Lena Dunham is getting candid about her body again.
The 29-year-old star and creator of HBO's Girls opened up to Jane Fonda, 78, in an interview published in Paper magazine Tuesday. Dunham appears on two covers for the March 2016 issue. In one, she wears a fake mustache. Another cover shows her sporting a platinum blond wig and tank top painted like a woman's bare chest.
Both she and Fonda have something personal in common: They've dealt with body image issues and have been the target of body shaming.
Dunham often appears naked on Girls and plans to continue to strip down on the show despite frequent criticism about her body from strangers on the Internet.
"All the characters I play always dress like they're a size 0 when they're actually a size 10," she said. "Some might call it 'delusional' and I like to think about it as this sort of rocket confidence that's a little unearned but better than the opposite. I think that it was important to me also to announce that 'this is what I look like. I don't have an interest in changing unless it's on my own terms.'"
Lena Dunham is so gross to me how am I suppose to believe that Adam Driver on Girls is into her bc I Cannot?
? Iayna (@Iaynadelrey) February 15, 2016
Lena Dunham?s so fat, her blood type is Ragu.
? Son of Gosselaar (@bfkermit) February 3, 2016
Dunham reveals in her 2014 book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned, that she tried to lose weight just before she first began filming Girls and ended up in the hospital as a result of her excessive dieting and use of laxatives.
"I won't say I'll never lose weight in my life, but it'd have to be for reasons that made sense to me and weren't to try to meet some industry standard," she told Fonda.
"Because how could we not internalize everything that's being thrown at us every day?" she asked.
Fonda, a '60s sex symbol who released a series of popular fitness videos in the '80s, battled bulimia throughout part of her teenage and adult life.
"I grew up with massive body image [issues]," Fonda told Dunham. "My father made me feel that I was fat and unattractive and I don't think he realized how destructive it was and then I watch you and your body is part of your brand and I would like you to talk about that. I feel like you made a conscious decision that you were going to make sexuality and your body part of your brand."
Season five of Girls will premiere on HBO on Feb. 21. Dunham said earlier this month she "won't be out and about doing press" to promote the show as she battles "rough patch" of endometriosis. The Paper interview took place in mid-December.
Endometriosis is a chronic and often painful disorder affecting many women, in which abnormal tissue grows outside the uterus. Many of those who suffer from it also have fertility problems.
Dunham told Fonda she had often told longtime boyfriend and musician Jack Antonoff that she is getting to the point where she wants to have children.
"I have endometriosis, and I've said to my boyfriend, 'If fertility ends up being a challenge for me, I'm not gonna be the person who spends six years in IVF' because while I'm really intrigued by the possibility of carrying a child in my body, and I don't judge anyone else's choices, for me, years and years of hormones and body manipulation wouldn't work for my psychology and my body and it's not important enough to me that my child come out of my body and it's not important to me, really at all, that the child belonged to Jack and me on a genetic level," she said."