Meet The Girls From "Girls"

Substitute store-brand cranberry juice for Cosmos, slip on thrift store flats instead of Manolo Blahniks, shrink a Park Avenue apartment and move it to Brooklyn, and stick four female twentysomethings with thankless jobs and you'll get Girls, HBO's hyped new Judd Apatow-produced comedy series that's essentially the starkly realistic byproduct of the fantasies Sex and the City instilled in its younger audiences.

Created by and starring one of the funniest females in the biz, Lena Dunham, the series, which airs every Sunday at 10:30 p.m., follows four (the three others including Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet) privileged young women trying to navigate their life in New York City.

After last night's impressive premiere episode, we're sure you want to know more about the women who fearlessly portray the show's engaging characters. We did a bit of Googling and made this cast guide for you and anyone who's just as curious. Consider it the after-show introduction to the stars of the Girls.

Who she is on the show: Hannah Horvath
As Hannah Horvath, Dunham is the girl of the show whose lofty ambitions far exceeds her will to actually accomplish anything, yet her naiveté makes her the endearing lead. She believes herself to be the “voice of her generation,” yet she hasn’t penned more than the memos she writes for her internship. After being cut off by her well-to-do parents, she’s attempting to land a paying job, yet she doesn’t realize her own quirks make her unhirable. Most crippling of all, she’s convinced of a relationship with a scrawny man-child to whom she seems to mean nothing more than a perennial hook-up.

Who she is in real life: Dunham and the characters she’s created for herself in Tiny Furniture and Girls can be mistaken for each other: They’re from wealthy families, they’re liberal arts majors who live in New York and, with the exception of her character in Girls, their parents are prominent NYC-based artists. Dunham’s mother in real life is the renowned artist and photographer Laurie Simmons and her father is the painter Carroll Dunham.

Yet Dunham bears one important distinction from her on-screen personas: Her real life ambition has actually manifested itself. Just take a look at the writer-actor-producer-director’s list of accomplishments: She created her own comedic web series, Tight Shots, on Nerve.com, produced Delusional Downtown Divas, a web show poking fun at the NY art world and her first feature Tiny Furniture won “Best First Screenplay” at the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards.

Where you’ve seen her before: Since 2006, Dunham has acted in a string of hardly seen shorts and indie films, including Una and Jacques and Creative Nonfiction. As far as her more mainstream work in Mildred Pierce and The Innkeepers, you might not have been paying enough attention to notice her as “Nurse 1” and “Barista,” respectively.

However, none of those bit parts compare to the surprise success of her self-directed indie Tiny Furniture, a film about an aimless college grad navigating her life back at home in NYC, which won “Best Narrative Feature” at SXSW 2010 and is now a part of the Criterion Collection.

Who she is on the show: Marnie Michaels
Hannah Horvath’s professional and personal shortcomings could not be more apparent than when she stands beside her mature and responsible roommate, Marnie Michaels. Already dubbed as the “Charlotte York” (Sex and the City) of Girls, Michaels is the “adult” of their apartment, i.e. the one with the stable job at an art gallery and a longtime boyfriend. However, the precedence she puts on the idea of her security keeps her from actually admitting she might be miserable in both of her commitments.

Who she is in real life: Born in Connecticut, the 23-year-old daughter of television producer Jane Stoddard and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams couldn’t seriously pursue an acting career until she fulfilled her promise to her parents to graduate college. During her four years at Yale, Allison was part of the improv troupe Just Add Water and was inducted to the school’s secret society, St. Elmo.

Late in 2010, only months after moving to L.A. after getting her bachelor’s degree in English, Williams was invited to audition for Girls by the show’s producer Judd Apatow, who believed she possessed the aura that captured her character Marnie after seeing her in the video Mad Men. . . With a Twist.

Where you’ve seen her before: If you just thought to yourself that Allison Williams has a striking resemblance to Kate Middleton, she’s already capitalized on it. In 2011, Williams starred as the Duchess of Cambridge in a series of Funny or Die shorts titled, William and Kate: Before Happily Ever After, which she also co-wrote.

Though she’s also had a small role on American Dreams and The League, Williams is most famous for a mildly viral YouTube video of her covering Eden Abhez’s song “Nature Boy,” which she sang over RJD2’s “A Beautiful Mine,” better known as the Mad Men theme song.

Who she is on the show: Jessa Johansson
Jessa is arguably the most enviable girl among the foursome: She’s a laidback, British world traveler who isn’t caught up in the drama of her revolving door of men. Finally back in New York, Jessa settles down in her cousin Shoshanna’s apartment and looks to unwind her group of more socially reserved friends.

Who she is in real life: Kirke’s own personal biography could be written for both of the socialites she’s professionally portrayed, Jessa in Girls and and Charlotte in Tiny Furniture. The London-born daughter of Bad Company drummer, Simon Kirke, and interior designer Lorraine Kirke grew up in Manhattan (specifically Greenwich Village, for trivia-obsessed folk), where she attended high school with Lena Dunham.

But don’t lump Kirke in with the group of “The Ones to Watch in Hollywood.” Kirke has mentioned several times that acting isn’t her career. The 27-year-old, who’s now married to a real estate developer and a mother to baby daughter Rafaella, is an artist before she is an actress. Although the reluctant star maintains that she isn’t opposed to an exciting role if it happens to come up, she doesn’t actively seek any.

Where you’ve seen her before: Other than Girls, the only other mainstream work we’ve watched Kirke in was co-star Lena Dunham’s breakout hit, Tiny Furniture. As the film’s well-connected party girl Charlotte, Kirke’s character is reminiscent of her role on the HBO series, both of which were seemingly tailor-made for her. Even Kirke attested to their resemblance to Vanity Fair, stating, “I think there’s a reason why [Lena] gave me these roles. Not necessarily because our behaviors are the same, but because perhaps there was a similarity historically between the characters and me. “

Before getting noticed for her acting, Kirke and her elder sister Domino recorded the theme song for the short independent film, Smile for the Camera, which was directed by Jordan Galland, who co-wrote the screenplay with John Lennon and Yoko Ono's son, Sean Lennon.

Who she is on the show: Shoshanna Shapiro
With Sex and the City aspirations and a repulsion of every other borough outside Manhattan, NYU student Shoshana Shapiro is the archetypal tracksuit-wearing suburban girl in the big city. As the token virgin, despite her party girl cousin Jessa, Shapiro’s insight and life advice is often underestimated by the rest of the girls.

Who she is in real life: When your parents are acclaimed playwright/director David Mamet and Oscar-nominated actress Lindsay Crouse, it’s understandable that you would focus more on an acting career rather than your education. In fact, the now 24-year-old Zosia (pronounced like Sasha with a Z) tried to drop out of high school every year she attended and decided to skip college to continue pursuing an acting career, which she had begun in 1994 at six-years-old with the TV movie Parallel Lives.

Where you’ve seen her before: Out of the four female leads, Zosia Mamet’s filmography is undoubtedly the heftiest, with the list including a role in the film The Kids Are All Right and the TV series The United States of Tara and Parenthood. Most memorably, however, Mamet starred as Joyce Ramsay, the assistant photo editor at Life magazine who becomes Peggy’s lesbian wooer in Mad Men.