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‘Girls’ Actress Lena Dunham Gets Support From Cast Over Body Shaming Battle

By Nick Younker
Published on: 13:34 PST, Feb 5, 2017

Girls actress Lena Dunham has gone through a lot of criticism over the last six seasons of her hit HBO dramedy series. But that hasn’t really discouraged her in any way to pursue her craft or to change things about her life. As a matter of fact, Dunham has had a particularly different outlook on how the body shaming has affected her life.

There is an inherent truth to what Lena Dunham really thinks of her role on Girls and how she portrays her character, Hannah. Although most people are used to seeing actors with great bodies portray major characters on a TV show these days, it is a bit of pleasant surprise to see people who look like everyone else does in real life.

That is something that independent films have done for quite some time now and if Lena Dunham has done anything with her career on Girls, she has certainly transcended the medium to be more representative of what real life really looks like and portrayed it very well on the small screen.

When Lena Dunham was at the premiere for the final season of Girls, Entertainment Tonight caught up with her and co-star Andrew Rannells on the red carpet premiere event. The two seemed to have similar opinions on what Lena Dunham endured at the mouths of criticism about her body and they both shared a similar outlook of what it has done to influence their lives.

“I think it was at first surprising to people to see a woman who looked or acted like someone they knew, who didn’t have the sort of sheen or perfection of a television character,” Lena Dunham told ET.

“For some people that was refreshing, for some people it didn’t constitute what they wanted to see on TV.”

There is an inherent truth to what Lena Dunham said at the Girls Season 6 premiere event. American audiences are most certainly presented with a barrage of unrealistic actors on TV shows that have bodies that do not represent what people look like in real life. There is a sensational value to how their characters are made up for the small screen, even if it is just for one episode or one season.

With that being said, if you take someone like Lena Dunham and present her in a show like Girls, with no real filter for how her character behaves, then audiences are going to be exposed to a certain degree of shock value that might drive them to criticize the young actress on social media.

But after six seasons of Girls on HBO, one would think that imperfect look that Lena Dunham brings to the show would no longer shock audiences. The criticisms from fans may have died down, but she still gets body shamed by other celebrities or talking heads on daytime talk shows and news programs. Lena Dunham even has to face such horrible body shaming tactics from magazines and other supermarket tabloids.

“I actually weirdly have a lot of friends that are models who were all like actually would say to me, ‘I’m inspired by the way that you own your own body in this context,'” Lena Dunham said.

“My criticism wasn’t from super fit people… It was from people who had been indoctrinated with a sense of their own body wasn’t worth looking at. I actually have a lot of friends who are models.”

Andrew Rannells also weighed in on the topic in defense of his co-star, Lena Dunham, at the Girls premiere event.

“I was most frustrated by the physical criticism of some of our cast, specifically Lena [Dunham]. That was sort of baffling to me,” Andrew Rannells told ET.

“I found myself getting very defensive on her behalf about it.”

You can catch Lena Dunham in the final season of Girls, which is currently running on premium cable network HBO.

[Featured Image by HBO]

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