The Brit one from Girls: Jemima Kirke talks mayhem and motherhood 

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The Brit one from Girls: Jemima Kirke talks mayhem and motherhood

She’s the London-born star of Lena Dunham’s hit show, with a rocker dad and a defiant attitude. Jane Mulkerrins meets Jemima Kirke

Louche and lovely: Jemima Kirke in her role as Jessa Johansson in Girls.

In a spacious but slightly chintzy cottage, in the grounds of a grand Los Angeles hotel, Jemima Kirke is detailing the difficulties of her role as the snarky, entitled, louche, bohemian rebel Jessa Johansson in the hit HBO comedy Girls. Specifically, we are discussing her girl-on-girl oral sex scene, in a drug rehab centre, which gets the third series of the show — already renowned for its boldly unvarnished and often eye-wateringly awkward intimate moments — off to a tea-spitting start next Monday.

“It was hard, actually, and I didn’t think it would be,” admits the 27-year-old British actress. “I thought: ‘Oh, this is going to be so funny and silly, and then when I got into it, I was like: ‘This is really f***ed up. It’s rapey and bad’.” She wrinkles her pretty nose, fiddles with the giant silver skull ring on her finger and looks genuinely pained. “All girls have been there at some point in their life, and that was not a nice thing to have to do. I just wanted to get it over and done with as quickly as possible.”

Fortunately for Kirke, while the rest of the Girls get down and dirty with some regularity on screen, Jessa, by contrast, does not. “I’ve had one sex scene in this entire show. One. And yet I always get called the oversexed one,” Kirke moans quasi-theatrically, rolling her blue eyes. “The ‘oversexed free spirit’.”

To be honest, it’s not exactly tricky to see why. In the flesh, not only is Kirke cover-girl beautiful but positively swimming in womanly sex appeal. And though she is infinitely more thoughtful, warm, open and vulnerable than her terrifyingly empathy-free on-screen persona, there’s still a definite, defiant, don’t-give-a-damn essence emanating from her.

Today, Kirke is sporting a demure navy blue polka-dot tea dress, with scarlet heels and matching lipstick, and her dark-blonde hair is pulled back in a sleek ponytail, but her exposed arms and hands are littered with tattoos, including an enormous tiger on the inside of her left forearm and a sun covering her palm. She’s finished with her inking phase, though. “You know what? Tattoos hurt,” she declares. “I’m not getting any more done. It’s too painful. I used not to care, but now, it’s not worth it.”

Girls will be girls: Kirke with fellow cast members (left to right) Lena Dunham, Allison Williams and Zosia Mamet

Both her rock ’n’ roll attitude and wholly individual sense of style should probably come as no surprise given Kirke’s lineage. Her father is Simon Kirke, the Lambeth-born former drummer in the bands Free and Bad Company, while her mother, Lorraine, owns the New York vintage boutique Germinola. As a teenager, Jemima was featured, along with her two sisters, Lola and Domino (both now musicians), in Teen Vogue, modelling clothes from the shop. Lorraine is also the daughter of the British businessman Jack Dellal, making the model Alice, shoe designer Charlotte and art gallery owner Alex Dellal Jemima’s cousins.

Incredibly, Girls is only Kirke’s second acting gig and, until recently, she refused to even consider herself an actress. “I’m grateful for the opportunity but I was fighting not to be an actor for a while; fighting the title,” she explains. “I’m not resisting it any more, but it’s still funny to see myself in posters on the street.” She looks bemused. “I went to see a movie with my husband the other night. We were sitting eating popcorn and the ads came on, and I was like: ‘Holy f***, that’s me’. It’s so weird.”

She’d never acted — and never wanted to — until her old school friend Lena Dunham, the 27-year-old writer, director and co-star of Girls, persuaded her to appear in her first low-budget but critically acclaimed indie feature film, Tiny Furniture (“I was under the impression, when she told me about it, that it was almost one step away from a student film,” says Kirke, who wasn’t even paid for her turn as the aggressive, narcissistic Charlotte), and Girls followed.

