Lena Dunham drops out of ‘Polly Pocket’ film — refuses to have ‘body dissected again’ in Netflix show
She’s out of pocket.
Lena Dunham, 38, revealed in a new interview with the New Yorker that she is no longer attached to Mattel’s “Polly Pocket” movie.
“I’m not going to make the Polly Pocket movie,” Dunham told the outlet. “I wrote a script, and I was working on it for three years. But I remember someone once said to me about Nancy Meyers: the thing that’s the most amazing about her is that the movie she makes or the movie she would be making with or without a studio, with or without notes — that somehow her taste manages to intersect perfectly with what the world wants. What a f–king gift that is. And Nora Ephron, too, who was such a mentor to me, but always said, ‘Go be weird. Don’t kowtow to anyone.’”
The film was announced in 2021 with “Emily in Paris” lead Lily Collins set to star, with Dunham writing and directing. The movie is one of Mattel’s follow-ups to the smash hit “Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
“I think Greta [Gerwig] managed this incredible feat [with ‘Barbie’], which was to make this thing that was literally candy to so many different kinds of people and was perfectly and divinely Greta,” Dunham said.
“And I just — I felt like, unless I can do it that way, I’m not going to do it. I don’t think I have that in me. I feel like the next movie I make needs to feel like a movie that I absolutely have to make. No one but me could make it. And I did think other people could make ‘Polly Pocket.’”
Instead of that movie, Dunham is moving on to two Netflix projects.
She’s got one series called “Too Much,” which is an autobiographical rom-com starring Megan Stalter. It follows a New York woman who moves to London after a breakup and meets a musician (played by “The White Lotus” star Will Sharpe). Emily Ratajkowski will also cameo.
Her second series with the streamer is about a group of college students who get recruited to join spy agencies.
Dunham told the outlet that she’s not casting herself as the lead, the way she did on her HBO show “Girls,” which ran from 2012 to 2017, starring Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Adam Driver.
“I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around ‘Girls’ at this point in my life,” she said.
In 2022, Dunham told the Guardian that the public response to her naked body in that show “was a trauma all of its own,” adding, “I wasn’t hit with the signal that I was not ‘correctly formed’ until the public really let me know … All of that feedback contributed to the formation of self. And I stopped being a person that I liked.”
During a 2014 panel at the Television Critics Association, a reporter from the Wrap asked Dunham why she was always naked on “Girls” — “at random times for no reason” — to which Dunham replied, “[It’s] a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive. But I totally get it. If you’re not into me, that’s your problem and you’re going to have to work that out with professionals.”
“Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again. It was a hard choice, not to cast Meg [Stalter] — because I knew I wanted Meg — but to admit that to myself,” Dunham said.
She added: “I used to think that winning meant you just keep doing it and you don’t care what anybody thinks. I forgot that winning is actually just protecting yourself and doing what you need to do to keep making work.”
