BORN AGAIN AND AGAIN

Natasha Lyonne Can’t Stop Living

“I’m a very dark horse in terms of surviving it all,” said the star of Netflix’s new dark comedy Russian Doll, which she co-created with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland.

By Joy Press

January 31, 2019

Natasha Lyonne jangled with energy as she arrived at the threadbare Silverlake diner where we’d arranged to meet on a Saturday afternoon. She had just been through the carwash across the street—the kind where you sit trapped inside while psychedelic suds and rotating brushes engulf your vehicle. “I was a little bit more paranoid than a standard L.A. bearer would be,” said the native New Yorker, “because I definitely felt like, something is going to go wrong. It just seems so lo-fi, technology-wise . . . like, is this really safe?”

Lyonne has a way of making everyday life feel like a tremendous, defiant adventure. A larger-than-life personality, she wields wit like it’s an Olympic sport, and exudes a sense of hard-earned wisdom. I wouldn’t describe her as someone “at peace” so much as a person O.K. with where she stands—or rather sits, at this moment, in a booth eating scrambled eggs and talking about Russian Doll, the gem of a Netflix series she created with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland.

Russian Doll is a pitch-black comedy about Nadia (Lyonne), a chain-smoking, hard-partying video-game coder who is having a tough time getting through her 36th birthday—as in, she actually keeps dying and jolting back to life on the same day in the same bathroom, having interactions with the same people. (The show’s ensemble cast includes Greta Lee, Chloë Sevigny, Elizabeth Ashley, and Charlie Barnett.) Downtown Manhattan becomes a deadly obstacle course, so it’s not surprising that in real life Lyonne would be hyper-aware of lurking dangers, whether it’s a carwash, a manhole, or a freeway on-ramp.

“The universe is trying to fuck with me and I refuse to engage!” Nadia shouts at one point in Russian Doll, embarking on a journey that will enjoyably whisk her through rage, nihilism, panic, and angst. Lyonne knows existential trauma. In between making her TV debut at age seven on Pee-wee’s Playhouse and playing junkie Nicky Nichols on Orange Is the New Black, Lyonne struggled with (and kicked) a heroin addiction.

With her halo of orange curls and her Borscht Belt comedian accent, Lyonne is the kind of oddball actor often relegated to the margins of the entertainment world. She once told me she felt more of a kinship with the kind of 1970s movie characters played by Robert De Niro and Gene Hackman.

It eventually dawned on her that the best way to find her dream role was to create it for herself. Her first attempt was Old Soul, a 2014 pilot she developed with Poehler at NBC. It featured several elements that would carry over to Russian Doll, including the seeds of Nadia. After the network declined to pick up the series, Poehler asked Lyonne what she’d want to do if there were no network restrictions or expectations.

“Russian Doll really came out of a conversation that [Natasha] and I started having about roles for women, and about how a lot of our really iconic television characters that are acted by men are really allowed to be many things at once,” Poehler said by phone from New York. “Deadly, and tender, and sexy, and cold—they get to be all those things. I think we were kind of laughing about the only way a female character would be able to do it is if she could re-do her part over and over again.”

Although Groundhog Day is an obvious reference point, Lyonne pointed to Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and Richard Pryor’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling as personal inspirations. “Both of those were semi-autobiographical tales told from the point of view of them in the hospital bed, like near-death experiences, and then kind of reconciling, what does it all mean?” Lyonne said. “Which, for me, because of my personal experience with addiction and dancing with death so often, felt very honest.”

Lyonne wasn’t being facetious about death: after she kicked heroin, she ended up having open-heart surgery to repair damage she’d done to her body. She recalled that her dear friend Sevigny accompanied her to the hospital, and how she had to lay down on the operating table. “Stone-cold sober!” she shouted. “You don’t get a Xanax or nothing. . . . What’s so crazy in that moment is your brain is almost like, on a survival-instinct level, going like, beep, beep, beep, beep, run, run, run! Because clearly, they’re about to come at you with a chainsaw and open your sternum.”

When I suggested to Lyonne that she’d packed half a lot of living into her first 30 years, she nodded a little sadly and pointed out one unfortunate side effect of her wild youth: she dropped out of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “Maybe I could’ve been a filmmaker early on, but instead, I decided to do things like open-heart surgery and so forth,” she quipped. “It is not lost on me that I’m a very dark horse in terms of surviving it all, in terms of making it out with a measure of sanity and desire to continue participating in life.”

That sense of emotional gravity flows through Russian Doll, making it more than a clever formal experiment. (Bandersnatch, I’m looking at you.) Poehler credited Headland (director of the films Bachelorette and Sleeping with Other People, as well as four episodes of Russian Doll) with figuring out how to fashion a complicated structure that somehow felt simple and satisfying. “We really needed somebody who was not afraid of the esoteric,” Poehler said, “and then could bring it down to earth and make this very physical, gritty show.” Headland imbued the visuals with an Alice in Wonderland-by-way-of-The Fabulous Stains feel, full of rich nighttime New York hues and subtly disorienting repetition.

Lyonne is currently in the midst of shooting the final season of Orange Is the New Black, a show that she said treated her “otherness” as “not a blemish but a bonus.” She loved that Netflix fostered this eccentricity in such a concrete way—with Jenji Kohan’s series and now with her own—and was relieved that it saw Russian Doll’s experimentation as a selling point.

Headland recalled that the feedback from Netflix surprised her. “Instead of saying, ‘Can you make it more conventional, so that more people like it?’ they said, ‘Actually, can you push it more into an original space, a riskier space?’” Headland said. That allowed Russian Doll to evolve into a vivid, fractured portrait of a woman.

Lyonne has pointedly surrounded herself with female collaborators on Russian Doll; in addition to Poehler and Headland, all the episodes were written and directed by women. In light of this overtly feminist approach, I had to ask her about Dave Becky’s role as a co-executive producer on the series. He is Lyonne and Poehler’s manager, but he also came under fire for allegedly helping another client, Louis C.K., suppress accusations of sexual misconduct. (Becky later dropped C.K. as a client and issued an apology for what was “perceived” as threatening behavior.) Lyonne looked nauseous at the question and, after an hour of fluid conversation, suddenly found herself struggling for words.

“He’s always been a part of this project and helped get it made,” she said, rubbing her face agitatedly. “I think that whole situation was an awful thing and he’s aware that it is.” After starting and halting sentences several times, Lyonne continued, “It’s all a minefield to talk about, because I don’t really know. I will say that I’m thrilled that we’re kind of unpacking the burial ground that is society. I really am glad that that’s happening, and, within that, discussing each situation individually on its own.”

Thinking back to this tense exchange, I remembered something Lyonne said earlier in our interview—that she found few female precedents on which to model Nadia, because she felt that in pop culture, “women aren’t allowed to just sit and think on the inherent discomfort of being a person.” Ironically, at 39, Lyonne finally feels settled in her own skin.

“I love being older,” she said. “My neck and my knees are not as solid as my emotional consistency. I finally feel steady enough to make it through a decade, but you just never know at this point. Anything could happen. You don’t know.”

Joy Press

TV Correspondent