoff. In fact, he’s not supposed to be any one person.
Is Too Much based on Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s relationship?
“That ex-boyfriend is very much an amalgamation of every ex that I’ve had, or that a friend’s had,” Lena told Vanity Fair. “It’s this quotidian acceptance of unkindness that eats away at a person over a long period of time and degrades their sense of self. If someone were to say, ‘Who inspired that character?’ I’d be like, ‘Do you have time for me to give you 42 examples?'”
There’s maybe nothing I would want more than to sit down with Lena and get all the tea on those 42 examples. But, until she hits me up, I guess I can just sit here and do my own investigation.
Even if Zev isn’t supposed to be a carbon copy of Jack, there are a few similarities. Jack works in music, and Zev is a music writer, for one thing. And after Jack and Lena broke up, he started dating model Carlotta Kohl. In Too Much, Zev doesn’t date a model, but he does date an influencer, which is very similar. And that influencer is played by Emily Ratajkowski, who is very famously a model. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or, those are just some of the real-life Jack Antonoff elements that made their way onto the screen in Too Much.
