She’s out of pocket.
Lena Dunham, 38, revealed in a new interview with The New Yorker that she is no longer attached to Mattel’s “Polly Pocket” movie.
“I’m not going to make the Polly Pocket movie,” Dunham said. “I wrote a script, and I was working on it for three years. But I remember someone once said to me about Nancy Meyers: the thing that’s the most amazing about her is that the movie she makes or the movie she would be making with or without a studio, with or without notes — that somehow her taste manages to intersect perfectly with what the world wants. What a f–king gift that is. And Nora Ephron, too, who was such a mentor to me, but always said, ‘Go be weird. Don’t kowtow to anyone.’”
The film was announced in 2021 with “Emily in Paris” lead Lily Collins starring, and Dunham writing and directing. The movie is one of Mattel’s follow ups to the smash hit “Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
“I think Greta [Gerwig] managed this incredible feat [with ‘Barbie’], which was to make this thing that was literally candy to so many different kinds of people and was perfectly and divinely Greta,” Dunham said.
“And I just — I felt like, unless I can do it that way, I’m not going to do it. I don’t think I have that in me. I feel like the next movie I make needs to feel like a movie that I absolutely have to make. No one but me could make it. And I did think other people could make ‘Polly Pocket.’”
Instead of that movie, Dunham is moving on to two Netflix projects.
She’s got one series called “Too Much,” which is an autobiographical rom-com starring Megan Stalter. It follows a New York-based woman who moves to London after a break up, and meets a musician (played by “The White Lotus” star Will Sharpe). Emily Ratajkowski will also cameo.
Her second series with the streamer is about a group of college students who get recruited to join spy agencies.
Dunham told the outlet that she’s not casting herself as the lead, the way she did on her HBO show “Girls.”
“I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around ‘Girls’ at this point in my life,” Dunham said.
“Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again. It was a hard choice, not to cast Meg [Stalter] — because I knew I wanted Meg — but to admit that to myself.”
Dunham added, “I used to think that winning meant you just keep doing it and you don’t care what anybody thinks. I forgot that winning is actually just protecting yourself and doing what you need to do to keep making work.”
