Girls creator Lena Dunham learned she’s related to Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David through a DNA test on Finding Your Roots.
Lena Dunham might be the voice of her generation—or a generation—but this news made her speechless.
After all, the Girls creator found out that she is distantly related to Curb Your Enthusiasm creator Larry David.
“No! My husband’s gonna freak out,” Lena who is married to musician Luis Felber said during the April 2 episode of PBS’s Finding Your Roots. “This is the hottest information I could have gotten.”
The ancestry show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., explained that the 37-year-old shares at least one common ancestor on her mother’s side with the 76-year-old, as shown by their “multiple long identical segments of DNA.”
“I could not have turned the page and been more delighted,” Lena gushed. “This is incredible. You saved the best for last.”
And fans of the television creators won’t be surprised by their distant relativity. After all, Lena scored several Golden Globe nominations and one win as well as eight Emmys nominations for her work writing, directing, and starring in Girls.
Her HBO comedy series which ran from 2012 to 2017 and also included Adam Driver, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, and Zosia Marmet in the main ensemble cast detailed a group of 20-something women navigating a New York lifestyle. It is not entirely unlike Larry’s own creations, which include Seinfeld and his more recent and still airing self-parody, Curb Your Enthusiasm.
In fact, at Girls‘ inception, Lena was often compared to a younger version of the comedian, and even drew a comparison herself in a 2012 interview while discussing her seemingly quick success.
“People are ultimately threatened by young people taking positions of power, but there’s also this feeling of ‘I could do that, too,'” she told Esquire at the time. “People don’t feel rabidly jealous of Larry David or Salman Rushdie because they don’t think, ‘I could do that.’ And with what I’ve done, I think a lot of people think, ‘I could do that in my sleep. If I’d just met one person along my path, I would have that TV show.'”