Since she first hit the spotlight, Kirke has been branded a wild child by the media. While that may have been the case in earlier years, today she comes across as a homebody (‘I have no problem saying no to events to stay at home with my kids,’ she explains) and somebody deeply in control of her life. She’s engaging and professional but has no truck with niceties. When I ask who she is still in touch with from Girls, she shrugs. ‘Just Lena but I haven’t spoken to her since she got married [to the British-Peruvian musician Luis Felber in September last year].’ The curtness of the reply implies that the cast is no longer close and Kirke has no interest in pretending otherwise.
Born in Westminster to Lorraine, an interior designer who used to run a vintage-clothing boutique in New York’s West Village (it supplied some of Carrie Bradshaw’s outfits in Sex and the City), and Simon, the former drummer of rock bands Free and Bad Company, Kirke comes from an artsy family. It was a loving, creative home (when, aged seven, Kirke showed an interest in painting, her mum turned their wine cellar into an art studio) but, as a teenager, Kirke recalls being left to her own devices. ‘They never spoke to me about sex,’ she says of her parents. ‘I’m not angry about it but issues weren’t always addressed directly. I didn’t have someone guiding me on those things.’
She plans to correct this with her own children. ‘I try to bring them [difficult subjects] up when there’s an opportunity. So when I hear something or see a behaviour I’m worried about, I use it as an opportunity to insert some of my beliefs. But not too much. That’s how you f—k up your kids – you give them your beliefs and they don’t have their own.’
Kirke’s maternal grandfather was the banker turned billionaire property tycoon Jack Dellal, famous for his love of gambling and flipping properties at speed (in 1987 he bought London’s Bush House for £55 million; he sold it two years later for £130 million). Her cousins include shoe designer Charlotte Olympia Dellal and model Alice Dellal (whom Kirke counts as one of her best friends), and she has two sisters – Lola, an actor and ‘country musician’, for whom Kirke has directed music videos (they also played sisters in the 2019 film Untogether), and Domino, a Brooklyn-based singer, actor and doula who was hired by comedian Amy Schumer when she was pregnant.
Not long after the Kirke brood upped sticks to Manhattan, Jemima started at the liberal Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn where, as well as befriending Dunham, she was close to the model and Boardwalk Empire actor Paz de la Huerta. The pair shunned school social events, preferring to hang out in tattoo parlours and, when they could blag their way in, bars. ‘This actually used to be a cool spot in the early 2000s,’ she chuckles, gazing around the restaurant. ‘It was where we came to drink at the start or end of the night.’
She went on to study fine art at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, but was suspended for missing classes. It was after graduation that she finally honed her focus, producing a series of watercolour portraits (predominantly of women she knew) that drew comparisons to American painter Alice Neel. But recently painting has tumbled down her list of priorities. ‘I haven’t really done it in the past two years because of all the jobs,’ she says wistfully. ‘I really miss it.’
