On a November evening outside a sound-editing studio in Chelsea, Natasha Lyonne was sipping a can of Red Bull Sugar-Free and puffing on a Marlboro Light 72, her brand of choice. “Short, like Robert Mitchum would have smoked,” she explained. She’d spent the afternoon doing a “watch-down” of new episodes of “Russian Doll,” her macabre Netflix comedy, in which she stars as Nadia Vulvokov, an East Village video-game engineer who in the first season gets hit by a cab on the night of her thirty-sixth-birthday party. The accident is fatal, but instead of expiring Nadia finds herself in a “Groundhog Day”-like loop of reliving the same night and then dying in increasingly gruesome and unlikely ways. Lyonne co-created the series with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, and for Season 2, which premières on April 20th, she has taken over from Headland as showrunner. She wrote four of the seven episodes, directed three, and had a hand in every aspect of postproduction. “Directing is this whole other third thing that came into my life, and I’ve never felt so at home,” Lyonne said. “It just turns all my defects into assets. Meaning, you know, being hyper-decisive and obsessive and tireless.” She pulled out her phone and ordered a Lyft, then decided that the wait was too long and strode to the curb to hail a yellow taxi. Before she could flag one, a group of young men in suits and ties recognized her and gave up theirs. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Lyonne said, and mimed the doffing of a cap.
Lyonne speaks in the rhythms of a Borscht Belt comedian. Her accent is outer borough, featuring rumbustious pronunciations (“cahk-a-rooch”) and the raspy “Ehhhh”s of a tired old rabbi settling into a comfortable chair. In front of a crowd or a camera, the effect becomes even more pronounced. “When I get nervous, I become Joe Pesci,” she told me. She is recognizable by her voice, but also by her Clara Bow eyes and her wild Titian curls, which lend her wise-guy mien a jolt of femininity. In Chinatown, she got out in front of a shabby walkup a block from Canal Street. Inside, at a secret outpost of a Japanese restaurant, she joined a table alongside the director Janicza Bravo, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, the “Succession” star Nicholas Braun, and several others who’d worked on “Zola,” Bravo’s super-fuelled 2020 film about a pair of strippers on a road trip gone wrong. They ate green-bean tempura and lacquered lamb chops while Harris, a precocious dandy of the theatre world, held forth on being fitted earlier in the day for his outfit, a custom Thom Browne suit in red-and-blue gingham. Lyonne picked at the food and chatted with Braun about a bar in the neighborhood that he helped open. In the presence of other outsized personalities, she seemed content to cede the spotlight.
“I’ve been waiting for a New Yorker profile since I was twelve,” Harris said.
“See, that makes one of us, because I was always, like, this is for intellectual bullies who graduated high school,” Lyonne replied.
After dinner, the group piled into two cars and headed to the nearby Metrograph Theatre, where Lyonne moderated a post-screening panel with the “Zola” team in front of a full house. Back outside on the street, she bear-hugged the actor Colman Domingo and brought up a vacation they’d soon be taking together in Mexico. At about ten o’clock, the comedian and actress Nora Lum, a.k.a. Awkwafina, pulled up to the curb in a luxury S.U.V. to whisk Lyonne off to a taping of “Saturday Night Live.”
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Raised between New York and Israel, Lyonne entered show business as a child, and as a young adult she became a star of cult comedies such as “Slums of Beverly Hills” and “But I’m a Cheerleader.” Her family life was tumultuous, though, and by her early twenties she was receding from Hollywood owing to drug abuse. She’s been clean since 2006, but she returned to professional prominence only after playing a scene-stealing role in the Netflix prison series “Orange Is the New Black,” which premièred in 2013. Now forty-three, she is charging ahead through her life at full tilt. She told me, “I get panicky I won’t have enough time. I feel like I already blew so much.”
“Russian Doll” is, in a sense, a show about lost time. In the course of the first season, Nadia drowns in the East River, falls down a flight of stairs, chokes on a chicken wing, and gets stung by a swarm of bees. Each time, she ends up back in the eccentrically renovated bathroom of her friend Maxine as the peppy opening notes of Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up” blare from the next room, where Nadia’s birthday bash is still raging. Eventually, she meets a man in the neighborhood named Alan (Charlie Barnett), who is having a similar problem, and together they set out to solve the mystery of their shared existential glitch. Season 1 was a showcase for Lyonne’s gregarious bravado and her world-weary one-liners (“Thursday. What a concept.”), but it also packed in philosophical musings and hefty themes of mortality and redemption. Its look channelled Lyonne’s favorite New York films, from the downtown grime of “Sid and Nancy” to the urban kookiness of “After Hours.” In a review for this magazine, Emily Nussbaum compared the show to such “arch, deeply emotional puzzle boxes” as “Fleabag” and “The Leftovers.” It won Emmy Awards for its costumes, cinematography, and production design, and was nominated in ten other categories, including Outstanding Comedy Series.