“Lena didn’t hire me because I’m such a good actress that I can pull off characters that are nothing like me,” Kirke asserts. “There are some similarities between Jessa and me.”

There are also some dramatic differences; Jessa is divorced, after a brief, disastrous marriage, and for the most part is jobless and drifting, often in a haze of drink and drugs, while Kirke is a happily married mother-of-two, living in a $2 million Brooklyn brownstone with her husband Michael Mosberg, a lawyer, and their children, Rafaella, three, and one-year-old Memphis. “Sometimes it is hard to connect with Jessa but I was there, I was wild, for about four years.” Kirke openly admits to having had “a bunch of profound and negative drug experiences”. “I was zero to 60,” she says. “I was wild before I was 24 — so wild that then I had a baby — and then, well, I had a baby,” she laughs. “I sort of missed out on the middle bit.”

Though she still speaks in the slightly posh, huskily honeyed tones of an English public schoolgirl, with far less of a transatlantic twang than on screen, the family left London when Kirke was 11 and she was brought up largely in New York. “When I go back to London I know nothing these days,” she confesses. She met Dunham at the famously liberal independent high school St Ann’s, in Brooklyn, where pupils are encouraged to express themselves creatively and their work isn’t graded. Instead, teachers write full-page anecdotal reports for each student.

Left to right: Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Kirke, cousin Alice Dellal and sister Domino at Leah Wood’s wedding

“I thought she was a wack job but in a good way,” Kirke says of Dunham. “In high school everyone is the same, or striving to be like everyone else. Lena definitely didn’t. She didn’t care what everyone else was wearing or saying.” Dunham, for her part, has said her ambition at school was to be as cool as Kirke.  “I was cool in high school,” she agrees, nonchalantly. “I smoked cigarettes and I wore real rock ’n’ roll T-shirts, I didn’t brush my hair and I skipped school all the time. I was that kid.”

She learned enough, at least, to win a place at Rhode Island School of Design, after which she became a portrait painter. She still considers herself an artist first and foremost. “But now I have three jobs: I’m a mum and I act and I paint. I can’t do any more than that, and I can only probably do two of those things well at any time,” she confesses. “Something is going to get left behind for a bit. Something is going to need work. Even the parenting sometimes.”

But while her domestic duties may prevent her truly running wild at the ripe old age of 27, Kirke certainly remains spirited; last summer she had to be forcibly removed from Jay-Z’s waist by security guards when she wrapped herself around the rapper and refused to let go during his seven-hour Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film video shoot at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan. And it wasn’t the first time she’s lost control during a performance art piece either. In 2010 Kirke was photographed in floods of tears at Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present MoMA exhibition, where Abramovic sat still for more than 700 hours, simply staring at visitors who took turns sitting across from her. The past few years, becoming a mother and starring in Girls has also altered Kirke’s own art too. “I paint a LOT of women now — only women, in fact,” she says. “And they have become less sad, the women I paint. Before, a lot of them had a sort of melancholy about them, but now that’s much less so.”

However, her own mental and emotional state, she admits, has been tested by some of the public responses to Girls and its stars. “I wasn’t prepared for the criticisms, and at first they would upset me,” she says. “I didn’t fully understand what comes along with putting out a show, and I was taken aback. I found the anonymous comments cowardly, and I wanted to call everyone who left a mean comment and say: ‘That was nasty and uncalled for and let me explain …’

“I don’t think like that any more, though,” she says. And the flip side is the devoted fans who stop her in the street. “Sometimes people will say: ‘Oh, you’re great on that show’, and that’s nice. But occasionally people will pull their phone out and ask: ‘Oh my god, can you call my friend?’ You don’t want to be mean, so you just have to politely say yes …” she shrugs sheepishly. “I need to come up with new ways to politely say no.” Jessa, of course, wouldn’t give it a second f***ing thought.

Season 3 of Girls starts Monday January 20, 10pm, Sky Atlantic HD.  Seasons 1 and 2 are available On Demand from Sunday, January 19

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