Jemima Kirke, the reluctant actress Woody Allen chose to lead his Madrid film

Jemima Kirke

Photo: Crunchydillpickle / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 26, 1985 London, England
Occupation	Actress and painter
Known for	The Little Hours, Ava's Possessions, Sylvie's Love

On a café terrace in Madrid’s Plaza de Oriente, a woman in a loose white shirt sits still while a crew of dozens moves around her and Woody Allen, in his usual fisherman’s hat, decides where the camera goes. The woman is Jemima Kirke, and the oddity of the scene is that she has spent most of her public life explaining that acting is not really her job. She is a painter, by her own account, who keeps being asked to act. The asking has not stopped.

That gap between how she describes herself and how the screen industry uses her runs through everything she has done. “I have an interest in acting, and painting is something I have to do,” she told Coveteur. With acting, she added, there might be a cap on how much she had. “I’m tolerant of it some days.”

In her family art was the default setting. Her father is Simon Kirke, the drummer of Free and Bad Company; her mother, Lorraine Kirke, ran Geminola, a Manhattan vintage shop whose clothes turned up in Sex and the City. Kirke, who was born in London on 26 April 1985, moved to New York as a child and grew up there with her sisters, the actress Lola Kirke and the singer Domino Kirke. At Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn she became friends with a classmate named Lena Dunham.

She knew early what she wanted. “I was one of the lucky few kids who knew from a young age what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be an artist,” she told The Untitled Magazine. She took a degree in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and then, in her telling, felt lost, until a stranger in an art-supply shop offered her a corner of his studio. She painted too many self-portraits before asking people around town to sit for her.

Dunham’s first feature, Tiny Furniture, was made in 2010 on so little money that friends filled the cast; Kirke played Charlotte and was not paid. When HBO ordered Girls, Dunham cast her as Jessa Johansson, the bohemian English cousin of Zosia Mamet‘s Shoshanna. Kirke’s reasons for saying yes were practical. “It was big money, right? I had just had a baby,” she has said. She was told the part would be small. It was not. Jessa lasted all six seasons, from 2012 to 2017, and Dunham later revealed that Kirke had tried to quit before the second season.

Television kept using what Girls had found in her, a calm that can read as serene or as the moment before trouble. Cary Joji Fukunaga cast her in the Netflix miniseries Maniac in 2018. In 2021 she became Hope Haddon, the headmistress brought in to scrub Moordale’s reputation in the third season of Sex Education. In Conversations with Friends, adapted from Sally Rooney’s novel, she was Melissa, the older writer drawn into a young couple’s orbit, and Apple TV+ put her in City on Fire in 2023. Film kept her in the margins: a part in Jeff Baena’s convent comedy The Little Hours, a struggling writer opposite her sister Lola in Emma Forrest’s Untogether.

The painting never stopped. The Ceremony, her show at Sargent’s Daughters on the Lower East Side, opened in December 2017 with portraits of women in wedding dresses, Kirke herself among the brides, painted after her own long relationship ended; Artnet noted that the brides looked kind of miserable. In 2025 she showed at The Untitled Space’s UPRISE exhibition, including Girl in a Pink Room, a nude of her younger sister holding a cigarette that she called “distasteful. Which is really what makes it radical.” The same bluntness shaped the video she recorded in 2015 for the Center for Reproductive Rights, describing an abortion in college without anaesthesia because she could not afford both. “I’ve never felt ashamed,” she said a decade later.

The uncomfortable part of the Kirke story is how easily the screen work arrived. Girls was attacked from its first season for the privilege of its cast, the children of a rock drummer, a network news anchor, a playwright and two well-known artists, and Kirke never pretended otherwise; early on she joked to Purple that the role had been handed to her on a silver platter. Allison Williams has since argued that the cast got no credit for a show that skewered exactly that privilege. Kirke’s own account is less defensive. She “didn’t see the political element or how provocative it was. I thought it was just funny.” Her newest choice invites a harder version of the question. Allen has denied the allegation by his adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, that he abused her as a child, but since 2017 several actors who worked with him have said they regret it, and his recent films have been made in Europe, this one with three million euros of public money from Madrid’s regional and city governments. Kirke has not spoken publicly about the casting.

The film she is making is Allen’s 51st as director, a contemporary comedy he describes as “a comedy with a romance, with intrigue, with infidelity,” set among diplomats; under the agreement with Madrid, its still-unannounced title must include the city’s name. Cameras rolled on 5 October 2026 for a six-week shoot in Madrid and Aranjuez, with Kirke and Alexi Wasser, another Girls alumna, in the lead roles; Marton Csokas, Jakob Oftebro and Peter Vives complete the main cast, and Pedro Almodóvar‘s longtime cinematographer José Luis Alcaine is behind the camera. Eight days later HBO announced that Girls is coming back as a five-episode limited revival, with production planned for 2027, a decade after the finale. Kirke returns as Jessa alongside Dunham, Williams, Mamet and Andrew Rannells, and this time she is also a co-executive producer. Adam Driver is not among the announced returning cast.

Kirke divides her time between Brooklyn and East Hampton. She has two children from her relationship with the lawyer Michael Mosberg, which ended in 2017. She later spent several years with the Australian singer Alex Cameron, for whom she directed music videos and who has said his album Miami Memory was largely about her; the couple have since separated.

None of this has settled the question she keeps raising herself. “I’ve learned you really can’t do more than one thing at a time to its fullest extent. Let alone two careers,” she said last year. For now the calendar belongs to the career she says she tolerates: Madrid through the autumn, then Jessa again in 2027.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Lena Dunham, Girls, woody allen, Jemima Kirke, Sex Education

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