For Season 2, the “Groundhog Day” premise has been traded for a riff on “Back to the Future,” and the result is heavier than one might expect. In an early scene, Nadia discovers that she has teleported, via the No. 6 train, to 1982, the year she was born. This sets her off on a race to uncover a family mystery and its psychological reverberations. Through seven episodes, parts of which were filmed on location in Budapest, Nadia keeps barrelling into the past, connecting the dots between her own sense of dislocation, her mother’s mental-health problems, and her Hungarian grandmother’s experience of the Holocaust. (Alan, meanwhile, delves into his own personal history.) Lyonne admitted that an earnest exploration of inherited trauma might not resonate with every fan of “Russian Doll” ’s jaunty first season. “You don’t get a lot of shots to say what you want to say, so you may as well say what you want while they’re letting you,” she said, adding, “If people don’t like it, I’ll just sue them.”
Lyonne lives in a luxury condominium inside a converted synagogue in Manhattan. An Orthodox congregation still occupies the ground floor. One winter afternoon, she showed me around her three-bedroom unit, which is filled with a stylishly jumbled array of art and personal memorabilia. “This can all be yours for twenty-five hundred a month, in perpetuity,” she joked. “Hear me out, this is not a scam!” The bed was unmade. Framed movie posters were propped along the walls, some two or three deep. Lyonne was wearing her ringlets pulled away from her face in a lopsided bun. On her fingers were acrylic nails—red, white, and spiky—that she’d kept on with Krazy Glue since a photo shoot a month earlier. She pointed out a set of timbales from her ex-boyfriend Fred Armisen, and a Sonos speaker from the “lovely new man” in her life, whom she preferred not to name.
Lyonne is an autodidact and a film obsessive, who peppers conversations with references to silent cinema, Jewish mysticism, nineteen-seventies Hollywood moguls, New York City trivia, and Lou Reed lyrics. A single question sent to her by text message might elicit a waterfall of replies, plus a GIF of, say, a Pikachu with the caption “Haters Gonna Hate.” In her apartment, nearly every shelf, wall nook, and windowsill was crowded with books. She excitedly showed me a volume called “House of Psychotic Women,” about female neurosis in genre films, and a copy of Cynthia Ozick’s 1997 novel, “The Puttermesser Papers,” which she said she would be reading aloud for a new audiobook recording. Pointing to a beat-up biography of Rasputin, she said, “In my addiction I was always carrying this around. It was my safety blanket.” Lyonne was educated in part at a Modern Orthodox Jewish high school where students read the Talmud in the original Aramaic, and she runs “Russian Doll” a bit like a yeshiva study circle. A lengthy syllabus that she distributed to the writers of Season 2 included texts on Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann, quantum mechanics, and the history of the lobotomy. She told me that the show’s riddle-like construction was influenced by her love of word games. Hanging in her kitchen is a frame containing a crossword puzzle that she wrote for the Times, in 2019, and an accompanying article. “This for me is my favorite interview I’ve ever done,” she said. “Because it was about something I have very clean feelings for.”
Lyonne recalled that she has wanted to be a director ever since her first major film role, in Woody Allen’s musical “Everyone Says I Love You,” playing the Allen character’s free-spirited teen daughter. In her apartment she keeps a cramped “movie room” outfitted with a TV, a love seat, and dozens of vintage VHS tapes. On one wall hung a still photograph from the first project she directed, a short film for the Parisian fashion brand Kenzo, from 2017. Leaning against another was a poster of Linda Manz, a tough-girl actress of a previous generation, from a new restoration of Dennis Hopper’s “Out of the Blue,” which Lyonne and Chloë Sevigny, her longtime best friend, helped finance. In the living room, two huge stained-glass windows cast colorful shadows on the rug. On the coffee table was a copy of the script for one of Lyonne’s most beloved films, Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical musical “All That Jazz.” Boisterous and hallucinatory, it follows a pill-popping choreographer (Roy Scheider) as he burns the candle at both ends while being courted by an angel of death, played by Jessica Lange. Each morning, he tells his beleaguered reflection in the mirror, “It’s showtime, folks!” Lyonne told me, “It’s the closest approximation to what life feels like that I’ve ever seen.” Sitting on top of an old piano were the two SAG Awards that she received for her performance in “Orange Is the New Black.” “You always read about people who say, ‘I put my awards directly in the garbage, because I’m grounded.’ No! Put your awards where people can see them! What are you, a fucking dummy who wants to pretend like you didn’t do that work? Schmucks.”
