What is one of Natasha Lyonne’s biggest fantasies? ‘To be a wallflower! The quiet mysterious woman in the corner who’s almost on the verge of disappearing. That’s always been my f-ing fantasy!’ Unfortunately, the role of wallflower was never in the cards for the 45-year-old actress – not by nature or by nurture.
It’s worth noting that she mentions this dream of going under the radar at 10 pm on a Saturday night wearing a sparkly poly-knit gray-and-white two-piece pajama set with ruffled sleeves and bell-bottom cuffs that she bought off Instagram because it reminded her of the wardrobe of her dead Hungarian grandmother. Add to it, her signature lion’s mane of red-orange hair – a style more wildflower than wall-flower – and pepper it with arguably the most idiosyncratic voice working in film today – coarse as Manhattan concrete, electric as a short burst of microphone interference – and you’ve got a woman who is so far from disappearing in a corner that you almost wonder how a human could be any more alive and awake to the moment. Her wit is so sharp and quick, always on, always running, you get the sense her energy could feed the entire downtown Manhattan grid.
Lyonne needs every ounce of energy for the armada of projects she’s taken on. She’s currently filming the second season of her hit comedy-mystery show Poker Face, where she serves as producer, star, and sometimes director (her lead role in season one as the streetsmart human-lie detector Charlie Cale earned her a nomination for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series at last year’s Emmys). Her latest film, director Azazel Jacob’s gloriously wrenching indie drama, His Three Daughters, about three incompatible sisters gathering in their father’s downtown New York apartment for his final days, was released this past September and is garnering award-season chatter for Lyonne in her unforgettable turn as the volatile black sheep.
Lyonne also has a slew of upcoming projects in the works (including the next installment in the Marvel Fantastic Four universe). And it’s nearly impossible to drive through Los Angeles or clomp around New York City without seeing Lyonne as a fashion muse for brands like Warby Parker and Maison Schiaparelli.
This flurry of attention usually swirls around some just-discovered ingenue in a blockbuster film franchise. Only Lyonne, all 5’3” of her, has been in the bright, sometimes harsh lights of the entertainment industry almost as soon as she could walk.
No one who’s heard Lyonne speak will be shocked to learn she was born in New York City. Encouraged by her parents – Lyonne describes the encouragement more like ‘being raised by wolves that turned into Lord of the Flies’ – she began working in commercials at age six and landed a gig on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse at seven. Lyonne, however, is quick to cast aside any claims of being a famous pre-adolescent. ‘Whenever I see Macaulay Culkin or Drew Barrymore, there’s an immediate bond between us,’ she says, ‘but I always remind them, “You guys were childhood stars. I was a childhood character actor”. I was not the face of Home Alone or E.T. Which is to say all the money I made as a kid did not result in a Lamborghini, or a Lambo, which is all I wanted. My situation was very different than theirs.’
As her family’s de facto breadwinner, Lyonne worked steadily from six to 16, when she was cast in Woody Allen's musical comedy Everyone Says I Love You. For some, landing an Allen film would be the confirmation that she was on the right path, but Lyonne felt like she was coming to the end of that whole part of her life. ‘I associated acting with child’s play,’ she recalls. ‘Like drinking a glass of Minute Maid and saying delicious over and over again. That was my parent’s dream and I had conquered it.’
She went to college at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, studying film and philosophy, already thinking of a bigger-picture, cerebral career as a writer-director in line with the contemplative arthouse masterpieces of Allen or Ingmar Bergman. Acting, however, didn’t give up on Lyonne so easily. Projects kept coming. While she might not have been a child star, she certainly became one in her late teens, with defining performances in Slums of Beverly Hills, American Pie, and But I’m a Cheerleader. In her early 20s, Lyonne had reached her ingenue moment, a gorgeous, gregarious actress with a dazzling talent.
