Alex Karpovsky is one of those lucky actors who rarely has to audition for anything. He was friends with before landing his role on her hit HBO series, Girls. The only part he’s ever tried out for is in the upcoming Coen brothers’ movie, Inside Llewyn Davis.
“It’s the only role I’ve ever gotten in my life through audition,” Karpovsky said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “Everything else has been, friends have asked me to be in their movies.”
Karpovsky maintains that his character, Ray, on Girls wasn’t based on him. “We were friends at that point, we’d worked together in [Dunham’s breakout film] Tiny Furniture,” he said. “I think they needed someone to be the agitator of the group, and she felt like I could do that.”
The actor is also an independent filmmaker, who has two upcoming movies called Red Flag and Rubberneck. But it’s his role as Ray that’s gotten him the most attention.
“I met [Lena] at South by Southwest (film festival) in 2009,” Karpovsky recalled. “She was there with her first film, Creative Nonfiction, and I was there with my third film, Trust Us, This is All Made Up, a documentary. We shared a ride in the car of a mutual friend for at most five minutes. But I liked her. She was really funny and effervescent and smart, perceptive. I was also intrigued—who was this 22-or 23-year-old kid with a feature film at a major festival? I was living in Austin at the time and she was living in New York, and we started to email each other and do DVD swaps. I moved to New York in 2009 and we started hanging out a little bit, and she told me she was writing a part for me in a movie that she wanted to make in November of that year.”
From there, their working relationship grew, resulting in Girls, which airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.
