Lena Dunham Doesn't Want Playboy to Imagine Her with a Supermodel Body
Completing some sort of weird circle, Lena Dunham is now in Playboy—albeit participating in the 20 Questions feature for their April issue, and she came prepared. Dunham, who recently called the magazine "Kindergarten reading material now," is as comfortable with nudity as ever this season on Girls, even as a self-directed frequent display of her apparently non-standard figure remains a perpetual point of discussion. And guess what? The magazine that has long been synonymous with promoting a certain standard of women's body type asked Lena Dunham to imagine having a perfect body type.
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David Rensin posed the following question to Dunham, which she essentially decided to turn on its head:
Playboy: If you woke up tomorrow in the body of a Victoria’s Secret model, what would you do for the rest of the day?
Dunham: I’d be really disoriented and wonder what had happened in the night. Which enemy had dragged me to the doctor? I don’t think I’d like it very much. There would be all kinds of weird challenges to deal with that I don’t have to deal with now. I don’t want to go through life wondering if people are talking to me because I have a big rack. Not being the babest person in the world creates a nice barrier. The people who talk to you are the people who are interested in you. It must be a big burden in some ways to look that way and be in public. That said, I probably would want to see if I could get free food at restaurants. Then I’d call a doctor and see if she could return me to my former situation.
Dunham has talked about appearing in Playboy before. In a pre-Girls era conversation with fellow indie darling Greta Gerwig for Paper, she said: "...I want to be in Playboy. You get photographed covered in oil and dirt. I would wear underwear but I'd take my top off. I just don't want to show my genitals. It's the same thing: you'd never expect 'this guy' in Playboy." At the time she tweeted:
Dept. of things I knew not to say even while saying them: RT @playboyupdate Lena Dunham ready to go topless for Playboy http://sns.ly/wzcqy1
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) March 21, 2011
Perhaps fulfilling some sort of fantasy (or making some sort of commentary),for her real-life stint in the magazine she posed with a t-shirt usually handed to women who attend Playmate castings.
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Playboy/Autumn de Wilde
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As for the rest of the Playboy interview, there are a number of standard "Lena Dunham Questions" about weird sex, millennials, diversity, and Brooklyn. (She tells Rensin that she wants people to stop asking: "Why are you naked on TV so much?") But when asked about whom she would "dream of directing in a nude scene" she comes up with the fairly disturbing combination of David Strathairn and Rooney Mara. Thanks for that image, Lena.
