Why are women such beasts to each other?

They’re not. Women are the best supports in my life. Women are a woman’s best friend. But I do think women are so used to being pitted against each other by the media that they start to perpetuate it for themselves. At a certain point, girl-on-girl violence is systemically learned. And it’s not that women want to be in catfights; if you grow up surrounded by hate, you’re gonna hate; if you grow up with parents who hit you, you might hit your children; if you grow up in a media that tells you that other women are your enemies, and that the best way to insult them is to assail their personal lives and their bodies, that’s what you’re going to do. Twitter is the worst. I’d rather have a knife fight in an alley than have a fight on Twitter.

You must cry a great deal.
I have my moments: if I’m tired, or I’ve forgotten to eat, or if I’m sick – then my guard is down. But for the most part, I love my job and I love the people that I work with. I also recognise that being able to criticise and reject things is part of the freedom of speech our country was founded upon. People have to be allowed to be critical and I have to be allowed to ignore it. How exhausting would it be to fight back at all of that? Instead, you can just keep moving forward.

But seriously, what has been the nastiest thing anyone has said to you? Dredge it up! Really FEEL IT.
That would be when I’ve tweeted about my pro-choice beliefs. The fact is that a lot of antichoice people in the US speak in fairly violent terms and talk about how you’re going to go to hell. I’ve had people say, “I hope you get ovarian cancer, I hope you die.” It’s so weird, because you’re like, “Who would say that to another human being?” And if your position is that we all deserve to live and that all of us have a right to life, then why would you wish cancer upon me? It goes against everything that they believe in.

Well, that’s just AWFUL. What can be done?
I actually just read an article about Mary Beard, she’s incredible; she has been fighting back against all her trolls on Twitter. The thing is, you can’t diss a brilliant classicist who understands the history of the universe, because she’ll have an amazing diss from, like, 1492 for you, and you’ll look like an idiot. Social media is weird because there’s a beautiful way that it creates community yet it also allows people in an anonymous form to say the most horrid, vile things. You go, “Really? A human being wrote this? Not some disgusting robot created by Hitler?” You just have to recognise it for what it’s good for and realise that you could write, “I love kitties and bunnies” and someone would write back, “Slut.”

But you always try your hardest to be a sweetie, don’t you Lena? Don’t you? You do try!
Totally. Even when a female journalist writes something negative about me, I really try to avoid lashing back because all it does is add fuel to this broken media culture about female friendship. What the press want to find is a picture of two women rolling their eyes at each other, and they’re not going to get it from me. I guarantee that if you read a quote that’s me throwing shade at another woman, that it was f*cking twisted, because that’s just not how I operate. And believe me, I have plenty of terrible thoughts within the privacy of my own home and my own mind, but that’s where they should stay! One of the things I’ve tried to do with Girls is show that women can be jealous of each other, they can take issue with each other, but at the end of the day, they need each other. Those friendships are the strongest bonds they’re ever going to have in their lives. The guys come and go but the girls are there to stay, those are the relationships that really matter.

So what’s up with all those ‘hos’ on Girls?
They’re each taking the next step in their lives, be it a relationship or be it professionally. They’re going from their obsession with each other to actually figuring out what their next step will be, and they’re making some more mature choices. But what they’re realising is, that just because you make the right choice, doesn’t mean you’re going to get the right result.

Are you always going to make angsty work about women living in Brooklyn? Cuz it’s sort of like, um, give it a rest already.
People make this assumption that the first thing you make is the only kind of thing you’re ever going to make. But I love history, I love politics, I love many, many genres of film, so for me, I’m always planning to just tell stories. They will all have a kernel of emotional truth that I’ll connect to, but I’m thrilled at the idea of doing a period piece, for example. I don’t think everything I'm going to make is going to be, you know, 20-something women in Brooklyn, then 30-something women in Brooklyn, because I would get bored.

Lena interviews Lena and talks trolling, hos and therapy