‘Girls’ Postmortem: How Hannah Got Her Surf Groove Back
Warning: This post contains spoilers for the “All I Ever Wanted” episode of Girls.
If Lena Dunham had had her way, her Girls alter ego, Hannah Horvath, would have started her sixth and final season as the Queen of Atlantis. No, we’re not talking about Aquaman’s underwater hometown. In the original draft of the show’s season premiere, “All I Ever Wanted,” which Dunham co-wrote with executive producer Jenni Konner, Hannah was going to parlay the overnight success generated by her New York Times byline into an assignment at the swanky Caribbean resort. “We wrote it for Atlantis and everyone was like, ‘There’s no way in hell you’re doing it in Atlantis,’” Konner tells Yahoo TV. “Atlantis did not want us messing with their families,” Dunham adds, laughing.
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With a Caribbean vacation out, the duo thought of other locations where Hannah could have an up close and personal encounter with that exotic event — exotic to a Brooklynite anyway — known as “surf school.” It’s a story she’s been hired to write for a VICE-like publication that employs snarky editors like guest star Chelsea Peretti, who was among the numerous Times subscribers that devoured Hannah’s account of watching her best friend, Jessa, fall into a torrid love affair with her ex, Adam. Hannah’s specific assignment, as Peretti explains it, is to: “Witness bored rich ladies who are taking surf culture and co-opting it, turning it into some kind of s**tty yoga, which they’ve already ruined.”
So Hannah heads off to a surf school in the East Hampton vacation destination known as Montauk, the beachside location that Girls settled on after Atlantis turned them down and Florida was ruled out due to Zika-related concerns. “The idea of sending her to the beach is because it’s somewhere that Hannah hates,” Konner says. “And the whole concept behind the episode is that Hannah is so cynical and bratty, so what if she went to a place where people were living this simple, positive lifestyle and it had an effect on her?”
And, against the odds, Hannah’s stint in Montauk really does give her a change in attitude. Showing up in town fully intending to throw an endless amount of shade at her surf school experience — especially after experiencing a slew of mishaps that range from stealing another woman’s wetsuit to faking an injury to avoid having to do any more surfing — she ends up achieving a moment of beachside Zen. Her Zen master in that regard is Paul-Louis, an experienced wave rider played by Riz Ahmed who combines the effortless cool of Jan-Michael Vincent in Big Wednesday with the sheer studliness of Patrick Swayze in Point Break. Hannah wastes little time acting on her intense attraction to him, following Paul-Louis back to his bunk after a night of wild partying and too much drinking. “We were obsessed with The Night Of — just a full-on obsession,” Konner says of how they settled on the in-demand British actor for the role, which also awards him the opportunity to show off his rapping skills.
“When I first called Riz, he was like ‘Why are you asking me to do this? What about me makes you think I’d be a chill American surf instructor?’” Dunahm remembers. “And I said, ‘You’re an actor!’ He’s so professional; whether he’s doing a goofy comedy [like this] or a drama like The Night Of, he does his research. And his character ends up being an emotionally significant part of the season.” Take that as a very big hint that we probably haven’t seen the last of Paul-Louis, even if Hannah seemed turned off by the revelation that he has a steady surfer girlfriend who is gainfully employed at — where else? — Atlantis.
While Hannah is off expanding her mind in Montauk, her former boss Ray (Alex Karpovsky) is finding that his options for decent living quarters are steadily shrinking. Although technically Adam’s roommate, Ray’s been seeking refuge in Marnie’s tiny studio apartment due to the overwhelming amounts of sex, not to mention the reheating of fish, that’s going on in his other home. “It’s one of the most repulsive places you’ve ever seen — a boundless hinterland of sexuality,” he complains to his kinda-sorta girlfriend, who isn’t overly keen on having another live-in companion in the wake of her divorce to Desi, but also can’t bring herself to cut Ray out of her life completely.
“To some degree, they’ve both outsiders,” Alex Karpovsky tells us of Ray and Marnie’s intense co-dependency. “And the fact that they’re these marginalized characters is something that bonds them together. Ray’s also getting the girl he could never get: the high school hottie who would never give him the time of day. That feeds an insecurity he has about himself that keeps him coming back [to her].”
Of course, Ray may not keep coming back to her place if he discovers that Marnie and Desi are still seeing each other in the sexual sense. But even that sight might be preferable to seeing Jessa and Adam walking around in the buff again. “We all know each other’s anatomies way more than we probably thought we would six years ago,” Karpovsky jokes about his onscreen roommates’ proclivity for nudity. “That was a really fun scene to shoot. I love how Ray lives in the apartment, but all his s**t is just piled up in the corner and he’s too meek to put up a fight about it. It says so much about the character without him having to do anything. The fact that you can still learn so much about someone after six years by what he doesn’t do is kind of neat.”
Girls airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.
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