Opportunities abounded. What could go wrong? Dates get hazy in addiction-land. How and when did Lyonne’s demons begin to overwhelm her life? Probably in the early to mid-2000s. Eventually drugs took their toll, drained her savings, and wiped the opportunities dry. Eventually she found rehab and more than anything, a desire and determination to stay alive. Because Lyonne almost didn’t survive her 20s.
‘I’m very grateful to this sort of fucked-up origin story,’ she says, looking back on those dark years, ‘because so much blossomed from that. Without that sort of dysfunction, what story would I have to tell?’
By the late aughts, Lyonne had found sobriety and her feet, but her starry-eyed ingenue days were over, Hollywood not being much of a forgiving place for second chances and false starts. ‘Honestly for a while, I didn’t think I’d go back to acting,’ she admits. ‘I thought I’d become a social worker. I was annoyed I didn’t have the education to go work for NASA.”
Lyonne’s current fan base might be enormous, but it’s her friend base that’s been a constant of her life – many of whom are fellow New Yorkers in the arts – and she leaned on these solid friendships to get her through the uncertain years after getting clean. ‘Chloë swept me up and took care of me,’ Lyonne says, of one of her most treasured and valuable friendships with actress Chloë Sevigny. ‘That’s just Chloë, how good she is.” (Flash forward a decade, and Sevigny would make cameos in both of Lyonne’s hit television shows.)
It was Sevigny who recommended Lyonne to director Mike Leigh when he was casting the 2008 New York stage production of his play Two Thousand Years. ‘I got very serious about it,’ she says. ‘I watched every Mike Leigh movie, read everything, got the full British accent going, lived a block from the theatre so I could just be there every day obsessively.’
Lyonne is the kind of actor who enters the mouth of the beast, heart and mind. When she takes a part, she’s fully invested, and like the best actors, some of who she is melds with the character, fitting together like a bolt in a lock.
Other early offerings were hardly so creative or glamorous (or even financially compensating). ‘I did a Michael Madsen movie where I had to fly myself to Atlanta and bring my own clothes,’ she recalls, referencing the forgettable backwoods torture horror Outrage: Born in Terror. ‘They knew I was on a level that I couldn’t argue the terms.’
Little by little, part by part, Lyonne remade a name for herself, rebuilding the house that had spectacularly blazed to ash. Without question, the job that marked the U-turn was her role as the tough-talking junkie on the long-running prison drama Orange Is the New Black. The role of Nicky allowed her a showcase to prove her acting chops and create a character not just of wicker comic one-liners but of careful complexity and emotional depth. It also, tellingly, was a show that was primarily made by women. With the success of Orange, Lyonne was back, really back, and yet it was also a totally new Natasha Lyonne, a career designed on her own terms and in her own making. She wouldn’t just act out the lines written for her. She’d control the page they were written on. Lyonne went from performer to ringleader, actress to multi-hyphenate mogul.
Back in the present, where she’s wearing the Las Vegas-y dead-grandmother sparkly pajama set, Lyonne is keeping her eye on the time. She needs to leave soon for the taping of Saturday Night Live. Many of her friends are part of the cast for this episode – including Maya Rudolph, with whom she began her production company Animal Pictures in 2018. (Rudolph eventually split off to explore other projects.) It’s going to be a late night – even later than usual because the clocks are turning back for daylight savings, and Lyonne has a packed day tomorrow, packed week really, with all the filming, packed eternity ahead of her. But a late night is music to Lyonne’s ears. She’s always been a night owl. In her younger days, that predilection meant bars or clubs or friends’ crash-pad apartments, staying up to watch the dawn shuffle over the East River. The post-midnight urge to stay up is still a part of her routine a decade and a half into sobriety. She rarely falls asleep before 3 a.m.
