Sure, the show’s not called Guys—but the men of Girls, which returns on Sunday, will certainly be missed after HBO’s buzzy hit concludes its final season this year. While they’re technically not the protagonists of Lena Dunham’s show, which chronicles the ebbs and flows of female friendship among four twentysomethings, at least one of the guys believes he should be. Says Andrew Rannells, who plays Elijah Krantz: “I think that every scene he’s in, he thinks he’s the star of Girls. He’s the Carrie Bradshaw.”
After five seasons, the show has mostly managed to break free of its early, erroneous comparisons to that other HBO show about four women in New York City. Still, it’s worth considering the vastly different ways that Sex and the City and Girls present their male characters. The former cast the majority of its countless male guest stars as boyfriends, husbands, or one-night stands, who wafted in and out of the lives of Carrie and her crew like so much expensive perfume. Many have been immortalized by reductive nicknames alone (read: Mr. Big; the New Yankee; Sean, the bisexual).
That’s not so with Girls, where the male characters are as complex, raw, and multi-faceted as their female counterparts. Take grouch-with-a-heart-of-gold Ray, played by Alex Karpovsky: though he’s introduced as Charlie’s best friend and band mate, he has gradually evolved into one of the funniest and most refreshing voices on the show, whether he’s railing against local politics, navigating the romantic waters with Shoshanna, or delivering some much-needed straight talk to Hannah. And then there’s Elijah, who, far from being a stereotype—a “sidekick who’s just gonna hold [Hannah’s] purse,” as Rannells puts it—encounters interesting arcs of his own, from a brief relationship with a suave news anchor to supporting Hannah following her dad’s unexpected, late-in-life revelation that he’s gay.
Given how central many of the guys have become, it might come as a surprise to learn that many of them thought they’d last on the show only for an episode or two.
As Rannells recalls, his first Girls stint was a single scene from Season 1, when Hannah confronts Elijah “about giving her HPV, and I say, ‘Your dad is gay.’ It was a pretty short scene.” Brief as it was, he and Girls creator-slash-star Lena Dunham clearly had great chemistry—and before long, Rannells had become a recurring guest star. In Season 4, he became a series regular.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays cerebrally melancholy Desi, shares a similar origin story. A weekend getaway at director Jesse Peretz’s house led him to a chance meeting with Girls show-runner Jenni Konner. Soon afterward, she and Dunham developed a small guest role for him. “You learn as an actor to make yourself indispensable, if you’re smart, so that’s what I tried to do. And it worked,” he says.
Desi’s genuine encouragement of Marnie’s musical talents inspired her to quit her day job and pursue a full-time career as a singer-songwriter. While their marriage fell apart in Season 5, their artistic connection has been key to Marnie’s character development—and, ultimately, has held more significance than their failed romance. “I think they both were each other's biggest fans, which goes a long way when you're making music together and you’re creating this beautiful, little, crystalline, special thing,” Moss-Bachrach says. To the character, losing a collaborator is “what’s real—not a marriage certificate.”
Rannells also benefited from the show’s resistance to cut-and-dry gender roles. As the primary gay friend in the girls’ lives, Elijah’s presence adds another layer of complexity to the show. “It’s a very unique friendship that gay men have with straight women. There’s a nurturing aspect to it, there’s a vulnerability, there’s an intimacy—but there’s also a nastiness.” he says.
For Alex Karpofsky, Dunham and Konner’s clear-headed creative vision inspired the approach he tries to “ape as much as [he] possibly can” in his own filmmaking career.
“Lena and Jenni have a very strong idea and a clear image of what they’re trying to capture and advance in a given scene,” he says. “They function in harmony, and that’s a very difficult thing to pull off.”
As for Ray, Karpofsky was especially fond of his character’s impassioned diatribes: “He likes to get on this soapbox sometimes and just really vent his grievances and frustrations, his cynicism, and his judgment unto the world. I’m going to miss that.” Given the current political climate, he jokes, “We need him more than ever now.”
Rannells waxes nostalgic about one scene in particular: from the third episode of Season 2, which finds Dunham’s Hannah (on an ill-advised journalistic mission) and Elijah (who hopes for a night “where it’s five A.M. and one us has definitely punched someone that’s been on a Disney Channel show”) losing their minds on the dance floor, aided by a few snorts and the sounds of Swedish electropop duo Icona Pop.
He’s also especially fond of the “last line to the girls—to all four of them” that he will deliver in the final season. Rannells hints that the line “perfectly encapsulates who [Elijah] is, and what his role was.” He won’t reveal the line itself, though he does say that he improvised it: “I knew what was gonna make them laugh.”
The months ahead find the guys moving on to new projects: Karpovsky has a role in the upcoming Netflix film Girlfriend’s Day, and Moss-Bachrach is currently shooting Marvel's new series Punisher for Netflix. (In a small-world twist, he points out that a bunch of the show’s crew also worked from Girls.) And Rannells recently wrapped a run in Lincoln Center’s critically acclaimed revival of Falsettos.
Reflecting on their Girls tenure, Moss-Bachrach, Karpovsky, and Rannells all credit Dunham and Konner’s sustained commitment to elevating their male characters beyond faint sketches of guys they once knew, or predictably gendered stereotypes drawn from other shows, as something that set the show apart—and one of the main reasons they’ll miss it when it’s gone.
As Karpovsky explains, “They’re fleshed out characters. They’re tethered to reality. These are real people. They’re complicated, as you are and as I hope I am, and they’re not so easy to depict or engage with. And that’s what I really like about them. Like, Ray has got all of these vulnerabilities and insecurities and twisted and distorted ambitions, but like, a lot of people do. A lot of my friends do. And Adam’s got all this going on, and Ebon and Andrew. Like all these people are a pulsing heap of neurotic confusions—and that’s just representative of a New Yorker.”
