Why Lena Dunham 'broke up with New York' and made London her home

Yahoo

08-07-2025

Lena Dunham made her name with New York-set sitcom Girls, and at the height of the show's success she seemed to embody everything about living in the city. But now, the writer, director and actor has moved to the UK, swapping NYC for London.
Her new show for Netflix, Too Much, takes inspiration from her own move across the pond, casting Megan Stalter as heartbroken New Yorker Jessica looking for a fresh start in London. She soon crosses paths with musician Felix (Will Sharpe) and finds communicating with a Brit holds a whole new set of problems.
But what was behind Dunham's own move to the UK as a born-and-bred New Yorker?
In May, Dunham wrote about her reasons for "breaking up with New York" in The New Yorker, opening up on how, from childhood, she had found the city's busyness anxiety-inducing. Although her parents loved the city, she admitted she had never felt at home despite having written and starred in Girls, a series where her character Hannah believes she'll find her true self there.
She wrote of Girls: "The irony was that the series cemented me, in the minds of everyone I met, as a New York girl through and through. How could they have known that the safest I'd ever felt in New York was either hiding under the covers or pretending to be someone else under klieg lights?"
Dunham spent some time living in Wales but eventually migrated to London, where she says she was won over by the spaciousness compared to her home town. She wrote: "Three decades of urban sense memory cleared, as if I had woken up to a system upgrade and damaged files had been erased in the process."
Adding that "London is my home now", she said that despite some similarities, London does not "jangle" her in the same way.
The move to London was never supposed to be permanent - Dunham expected to leave after a work project ended - but she met her now-husband, Luis Felber, after a mutual friend set them up on a blind date and realised she did not want to take him away from his life in London.
In another interview with The New Yorker, Dunham claimed that she fitted in perfectly in England because she is uncomfortable with receiving compliments and "I don't like having 'Happy Birthday' sung to me".
Dunham's husband is British-Peruvian musician Luis Felber, who she met in 2021 just after coming to London for a filming project.
She was in the UK making the film Catherine Called Birdy, starring Bella Ramsey, when she was introduced to Felber and they worked together on the film's soundtrack. Dunham also shot the music video for one of Felber's songs recorded during lockdown.
Felber is one of the founders of the label and club night Young Turks, and has performed as part of various bands and groups, as well as under the name Attawalpa.
They made the Netflix sitcom Too Much together, inspired by their own romance.
Although Dunham knew she didn't want to star in another TV show she'd written, Too Much takes plenty of inspiration from her own experiences of moving from New York to London and falling in love with a Brit.
She told Netflix: "When I first started coming to the UK for work… I thought to myself, 'I want to write something about the experience of being a foreigner here, and the fantasies we have of [London] versus the realities'. Then when I met my husband, Luis, I felt like I was experiencing all of that, but in the context of a relationship."
However, while Dunham does have a small part in the show, she isn't the lead, explaining that she was "just not up for having my body dissected again" after her experience of fame on Girls.
Asked by The New Yorker whether comparisons would be drawn between her real life and Too Much, she replied: "Totally. I can't escape it. It's about an American woman in London who has had a bad breakup in New York and is confused, meeting a recovering punk musician and trying to figure out if they can make a life together. It's not a huge leap. But I knew from the very beginning I would not be the star of it."
Too Much begins streaming on Netflix on Thursday, 10 July.