Lyonne has been working since kindergarten. Born Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein, in 1979, she is the second child of parents whom she describes as “rock-and-roll black sheep from conservative Jewish families.” Her mother, Ivette Buchinger, was the daughter of Hungarian Holocaust survivors who settled in Los Angeles by way of Paris and went into watch distribution. Lyonne described her mother as a “red-headed European prima-ballerina hot chick,” who hoped to become a professional dancer but never quite found an on-ramp. As a teen-ager, Ivette met Lyonne’s father, Aaron Braunstein, a loud-talking, ponytailed Brooklyn native, and they began a high-octane love affair. “They were both into fast cars, fur coats, Rottweilers, cocaine, drinking,” Lyonne said. Ivette moved to New York to be with Aaron, and they had Lyonne’s older brother in 1972. They bought a run-down mansion in Kings Point, Long Island, that they boasted had once been the home of Herman Melville. (It had not.) Ivette worked on and off for her parents’ business, but around the time Lyonne was born the company foundered, and the family struggled financially. “My father was always up to shit,” Lyonne said. “First he wanted to be a race-car driver, then a boxing promoter. So I got put into this business.”
Aaron and Ivette took a gimmicky approach to stage parenting. When Lyonne was five, they legally changed her last name. She recalled that at parties they would have her take sips of their beer and belt out David Lee Roth lyrics “to show off for their friends.” Riding the Long Island Rail Road to auditions in the city, Ivette would urge her daughter to read the Wall Street Journal stock trades aloud. “It was, like, my street-urchin trick,” Lyonne said. She landed her first film role at the age of six, a minor part in Mike Nichols’s 1986 adaptation of Nora Ephron’s novel “Heartburn,” and, that same year, got a recurring role on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” She auditioned for but didn’t get the lead role in “Curly Sue,” though the character, a frizzy-haired ham who assists her grifter father figure, may as well have been written for her. “When I go to Times Square I get nostalgic, because I think of myself as a little kid with a briefcase walking around, developing street smarts, wondering if my drunk dad is going to pick me up,” she said.
In social settings, Lyonne trots out certain anecdotes from her childhood as if they were bits in a comedic monologue. But in reality her parents’ marriage was volatile, and her upbringing was distressingly unstable. She recalled that Aaron would disappear on drinking sprees or lock himself in his bedroom for days at a time, and that Ivette would move out of the house after the couple’s ugliest fights, dragging Lyonne with her to a Manhattan rental apartment. “It was a lot of basic shit, like Mommy called the cops on Daddy,” Lyonne said, adding, “For me and my brother, it was very much trying to hold on.” When she was eight, her father abruptly announced that the family was moving to Israel, and that he had grand plans to bring Mike Tyson to the Hilton Tel Aviv. (Lyonne refers to the move as her parents’ “tax-evasion scheme,” because they ended up in debt to the I.R.S.) Her dad bought a black Porsche and promoted boxing matches in small venues around the country. Lyonne recalled visiting the ancient city of Caesarea, taking a ski trip in Lebanon, and performing in an Israeli movie involving a hot-air balloon. In a narrow office at the back of her apartment, she showed me a framed photograph of her working as a “ring girl” at a fight in Tel Aviv, grinning and waving an Israeli flag. Lyonne described that period as the “great years” of her childhood, but in 1989 Ivette returned to New York and took Natasha with her. “My dad’s drinking was no longer magnanimous or the life of the party,” Lyonne said. “And it’s not like they were winning at this boxing-promoting life style. That pipe dream was dying, and the money was running out.” (Her brother stayed in Israel, and as adults the siblings lost touch.)