When she has an early call time on Poker Face, she’ll put herself to bed at 10 and just lie there, sleeplessly in the dark. ‘I’ll read a book, do my crosswords, play Wordle or Spelling Bee. I’ll meditate. But I won’t fall asleep. I can fall asleep at 2 in the afternoon, no problem. But 10 p.m.? Forget it. It’s 3 a.m. now and I have to be up by 5, and now I’m in trouble because I can’t even call in an order for coffee because no one delivers in that window.’ In Lyonne’s dream world (one that really is conducive to New York City), nothing should happen in the mornings. ‘My biggest goal as an actor is to never work in summer because I have too much hair. And to never work before noon.’
When asked if it’s the intense pressure of all the work – so much riding on these slender shoulders – she shakes her head. She’d be up until 3 a.m. in a convent with nothing to do the next day. And really, all of the multiple hat-wearing is a prison of her own making.
‘Sometimes I look at the amount of work I’m doing, and I’m like, do I have gambling debts I’m not aware of? Am I paying child support that I don’t know about? Why am I working this hard? Who’s this for?’
It’s a fair question, but it’s also all the work that excites her, allows her roller-coaster mind to find a track and make incredible thrill rides on the screen. But why do these projects matter so much more to her than the ones she was making the first time around? In reply she offers up anecdote from her childhood auditioning days. ‘I didn’t get the role of Curly Sue [in the 1991 film about a con-artist drifter and a curly-haired redhead orphan]. I was devastated at the time. But looking back, I realize that I was never going to get that role, even though I was perfect for it. Same with Annie. The only way I’m going to get to play Annie is if I write Annie. Then everyone will be like, holy shit, she’s Annie!’
That claiming of her own character by creating it herself, all talent and ambition from start to finish, did manifest with her 2019 Netflix hit show Russian Doll, which she created, wrote, produced, co-directed, and starred. ‘It was a radical tectonic shift because people understood it came from me.’ It was pure Natasha Lyonne, a smart, tough, vulnerable night urchin wandering around Manhattan’s East Village, trying to solve the point – or purposelessness – of her own existence while the last day of her life (in season one) recurs on infinite loop. The brilliant metaphysical acid trip lasted for two seasons, much of it involving night shoots filmed in the blocks around her own apartment. (Lyonne was obviously in heaven.) She hopes Russian Doll will continue on in some capacity, using Twin Peaks as a model, sparking future films or follow-up seasons.
If there is a similarity between Russian Doll and Poker Face – aside from the lead – it’s the feeling that arises in each show that the rotating collection of actors are coming together to work on something strange and unique. In other words, they’re each a piece of art rather than a quick means of paying the rent. There’s the sense of something personal on the line with these projects, an act of vulnerability and sharing rather than the usual tendency of actors to disappear and hide their weak spots. This approach has become something of a staple of Lyonne’s process: bringing friends on board, making the set or writer’s room into a community of like-minded souls. (Sevigny isn’t the only actor who overlaps on both shows.)
We’ve already talked about how important Lyonne’s crew of New York friends is to her, and the community she’s created in her work life isn’t all that different. ‘I love my family,’ she says. ‘I love being with friends and getting things made together. I was just thinking in the shower this morning, trying to be Zen, trying to be George Harrison before going to the set, how lucky I am for each and every one of them.’
The Lyonne adopted family is forever expanding. One of her biggest collaborators in recent years is Glass Onion director and producer Rian Johnson, who helped bring Poker Face to life. ‘I met Natasha through my wife [Karina Longworth, creator of the popular Hollywood podcast You Must Remember This]. It was during the time that Russian Doll came out and I just had a laser-focus of wanting to work with this person,’ Johnson says.
‘Russian Doll was the first thing Natasha had done that she’d completely crafted for herself, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her on the screen. There was an intelligence and magnetism, and something as singular about her performance as about Peter Falk [star of the late 1960s and ’70s detective show Columbo].’ Soon Poker Face came into being, something of a joint effort between star and creator.
