Lena Dunham makes her grand directorial return with Netflix’s Too Much, a rom-com series about a heartbroken New Yorker who starts a new life across the pond and has a whirlwind romance with a British musician. If that premise sounds familiar at all, you may find that it resembles Dunham’s real-life story of how she met her husband and co-creator of the series, Luis Felber.
The first episode of Too Much features brash New Yorker Jessica (Megan Stalter) adrift and depressed after her ex Zev (Michael Zegen) gets engaged to picture-perfect influencer Wendy Jones (Emily Ratajkowski). She moves to London in search of a Wuthering Heights-esque romance, but instead finds Felix (Will Sharpe), an indie rock musician carrying just as much baggage as she is. Dunham claims that the new show is “only 5% autobiographical,” insisting that the plot was inspired by a wide collection of influences and stories from others. “I would like 34-year-old women anywhere to be able to look at Jessica and…see something of themselves in her,” the Girls star tells Vanity Fair. But there’s no question that certain aspects of the show bear an uncanny resemblance to Dunham’s life and past relationship drama. Wondering how? Read on to find out.
Did Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s breakup inspire Jessica’s ongoing angst related to her breakup with Zev? If you’re asking Dunham directly then no, not entirely. “[Zev] is very much an amalgamation of every ex that I’ve had, or that a friend’s had,” Dunham tells Vanity Fair.
However, if you connect the show’s timeline of events to the real-world events leading up to Dunham meeting Felber, Zev seems to fit the bill as a Jack Antonoff stand-in. The acclaimed music producer was Dunham’s last serious publicized relationship before Felber came along, and after six years together, the two split in 2018. Dunham often spoke of how painful the break up was for her: “I was almost chemically changed, rewired,” she wrote in an essay for Vogue. “The finality nearly killed me.”
Jessica’s big move to London, along with her dreams of finding the perfect British gentleman, were inspired by Dunham’s experience moving to London in 2021. As she explains to Tudum, “When I first started coming to the U.K. 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.’”
After being introduced by some mutual friends in 2021, Dunham and Felber engaged in a whirlwind romance much like the one we see unfolding between Jessica and Felix in Too Much. There are quite a few parallels between the fictional couple and the two co-creators who wrote them — Felber is a musician himself, and has made reference in the past to how he and Dunham often stay up all night chatting, much like Felix and Jessica do in Episode 3 of the series.
The icing on the cake is the story of how Felber inspired the name of the series. Word-for-word to what Felix tells Jessica at the end of Episode 4, Dunham recalls a time when Felber said she was “too much.” He meant it as a good thing, that she was “just enough and a little bit more,” as Dunham tells Variety. The two married just seven months after meeting. Swoon City!
While Dunham certainly took inspiration from her own London love story, Too Much has evolved “into a totally different world,” Dunham tells The Hollywood Reporter. “While the germ of it may be autobiographical, it’s gone in directions I never could’ve dreamed.”
Watch Too Much now on Netflix.