Back in New York, mother and daughter bounced from one apartment to another. Lyonne landed a role in the film version of “Dennis the Menace,” but she was auditioning more than she was landing parts. “I’m no Drew Barrymore, I’m not in fucking ‘E.T.,’ ” she said. “And I’m lugging around this nutjob”—her mother—“and we are a package deal.” Ivette’s parents helped support them financially, and at their insistence Lyonne secured a scholarship to Ramaz, an Orthodox academy on the Upper East Side, but she was expelled in her sophomore year for dealing marijuana to her classmates. In 1995, Ivette moved to Miami, and Lyonne, who was fifteen, stayed behind to make “Everyone Says I Love You,” sleeping on the couch of a family friend’s studio apartment in Murray Hill. The movie was packed with stars—Goldie Hawn, Alan Alda, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts—but Lyonne recalled feeling out of place among them, “like they all had a shared secret I wasn’t in on.” After filming, she joined her mother in Florida and finished high school there, a year early, through a bridge program at N.Y.U. She applied with an essay comparing her co-stars to the characters in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” “It was very over the top, like how I would not be a part of a lost generation and was going to show up and be the real deal because mendacity makes me sick,” she said. “So, basically, me now, but high and sixteen.”
As an adult, Lyonne communicated with her parents irregularly, and by the time of their deaths, in the twenty-tens, she’d mostly cut off contact. Her father moved back to New York and ran a failed campaign for City Council on the Upper West Side, in 2013, the year before he died. In a piece that appeared in the Observer, he showed off an apartment cluttered with images of his daughter but admitted that they no longer spoke. “Poor Natasha. Let’s all cry for her,” he said. “What makes her be angry, angry at the father, that’s part of the thing, right?” Ivette struggled with mental-health problems, especially later in her life. When I asked Lyonne when her mother died, she had to think for a moment. “It was around Season 1 of ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ because I remember being so scared that those billboards were gonna trigger her,” she told me, adding, “I was quite intentionally trying to be invisible the entire time my parents were alive.” She continued, “No one is a villain or a victim; I don’t feel like anyone was trying to cause harm. I make a lot of jokes about my parents and stuff, but ultimately I am very impressed that people seem to have this endless reservoir of strength and empathy to engage with things that are as deeply and constantly triggering as a family unit.”
One of Lyonne’s major creative ambitions is to make a film about the years she spent in Israel—“ ‘Paper Moon,’ but with Jews,” as she put it—but “Russian Doll” is focussed on wrestling with matrilineage. Lyonne’s maternal grandmother, Ella, was a survivor of Auschwitz, and her maternal grandfather, Morris, lost his first wife in the camps. According to Lyonne, they coped with the horrors in their past with a brusque stoicism that left little room for their daughter’s problems. “It was, like, life as an endurance test of how much one can withstand,” Lyonne said. The new season of “Russian Doll” doesn’t draw on Ella’s story directly, but it explores the rift between a traumatized older generation and a vulnerable younger one, and the ripple effects of what Lyonne calls “damaged love.” She told me, “I joke that there’s a straight line from Hitler to heroin.”
Nadia has a surrogate-parent figure on the show, named Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), based on a friend of Ivette’s, Ruth Factor, whom Lyonne considers to be her godmother. In a Season 1 scene that was inspired by actual events, young Nadia (Brooke Timber) helps her mother, Nora, as she manically hauls watermelons out of a bodega and into the back seat of their car, which is already packed with the fruit. Later, when Nora has a meltdown at home, Ruth sweeps in to care for the girl. Lyonne wrote several of Factor’s signature phrases into Ruth’s lines, among them, “Nothing in this world is easy, except pissing in the shower.”
In the second episode of “Russian Doll” Season 1, Nadia goes on a nihilistic bender, pounding shots, snorting cocaine off the end of a comb, and falling asleep in the middle of her party with a lit cigarette dangling from her fingers. Sevigny, who plays Nadia’s mother on the show, recalled sobbing as she watched the episode for the first time. “Seeing her that way again,” she told me, her voice breaking, “I couldn’t handle it.”
By her late teens, Lyonne was a self-professed “club-kid raver and pothead,” but she told me, “I was so young that the consequences weren’t that serious yet. I was seventeen. I was Teflon.” She landed her breakout role, in 1997, in Tamara Jenkins’s dramedy “Slums of Beverly Hills,” playing the adolescent daughter of a huckster used-car salesman in nineteen-seventies California. Jenkins told me that she initially had doubts about whether Lyonne was right for the part. “I was, like, she’s really interesting, but I don’t know. She talks like she’s walking out of ‘Mean Streets’ or something. I kept saying, ‘We have to peel back your De Niro thing, because I want to know who you are, and I want to be able to have your vulnerability present.’ ” Lyonne gave a bravura performance, both insolent and poignantly mature, but during filming she drove while she was drunk and crashed her car into the window of a furniture store on La Brea Avenue. “I’ll never forget the steering-wheel imprint on her chest,” Jenkins said.
