Watch: Lena Dunham Welcomes First Baby with Husband Luis Felber
Lena Dunham arguably helmed the series about twentysomething Girls figuring out who they wanted to be when they grew up.
But the multihyphenate was always confident there was one role she was meant for.
“I’ll be 36 this year,” the Girls co-creator stressed to The Hollywood Reporter in January 2022, just three months after she wed musician Luis Felber in London. “I don’t feel like turning 38 without a child.”
She blew out a few sets of birthday candles before receiving her biggest wish. But this past August, the 40-year-old watched as her surrogate delivered her and Felber’s first child.
“I saw her face, gasping just as she did,” Dunham recounted of the experience in an essay for Vogue. “Her eyes, wide and unfocused, taking in the light and shadow, blinking rapidly.”
And in that moment, Dunham continued, she offered that first greeting: “‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m your mama.'”
They were words the Famesick memoirist had cautiously hoped to utter for nearly a decade. When she underwent a 2018 hysterectomy the actress was focused more on ending the crippling pain caused by her endometriosis than she was on losing her uterus, cervix and one ovary.
“Before then, motherhood had seemed likely but not urgent, as inevitable as growing out of jean shorts,” Dunham detailed to Harper’s Bazaar in 2020, penning a personal essay about undergoing in vitro fertilization before pivoting to other ways of growing her family, “but in the days after my surgery I became keenly obsessed with it.”
The same could be said of her early weeks with Felber.
Officially, Cupid’s arrow struck the day after Valentine’s Day 2021.
“I met the person who would become my husband,” Dunham wrote in a 2024 anniversary tribute. “I’ve said it before, but Lu was immediately familiar to me. I chalked it up to the warm glow of healthy connection.”
By that September, they were husband and wife, cutting a 10-year getting-to-know-each-other process “to 10 hours,” Dunham noted to Vogue. “And then we took a month to get married instead of waiting six months or a year.”
But it was enough time for Dunham to determine why she felt she’d known Felber in a past life.
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“The year: 2009,” she detailed in her 2024 post of crossing paths with a group of “rowdy and loose” British boys while preparing to debut her first film, comedy-drama Tiny Furniture, at South by Southwest.
She found herself making note of one in particular, “wearing a French military coat,” the same epaulet- and brass button-covered jacket Felber would pull out of his closet as they were preparing to move in together.
“It was him. The beautiful boy,” reflected The C-Word podcaster. “My infinite, swirling companion animal. So nice I married him twice.”
Because sometimes you really just know.
“A mutual friend of ours basically set us up,” Felber—raised in his mother’s native Peru before returning to his father’s home country of Britain—told The New York Times in 2021 of their first blind date. “We didn’t stop talking for, like, eight hours.”
In the past, he acknowledged, he’d found himself holding back with someone new.
But, “I was just a bit fed up with that, so I just walked into the situation very myself, shall I say,” he continued. “And Lena liked that. And she’s the same.”
Never mind that Felber had never seen a single episode of Girls or that Dunham wasn’t all that familiar with the alt-rock music (“If I’m feeling cocky, I’ll say it’s between Prince and Nirvana,” he said) he released under the stage name Attawalpa, his middle name and a nod to Incan ruler Atahualpa.
Together, they shared a commitment to sober living (“I just drink when I feel like it,” he told the NYT. “I call it ‘conscious drinking'”) a similar sense of humor and the overwhelming sensation that they were meant to be in each other’s lives.
“I’m way more into the flow of getting to know the person,” he told the NYT. “And I think Lena’s the same. And I think—I’m going to sound cheesy—but when you find your soulmate, you just know.”
When Dunham shared that she hoped to marry him one day, he suggested they pick a date.
A month later they were exchanging vows in front of 60 loved ones (including bridesmaid Taylor Swift) at London’s members-only Union Club, Dunham wearing a trio of custom Christopher Kane gowns.
“There were lots of moments,” Felber told The New York Times of realizing he wanted forever. “I’m not living in a Disney film where you’re certain about who you want to spend the rest of your life with in one moment. Time is fluid and when you know, you know. I love my wife, who is also my best friend.”
No surprise, that’s a sentiment Dunham shares, marveling how they’ve been able to team up for projects like Too Much, the Netflix series loosely based on their love story.
“The last years have been, I would argue, the most peaceful of my life,” she marveled to People in 2024. “Sometimes I feel like I am boring on the phone with my friends, because I have a lovely husband who I adore collaborating with.”
And now they’re tackling the most important collab of their lives. Keep reading to see the other stars who grew their families through surrogacy.
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