‘We both love getting our hands dirty. It might look very riffy as a show, but it’s incredibly crafted, and it takes a lot of work. It’s especially intense to be the lead where you’re carrying every single episode.’
If Poker Face is an homage to the star-studded-cameo days of Columbo, the film His Three Daughters harkens back to another of Lyonne’s favourite genres: the intimate independent film. Lyonne is something of an indie film fanatic of the old-school writer-director vein, which has become something of an endangered species in the American cinema landscape. Jacobs wrote the script with Lyonne in mind for the thorny, chain-smoking character, and it didn’t take much convincing to get her to agree. Part of the appeal was not simply the talent quotient of her co-stars (Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon), but Jacobs’s personal, hands-on approach.
‘That was a real Lower East Side apartment we filmed in. I think Jacobs pasted up fliers looking for the perfect apartment himself. Az is the last analog filmmmaker. He hand-delivered the scripts. That’s what made working on it so incredible. We all synched up for 17 days and made a little family out of it.’ Beware of complimenting Lyonne on her performance. Don’t lead with something like, ‘Gosh, that was unexpected from you. I always think of you as a comedian, but to be able to punch heavyweight in a drama? Wow.’
Lyonne is an autodidact, meaning she doesn’t have formal training, but she has a life of experience in the trenches. ‘I am at a weird point in my career,’ she says. ‘I’ve been acting for 40 years. I’m a 360-movie machine. I’m Mr. Moviefone over here. So, when people say, “God, she’s never been better. Who knew she could do that?” I’m like, “Are you guys insulting me? Why are you surprised?” I’ve been doing this the whole time. Bring me a script by Merchant Ivory if you don’t believe me! I just don’t get those opportunities, so I have to make them.’
It’s time to go. Lyonne slips into the bathroom and reappears in a black tank top and a black leather miniskirt with black tights and boots. She’s changed out of the pajamas. She suggests coming by the set of Poker Face, climbs into a waiting SUV and drives north into a loud New York Saturday night.
Three days later, on a soundstage located on the edge of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, shooting for season two of Poker Face is underway. Two monitors off set catch the camera’s POV of a pivotal scene starring Lyonne and one of her seasoned guest stars. This scene is just one of six that will be shot that day. First, they do their blocking and rehearsals, and a few takes later they’re rolling. The camera homes in on Lyonne’s face. It’s a movie-star face, dynamic and bewitching with a universe of subtle messages being conveyed in every dart of the eyes and twitch of the mouth. The scene is repeated for a few more takes, and Lyonne’s artistry is on full display – offering subtle variations on her character’s inner turmoil even when she isn’t speaking any lines. Again, again, again, and that’s a wrap.
Two hours later there’s a break, and Lyonne is back in her dressing room, a large white office-like space with a comfortable sofa. She’s on her phone, texting back and forth with the casting director about actors for future episodes. During this short lunch, she’s also scheduled for a meeting with a rep from the show’s L.A. production company to go over scheduling before she has to get ready for the filming of her next scene. When asked how she handles ‘all this’ – the acting in front of the screen, all the producing work behind it, the expectations and the artistry and the meetings, and even still managing a personal life, she pauses, slumps back on the sofa, and in a moment of solemnity before she dissolves into laughter, quotes Stormzy, quoting Shakespeare. ‘Heavy is the weight that wears the crown. OK, get out of here. See you later.’
Photographer: Richie Shazam. Styling Patti Wilson. Set design: Nicholas des Jardina. Hair: John Novotny. Hair assistant: Miss Kam. Makeup: Mitch Yoshida. Manucurist: Sonya Meeshat. Tailor: Can Cha Zutic.
TOP IMAGE Natasha wears (left) Schiaparelli jacket, hat, bag; FIDAN NOVRUZOVA shorts; Falke tights; Cartier earrings, rings; Paula Rowan gloves, Marc Jacobs brooch (right) Harris Reed dress, Cartier earrings, bracelet; Le Silla shoes.