In 1998, Lyonne enrolled at N.Y.U., but she quickly dropped out. According to the terms of the bridge program, she needed to complete a year of college studies before receiving her high-school diploma, so she never did receive one. “The jobs and drugs were doing this two-handed dance of pulling me away from an education,” she told me. “Slums of Beverly Hills” made her one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young actresses, and in 1999 she starred in the queer satire “But I’m a Cheerleader,” and in “Detroit Rock City,” a seventies period piece, with her then boyfriend, Edward Furlong. She also signed on to play a sexually sophisticated sidekick in “American Pie,” the gross-out teen comedy, a gig that she told me she took only for the money, after turning it down, “like, five times.” She bought a studio apartment on Sixteenth Street and, at a party around the same time, met Sevigny, an actress and downtown It Girl who was five years her senior. Lyonne described seeing Sevigny as a sort of big sister. “I remember Chloë coming over and washing my fishnets in the bathtub with Woolite,” she said. Sevigny told me, “I found her very dynamic and engaging and reckless in a way that was, at that point, fun.”
In 2001, just as “American Pie 2” became the No. 1 movie in the country, Lyonne was arrested on a D.U.I. charge. The following year, she moved into a town house in Gramercy Park owned by the actor Michael Rapaport, a close friend, with a series of roommates that included the Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur and the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. The place became a rowdy neighborhood gathering spot, and drug use was common. (After moving out and going to rehab, Wainwright wrote a song, called “Natasha,” that goes, “Does anybody know how scary / This is for you and is for me?”) In December of 2004, new tenants in the house called the police, accusing Lyonne of threatening their dog and ripping a mirror off the wall. She spent a night in jail, and, soon afterward, Rapaport evicted her.
“I just decided to drop out completely,” Lyonne said. “It gets really dark. I sort of think I’m done forever. And I’m not coming back.” She recalled periods when she went by the street alias Crystal Snow and would call her agent from pay phones to inquire about booking jobs. “It’s a long time between snorting heroin to shooting it to sharing needles,” she said. “I took it to the finish line.” She continued acting sporadically, including in “My Suicidal Sweetheart,” a 2005 indie flop about an escaped mental patient road-tripping with her boyfriend while trying repeatedly to end her life. But she wouldn’t have another noteworthy onscreen role until “Orange Is the New Black.” The press pounced on the story of a young celebrity’s downward spiral. In May of 2005, Rapaport wrote a piece in Jane called “Evicting Natasha Lyonne.” (He and Lyonne have since reconciled, but at the time, she said, “my heart was broken.”) The same year, life-threatening health complications landed Lyonne in the I.C.U., and the details were leaked to the Post. After she missed several court dates for charges related to the neighbor incident, a judge issued a standing warrant for her arrest. In December of 2006, she turned herself in, and, on court orders, checked into a rehab center in Pennsylvania. She hasn’t used drugs since.
Lyonne rejects the notion that what she went through was tragic or shameful. “What always made me feel really bad with, like, Terry Gross or Barbara Walters was when they would just come for me with the drug stuff,” she said. “And I’m, like, Dude, why are you victimizing something I’m transparent around?” She told me that in retrospect she sees her drug use, in part, as an attempt to grapple with her parents’ reckless tendencies. “Now that I’m an adult, I think so much of my being a wild thing was because I was trying to get in their shoes,” she said, adding, “I fully cleaned house on that type of behavior. I make sure that, at this point in my life, I just don’t fuck with chaos.”
In “Russian Doll,” Nadia’s self-destructive moments—and the grisly deaths that result—are treated without sentimentality. Lyonne said that she made the character a video-game programmer because she wanted her to confront her knotty predicament “without being spooked by it.” Often, Nadia discusses dying with a detached curiosity. “This is not good or bad. It’s just a bug,” she tells Alan in one episode. Nadia sees the world as absurd and wearying, but also as being suffused with possibility should she make it out the other side. Lyonne’s friend Michaela Coel, the creator and star of the British show “I May Destroy You,” about surviving the obliterating aftermath of sexual assault, told me that she admired Lyonne’s willingness to delve into her lowest experiences. “I don’t know if this will make sense to anyone other than Natasha, but it feels like we are both living life on some sort of dangerous and thrilling edge,” Coel said, adding, “We’re on two parallel edges. And we’re shouting at each other, and waving, and talking about how cool it is to be alive.”
