Lena Dunham and Emily Ratajkowski are joining forces once more for an exciting new Apple TV+ project exploring “female identity and modern motherhood.”
The pair – who previously worked together on Dunham's Netflix hit TV series Too Much – will team up with author Stephanie Danler, whose best-selling debut novel Sweetbitter was also adapted for TV.
Emrata will star in the upcoming series, which will arguably be her biggest role yet, after appearing in Gone Girl, Entourage and I Feel Pretty – as well as “cool girl" influencer Wendy in Too Much.
The TikTok singing sensation talks sisterhood, representing the younger Asian community and fighting for more female voices behind the scenes in the music world.
She will also serve as an executive producer and screenwriter on the series. The as-yet-unnamed project will be her screenwriting debut, after the success of her bestselling 2021 memoir My Body.
Both women have been vocal about their experiences around fertility and motherhood, so we can expect a diverse and poignant range of voices and stories about the modern experience of being a mother.
In a previous interview with GLAMOUR, she opened up about how motherhood completely overhauled her own connection to her body.
“It changed the surface-level relationship I had with my image and my body, where it was just this thing to be looked at and it was either doing a good job or a bad job in that regard," she said. "Now I see it as this amazing vessel that actually knows a lot more than me in some ways.”
When GLAMOUR asked if she’s noticed a shift in the way people treat her now she's a mother, she had some choice words to say.
“It’s the classic thing that once a woman becomes a mother, that should be her identity solely, if she’s a good mother,” she said.
“I’m an example of that. So, I feel like there’s this sort of confusion: if it’s not just blatant sexism of [on the one hand] ‘She shouldn’t be doing that, she’s a mother,’ which is obvious. There’s almost [on the other hand] this, ‘I can’t believe she’s a mom!’ which is also equally not great. And I experience that in real life sometimes, even where people are like, ‘That’s your son?’ It’s obviously really flattering. I’m like, ‘Oh, yes, I’m a child myself.’ Or if somebody doesn’t know that I have a child and then I talk about it [they’ll say], ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, it’s eight o’clock, so he went to bed an hour ago and I have a sitter.’ There’s always going to be something, right? It’s like being a mom is just an example of what I’ve experienced a million times in my life.”
She also explained how she navigates raising a son in a world that doesn’t particularly like women.
“The main things we talk about now are empathy and learning empathy,” she tells me. “And then he’s a very loving child, so he hugs a lot. But he started school, so kids will be like, ‘No,’ and just learning to listen to the other people.
“And I think just very open conversations from a very young age… I don’t want him to come home and have found out about sex on the internet before we’ve had the conversation, and I unfortunately know that that happens very young.
“I believe that the building blocks of empathy and consent you can start teaching as soon as your child is born.”
Lena Dunham has also been vocal over the years about her fertility journey. Back in 2020 she wrote an essay for Harper's entitled False Labour, with the subheading “giving up on motherhood”. She outlined her experiences of endometriosis, IVF and ultimately opting for a hysterectomy.
"I learned that none of my eggs were viable on Memorial Day, in the midst of a global pandemic," she wrote in the essay. "I was in Los Angeles when I got the call from Dr. Coperman, the slight Jewish man who was my entry into (and now exit from) the world of corporate reproduction."
"This journey has forced me to rethink what motherhood will look like," Dunham later told People. "IVF destroyed my body — as a woman who tends towards rampant endometriosis, filling my body with estrogen ... and because of what my body has been through, subjecting it to such excruciating pain, only to come to the end and learn those eggs were not viable after working so hard through illness and discomfort and going through anxiety and depression, it is just clearly not something I can ever repeat."
We look forward to the take these two amazing women put together on the complexities of motherhood in the modern world.
