The Guardian:

Desiree Akhavan … joining forces with Lena Dunham. Photograph: Getty Images

"Lena Dunham has been coming up a lot lately in my therapy sessions," blogged filmmaker Desiree Akhavan in March 2013. "We're too damn similar and she beat me to the punch." Dunham either read her frustrated tirade or the pair are as cosmically intertwined as their identical career-paths suggest: it has been announced that she has signed Akhavan up for the fourth series of her HBO series, Girls.

Both Akhavan and another newcomer, Peter Mark Kendall, will play Hannah's fellow attendees at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but it was a while before the casting announcement that Dunham and Akhavan were mentioned in the same breath. When Akhavan's comedy Appropriate Behaviour – about a bisexual young woman struggling to become the ideal Persian daughter – premiered at the most recent Sundance film festival, critics immediately spotted similarities with Dunham's debut, Tiny Furniture. Both films are set in Brooklyn and focus on their misfit protagonists' struggle with jobs and relationships (or rather, their lack of these things). And, despite Akhavan's protestations that her film is more Annie Hall than Hannah Horvath, she was dubbed "the next Lena Dunham" by interviewer after interviewer.

Both women started their careers by producing web comedy. Akhavan's The Slope, co-produced with her then-partner, Ingrid Jungermann, follows the rocky relationship of two self-professed "homophobic, shallow lesbians". Dunham's webseries, Delusional Downtown Divas, was a self-parody too – but of her set's art-world lifestyle...

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