Since 2018, Lyonne has co-run a production company called Animal Pictures with the producer Danielle Renfrew Behrens and the actress and comedian Maya Rudolph, one of several close friends who are “S.N.L.” alumni. “The name comes from when we were sitting at lunch, and I said, ‘You’re a fucking animal,’ ” Rudolph told me. “She wants to devour.” The company is headquartered in L.A.’s Studio City, in a white stucco ranch house whose main room is dominated by a giant painting of Rudolph in the style of a Gilded Age heiress. When I arrived, on an August morning, I found Lyonne smoking in the back yard and talking intently on her phone. She was wearing a backward black leather Telfar baseball cap and a Gucci purse with a lion’s-head clasp, plus her mother’s gold chain and her grandmother’s watch. The look was not unlike Nadia’s punk-rococo style in “Russian Doll,” a combination of glamorous and street tough. Noticing me, Lyonne pointed toward a small guesthouse, between the patio and a wooden pergola, where I found Todd Downing, an editor and a co-producer of the new season, sitting in front of several monitors cutting a sequence from Episode 3.
“Sorry,” Lyonne said, a minute later, entering the cottage and flopping down on a brown leather couch. “I was just arguing with the Netflix people about my music budget.”
On the wall was a whiteboard scrawled with notes for several episodes and a framed poster for the 1974 Robert Altman comedy “California Split.” Lyonne stretched her legs out on a coffee table and asked Downing, a burly man with a thick brown mustache, to pull up a scene that takes place after Nadia has rocketed back in time. Nadia is at Crazy Eddie, the now defunct electronics store in the East Village, exchanging banter with the store clerk (Malachi Nimmons). He mentions that he edits a zine about “commodity fetishism and the Debordian spectacle,” referring to the French theorist Guy Debord.
“Let’s cut that,” Lyonne said. “It feels very mundane.” Downing wordlessly clicked and then played the scene again with the line scrubbed.
“I kind of miss it,” he said.
“O.K., O.K., we keep the Debordian spectacle!” she replied.
To end the scene, Lyonne had improvised several “wackadoo exits.” In one, she tried a riff on Crazy Eddie’s slogan: “My prices are also insane!” In another, she said, “You should know I have an I.U.D.” Lyonne wrinkled her nose as she watched herself onscreen, and said, “What is she doing?” Lyonne is by all accounts an exacting showrunner. “She’s very demanding,” Alex Buono, an executive producer and the producing director of Season 2, told me fondly. Amy Poehler, who executive-produced both seasons, described her as a “very humane dictator.” But, after some back-and-forth over Nadia’s lines, Lyonne settled on the one that made Downing laugh: “All right, well. We live and we die, huh? Yeah. Adios!”
Lyonne nodded approvingly when she saw another shot from the episode, showing Sevigny’s image replicating infinitely on a pair of closed-circuit TV screens. “What you’re seeing there is introspective camera stuff based on Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘Strange Loop’ theory, made into a half-hour comedy,” Lyonne said. “That’s very satisfying to me.” Hofstadter’s book and many of the other texts on her Season 2 reading list explore ideas about the construction of a self or the hidden forces that shape a life. Lyonne showed me an app called Universe Splitter, which maps the repercussions of small individual choices using quantum theory, and explained that in the writers’ room they’d occasionally use it to “open up story ideas for fun.” She said, “The bigger question I’m asking is if it’s true that we all have the ability, regarding past trauma, to reorient ourselves around it, or if in fact there is no free will, because it’s a set element of the universe, and therefore we must just radically accept the full weight of the past.”
“Russian Doll” came about after Poehler approached Lyonne, in 2014, with a concept for a sitcom, called “Old Soul,” in which Lyonne would play a reformed rebel working at a home for the elderly. They pitched the show to NBC and recruited Ellen Burstyn, Fred Willard, and Rita Moreno as co-stars, but the project languished in the pilot stage. Poehler and Lyonne continued exchanging ideas, one of which involved Lyonne’s being stuck in a time loop and entering a new romantic entanglement each week. “I think it came from the fact that I just selfishly love to watch Natasha argue,” Poehler said. Lyonne met with several potential showrunners before settling on Leslye Headland, a playwright and the director of such acerbic comedies as “Bachelorette” (2012) and “Sleeping with Other People” (2015), in which Lyonne had played a small role. Together, the two decided to use the “Groundhog Day” conceit to tackle Lyonne’s troubled past through the metaphor of a death wish that won’t stop coming true.
