GIRLS

What Happened When Malia Obama Interned on HBO’s Girls

“Obviously, we weren’t making her go get our coffee . . .”
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Left, by Andreas Solaro/AFP; Right, by J. Countess, both from Getty Images.

In the summer of 2015, Malia Obama broke out of the White House to embark on an internship with HBO’s Girls. Obama, who has since moved on to an internship with Hollywood power broker Harvey Weinstein, was photographed on the Girls set during filming, but her specific role on the Lena Dunham–created drama remained a mystery . . . until this week.

While promoting the show’s final season, Dunham and Girls executive producer Jenni Konner described their experience with Obama, now 19.

“She’s an angel,” Dunham told Howard Stern when asked about the V.I.P. intern. “She was interning at HBO, and they thought, What if she comes a couple days a week to the set of Girls? She loved the show, and I mean, obviously we weren’t, like, making her go get our coffee. You’re not going to send [the president’s daughter to get coffee]. But she wanted to do all the jobs. That was the cool thing. She was totally enthusiastic.”

When Stern asked whether they filmed any racy scenes with the president’s daughter on set, Konner said, “Because of her age, we actually couldn’t do the graphic sex scenes around her if we wanted to.”

“We were sort of training her to do what our writer’s assistant did,” Konner said, explaining Obama’s role on set. “There’s a job where you sit on the set and—we do a lot of improv—so you take down the improv so we can get it in the next shot. We had one of our people who did that train her to do that.”

Dunham revealed that Secret Service accompanied Obama, but she did not even notice them until one blocked the Girls creator from using her own bathroom because Obama was inside.

Aside from the security detail, Dunham made it seem like Obama was a typical teenager, with only one other exception.

“She is so smart,” Dunham added. “I once asked her, ‘What’s your favorite movie?’ and she was like, ‘Well, do you want me to list by my favorite director, actor, or cinematographer?’ And I was like, ‘You are smarter than me, let’s just be done with that.’”

Stern closed out the segment by jokingly asking whether Dunham would ever let Donald Trump’s son Barron intern for her on the set of Girls.

“It remains to be seen,” Dunham responded. “Barron Trump may be a wild Planned Parenthood advocate, and he and I may join forces in the future. You never know. What if Barron interns for our feminist newsletter?”

VF.com reached out to Dunham’s publicist, who has no further comment.