14 DAY TRIAL // Taylor Swift partly recreated her star-studded “Bad Blood” music video in concert a few nights ago, when she asked her good friends Gigi Hadid, Lily Aldridge, Hailee Steinfeld and Lena Dunham to join her on stage. That was the first and last time Lena put herself in this position, she says in an interview with Judd Apatow for Cosmopolitan magazine.
Gigi and Lily are famous models. Taylor and Hailee are not, but they could definitely pass for models if you got them up on the catwalk. Oppositely, Lena is short and chubby, and though she’s quite body-confident, seeing herself next to these 4 women was a self-esteem hit below the belt.
Lena is regular-looking and she’s ok with it
Speaking with Apatow, the writer, creator and star of the “Girls” series says that she never felt so out of place among her friends as she did when she was up on that stage. Obviously, she knew that they were tall and slender and that she wasn’t, but she didn’t imagine the contrast between them would be so striking.
“I shan't be walking that runway again,” Lena says. “I've been feeling pretty tall, feeling pretty sturdy, and it was amazing to me, like, ‘Oh, I'm not tall, I'm chubby.’ It's different. But I mean, on most days, I feel really great and fine about my body, but I don't think standing next to, like, three supermodels or so is anything even the most confident woman needs to do. And when I socialize with those women, which I've done a little bit, because they're good friends of Taylor's, who is a good friend of mine, I don't feel so strange. But the minute I caught sight of myself in the Jumbotron, I knew something was very wrong.”
Her boyfriend even made one of the photos snapped on the occasion into a screensaver for her computer, because he finds the contrast hilarious. Lena does so too, but she didn’t at that moment.
She believes celebrities as beautiful as her 3 friends or the Brad Pitts and the Chris Hemsworths of the world are like “aliens” and no mere mortal should compare to them, or want to stand by their side for a comparison shot.
Lena the (controversial) truth-teller
“Girls” is a hit series on HBO and the media attention it’s been receiving since premiere has turned Lena Dunham into a bonafide star.
However, Lena doesn’t look like a star, in that she’s nothing like you’d expect from a celebrity: she’s short, she’s “chubby” (her word, not ours), she’s not conventionally attractive, she has a quirky fashion sense and you can tell she doesn’t travel with a glam squad.
She’s also an outspoken feminist and LGBT supporter, and is not afraid to have an opinion and make it public.
Depending on who you ask, Lena is either a truth-teller and the kind of woman Hollywood needs more of, or an annoying brat who’s riding the feminist / activism train to get the most media attention for her show.
She does have a point though about how standing next to Taylor Swift and her supermodel posse could make any woman feel bad about herself, doesn’t she?