Headland recalled that Lyonne asked her early on to read “You Can’t Win,” the cult-classic memoir by Jack Black, from 1926, about life as an opium-addicted drifter. “That was a big ‘Aha’ moment for me,” Headland said. “I saw that Natasha is a transient figure, one who moves in and out of spaces without ascribing to social norms or dictates.” In “Russian Doll,” the character of Nadia in some ways fits the trope of the lonely young woman in the big city. “She has the same cat as Holly Golightly,” Headland said. And yet the show is refreshingly uninterested in a conventional heroine’s journey toward romantic or professional fulfillment. In 2017, Lyonne and Headland secured a straight-to-series order from Netflix. They partnered with Jax Media, the production company behind “Broad City” and “Search Party,” and recruited a team of quirky character actors to populate the show’s surrealist world, including Greta Lee, whose hilarious performance as Maxine includes ditzily uttering the greeting “Sweet birthday babyyyyy!” each time Nadia crashes back to the land of the living.
Because of the pandemic, Season 2 took three years to create. Headland left the show before writing began, and in 2020 she signed on to make “The Acolyte,” a “Star Wars” series for Disney+. Lyonne cited the “Star Wars” commitment as the reason for Headland’s departure. “There’s also tricky stuff that happened that has nothing to do with me, to be honest,” she added without elaborating. Headland didn’t comment on the circumstances surrounding her exit, but told me, “I used to say to Natasha all the time, ‘You have all these incredible ideas, but it’s like you need the gel cap to put the NyQuil in. It doesn’t have a container.’ What I did for the show was a lot of narrative wrangling. But, by the second season, I wasn’t really sure I needed to be there anymore.” Lyonne had some reservations about stepping in to head the team, but Jenji Kohan, the showrunner of “Orange Is the New Black,” and Poehler encouraged her. Poehler told me, “With Russian nesting dolls, you open them and they get smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter. When you look at the show, she is the distilled tiny doll.” Lyonne jokes that she wants to become like Robert Evans, the matinée idol who went on to run Paramount Pictures in its seventies glory days. “Even though this is so stressful and intense, I’ve never been happier,” she said. “As a child actor, you have this hypervigilance that the rug is gonna be pulled out from under you. As the showrunner, I feel very calm by having all the information.”
Lyonne loaded Season 2 of “Russian Doll” with visual references to the auteurist cinema she reveres—Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence,” Coppola’s “Dracula,” Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.” She attributes the Dutch angles in one episode to Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil,” and a long tracking shot through a morgue in another to “Spike Lee dolly tricks.” “The entire season is an Easter egg,” she told me. Perhaps as a consequence, the season is more shambolic than the first. As Nadia’s adventures expand into multiple time lines, the story becomes disorientingly twisty. The result is less a puzzle box than a messy metaphysical punk opera, for worse and for better. In life and in “Russian Doll,” Lyonne employs the classic Jewish coping mechanism of leavening difficult moments with shtick. There are scenes in Season 2, though, when Nadia’s wisecracking finally gives way to quiet emotion. When she first sees her mother’s image, in the 1982 time line, the camera lingers on Nadia’s terrified face as tears roll down her cheeks. “I figured out how to stop dying,” Lyonne said. “How do I learn how to live? That’s what Season 2 is about.”
Lyonne told me that one of the great moments of her life was being invited to read Lou Reed’s song “Coney Island Baby” at his memorial service, in 2013. An episode of “Russian Doll” ’s new season was named for the song. Reed was one of many hard-living men whom Lyonne idolized in her youth. “Any macho swing involving a guy on a Greyhound bus with a notebook,” she said. “A Hemingway type with a glass of whiskey. Bukowski at the bar. John Fante on the case,” she said. “I started to think, O.K., so that’s what being a person is. You’re supposed to go into the belly of the beast.”
