What It’s Like Playing Hannah In The Girls Porn Lena Dunham Hates

Porn star Alex Chance dishes on the role of a generation

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Hustler

A scene from Hustler's "This Ain't Girls XXX."

The porn star hired to play Hannah Horvath in Hustler’s XXX reinterpretation of the HBO hit Girls doesn’t understand why Lena Dunham can’t appreciate her work.

“It seemed like she liked the parody that SNL did of her, so obviously it wasn’t making fun of her that was the issue,” 24-year-old Alex Chance told TIME.

Yet while Dunham tweeted that SNL’s skit “was a true honor,” of This Ain’t Girls XXX, she extolled: “It grosses me out.” She didn’t even need all 140 characters.

But Chance sees great merit in Hustler’s emulation. She says the script is funny, the character work solid (a frustrated Hannah eats ice cream in an “ugly” crop top and “not flattering” panties after a fight), and since Girls is “pretty much like a softcore porn to start, we didn’t think it was much of a stretch to go on and put the hardcore in it.”

While Girls is a show devoted to the ebb and flow of female friendship — the first (and only) line of Hannah’s unfinished e-book reads, “A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance…” — the Girls porn explores a different angle of feminine relationships.

“It’s about Hannah, and she isn’t sure if she likes girls or not,” Chance said. “She tries to have sex with Marnie just to figure out what’s in that head of hers.”

Probably not what Dunham was going for. (She did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.)

But Chance notes parallels between herself and Dunham, particularly given the fact that they both don’t have the archetypal body types that are usually shown naked in film, TV … or porn.

“I started out heavier [at the beginning of] my porn career two years ago,” Chance said. And it has fluctuated to what is now a slimmer frame. But when Hustler Director of Operation’s Rob Smith first tweeted Chance to see if she was interested in the Girls porn in April, the actress found herself in a strange middle ground that was impacting her career and perception in the porn world.

“I wasn’t necessarily getting as much work since I wasn’t skinny and I wasn’t fat,” thus not catering to the porn niches, she said. “I was normal sized for a regular person, but not for porn.”

This echoes what Dunham told Howard Stern after he offensively called her a “little fat girl who kinda looks like Jonah Hill.”

“I’m not that fat, Howard,” she said on a call in to Stern’s show. “… I’m not super thin, but I’m thin for, like, Detroit.”

Girls has made headline after headline, both positive and negative, for normalizing the human body. And Chance is trying to do the same for porn. “I know that girls watch porn,” she said. “And I hope that since I’m all natural, I hope that if anyone does watch they’ll be like, ‘Oh, it is ok to look like that.'”

She continued, “I’m curvier, I have big natural boobs, I haven’t had any plastic surgery, I’m not 100 pounds soaking wet, but I still have a really good fan base.”

But body types aside, Dunham has tweeted that the porn industry in general proliferates sexual, male-driven stereotypes that she tries to fight off in Girls.

Chance maintains, however, that while Dunham “never has normal, hot, oh my God that’s porno sex” in Girls and is “always second guessing” to cater to her partner, the porn star has had some of her best sexual experiences on camera. (Although the This Ain’t Girls XXX sex had to be more awkward  than normal porn to stay in character.)

“I honestly don’t know if it was intentional to have a candy ball gag, it looked like a regular one in the package, but it turned out really well because it got stuck in my hair,” Chance said. “It was freaking hilarious because it was sticky, and it just seemed like something that would happen to Hannah.”

Even though Chance hopes Dunham will watch (and enjoy) the Girls porn parody, there will be no hard feelings if she doesn’t. After all, Chance won’t be tuning in to season three of Girls. 

“I was a big fan of the first season, but not of the second,” she said. “Season two I thought that they were grabbing at something.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nkbctEv_Qs&w=420&h=315]