Photo: Lena Dunham. Credit: Jenny McCarthy / Getty Images
Ben Affleck might be on the cover of our Entertainers of the Year issue, but 2012 wasn’t so bad for Lena Dunham, either. Not only did she make our list of the year’s biggest talents in pop culture — earning a heartfelt tribute from Jon Hamm, who wrote it himself — she also scored an Emmy nomination for her new HBO comedy Girls, nabbed a role in Judd Apatow’s This is 40, signed a $3.5 million book deal, accepted an invitation to the Met Ball, and got the chance to interview her idol Nora Ephron about Ephron’s first movie, This is My Life, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (Pause and take a deep breath to quell any feelings of jealousy.) We spoke with Dunham about what she called “the best year I’ve ever had as a human being.” Here are a few excerpts from that conversation.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Can you talk about the night you interviewed Nora Ephron at BAM? Did she tell you what she thought of Girls?
LENA DUNHAM: She actually watched it early, before it came out, and was awesomely encouraging. But that night at BAM was amazing because she was so insanely generous with her knowledge about the industry, about being a female in the industry, about trying to balance the fact of having children, and being a writer of prose, and being a wife, with the fact that she needed to make movies. For her to talk so openly about that to an audience of young women — I don’t even think she could’ve known what a gift that was. But I have a sense she had an inkling.