But her recovery and her second act have been shaped by the guidance of other women. In 2009, Lyonne auditioned for Nora and Delia Ephron’s Off Broadway play “Love, Loss, and What I Wore.” Nora remembered her from “Heartburn,” and the two struck up a friendship. She cast Lyonne in the play and later offered her second home, in L.A., as a place for Lyonne to stay during work trips. “I was, like, ‘Nora, what are you doing? I’m a crackhead and a chain-smoker!’ ” Lyonne recalled. “She was, like, ‘Oh, shut up already. Not anymore. Just smoke outside and tell the housekeeper when you’re done.’ ” (On the wall of her office, Lyonne keeps a note from Nora that reads, simply, “I love you.”) In 2012, Lyonne appeared in her third “American Pie” film, and the following year she had small roles in a string of other forgettable comedies. Then Jenji Kohan launched her comeback by casting her in “Orange Is the New Black,” in the cheekily self-referential role of a former heroin addict whom another inmate dubs “the junkie philosopher.”
Through Animal Pictures, Lyonne is currently developing shows with several female creators, including Alia Shawkat and the “Russian Doll” writer Cirocco Dunlap. She compared her friendships with other women in the business to the fellowship among such men as Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Paul Schrader in nineteen-seventies Hollywood. “It’s almost like they had a pickup-basketball-game community of filmmaking, where they came around and saw each other’s stuff,” she said. A few nights after the “Zola” panel, I went with Lyonne and Janicza Bravo to see a Romanian film called “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” at Film Forum. The movie is an experimental romp about a teacher’s weathering the aftermath of her homemade sex tape appearing on the Internet. Its middle section features a dispassionate narrator reciting facts about Romanian history. “Have you guys seen Lina Wertmüller’s ‘Seven Beauties’?” Lyonne said afterward. “I don’t want to insult this movie, but that one is better done.”
She and Bravo retired to the nearby Washington Square Diner, where they settled into the same side of a booth. Like Bill Murray in the diner scene in “Groundhog Day,” Lyonne ordered with abandon: two grilled cheese sandwiches, two cups of chicken-noodle soup, French fries, turkey sausage, a side of pickles, and black coffee. Bravo asked only for mint tea. As Lyonne dipped a sandwich into a puddle of ketchup, she spoke of being a teen star in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood.
“After ‘Slums of Beverly Hills,’ they were, like, ‘Welcome to the WB! What do you want to do here?’ ” she said. “And I was, like, ‘I don’t fucking want to be on “Dawson’s Creek”!’ I went into that meeting in a Lenny Bruce T-shirt with a bottle of whiskey in my back pocket. My manager had to get me out of bed because I was so hungover. I came in and was, like, ‘You guys have seen “Chinatown”? Have you thought about anything like that?’ ”
“I actually do wish you’d found yourself in ‘Chinatown’ for teens,” Bravo said.
“I was in there pitching it before I knew what pitching was, like, ‘You guys need slats in the shades where the light gets through.’ ”
“And a suit, right? And a secretary!” Bravo said, putting on a Lyonne accent.
Lyonne talked about her family.
“I mean, I got really lucky, because they died,” she said. Bravo laughed sympathetically. “I only mean that it was so all-consuming, and I think it’s very hard to let go of that,” Lyonne continued. “Now I’m an adult, and I can start my life. That’s no longer a present danger in my psyche.”
“Did you ever see them in your dreams?” Bravo asked.
“It was worse than that. I would think I saw them on the street or in a grocery store, because I was terrified of running into them. For me, it’s a great relief to feel like I can walk free in New York.”
After dinner, we strolled south through Washington Square Park toward Bravo’s hotel on the Lower East Side. Despite the rise of Omicron, the night-life crowd was out in full force. Lyonne has a distinctive way of moving through the city: clomping, springy, coat collar popped high. Season 2 of “Russian Doll” opens with one of many shots of Nadia perambulating, her black boots tapping in rhythm with Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.” Lyonne is currently working, with the director Rian Johnson, on a “Columbo”-style crime show for Peacock, and it’s not hard to picture Lyonne, an avid Peter Falk fan, as the hardboiled detective, stalking the streets with a cigarette between her fingers and a wry expression on her face. Waiting to cross Houston Street, we spotted a group of fratty-looking revellers on the far side of the intersection, elbowing one another and pointing in Lyonne’s direction. “Oh, no, we need to get away from them,” Bravo said. But Lyonne just cocked her head confidently as she stepped off the curb. I asked her if the attention bothered her. “In New York, I like to think I’m a gnome or a leprechaun,” she said. “I’m part of the psychedelic journey through Manhattan.” ♦
An earlier version of this article failed to list Amy Poehler as a co-creator of “Russian Doll.”
