Women
Shaping
The
Future60 | Rolling Stone | March 2020
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RISTINA^ EHRLICH/FORWARD^ ARTISTS.appropriate action at the time”). Outside, the air
is clear and bracing, the right sort of air for this
sterilized, gentrified version of the East Village
overlaid on the grimier one Lyonne remembers
well. “I mean, I’ve lived all over this neighbor-
hood for the past 20 years, and the ghosts of the
streets are real,” she’d said earlier. “It’s funny
that you can walk through waves of them. It’s
funny that memory is as Fellini experiences it.”
I’m seeing the ghosts too. We walk half a
block to the first apartment I had in New York,
a prewar walk-up with all the grungy charm of a
Jim Jarmusch film. I tell her that my room used
to look out on a mortician’s storefront. “Ah!” she
barks. “That’s the New York I remember: Morti-
cians on every corner!” In the spot where I think
the funeral home used to be, there’s now a pizza
franchise (“All their pizzas come embalmed”),
which we glare at from under the light of Christ-
mas trees being sold across the street. “They
love putting Christmas trees
here,” Lyonne observes. “I stole
one of these Christmas trees
once — on my life, I did. A New
York Post van was delivering
papers, and we stole the tree,
tipped the driver, and had him
drive it back to my place.”
We wander near Sevigny’s
old apartment, where Lyonne
says she spent many nights,
probably never imagining that
she would one day write a TV
show in which her mother
is incarnated by her closest
friend. In fact, Sevigny is a
large part of the reason Lyonne
got the chance to do so. When
she was still “on the mend,” as
Sevigny puts it, Sevigny talked
the director Scott Elliott into
giving Lyonne a theater debut.
The next year, Nora and Delia
Ephron cast her in a play with
Tracee Ellis Ross, Tyne Daly,
Rosie O’Donnell, Samantha
Bee, and Rita Wilson. “And they
really kind of took me in,” Lyonne says. “I had
gone so far from what’s standard practice of
being a dropout in this town, that I was forever
surprised when someone like Nora Ephron
would give me the keys to her house and say,
‘Go stay there. I’m out of town.’ I would be, like,
very confused, because I didn’t understand why
she wouldn’t think I would steal her stuff, you
know? And I guess she could see in me, long
before I could, that I wasn’t in that place in my
life anymore. And that was the type of stuff that
started rebuilding my sense of trusting myself,
of wondering what I could do. There was a sortSevigny, tells me. “Just the way she looks at a
problem or relationships, it’s always surprising,
always inventive, and just brilliant.” Being asked
to play young Nadia’s mother — in what turned
out to be some of the show’s most potent scenes
— was a heady experience for Sevigny. “I don’t
think people understand the gravity of that, how
much of the show was based on things around
her mother,” she says. “It was very emotional
and upsetting and cathartic. On a human level,
on a best-friend level, it was pretty deep.”
Lyonne’s Talmudic toughness can be traced
back to growing up with a boxing-promoter
father who created a “tough-guy ethos” in their
unstable home. When Lyonne was eight, her
father moved the family to Israel, where “his
dreams were about bringing Mike Tyson to the
Tel Aviv Hilton and becoming the Don King of
Israel.” She grew up watching movies like Scar-
face, Taxi Driver, and The Godfather, and culti-
vating a clench-fisted, tomboy stance that she
hoped would endear her to distant parents. She
didn’t have many female friends. She thought
she might grow up to be a spy, though she now
realizes that the “hypervigilance I was experi-
encing was more about being a kid in an unsafe
home.” After her parents divorced and she
moved back to New York with her mom, things
got only more precarious. Her pot-selling enter-
prises got her got kicked out of the fancy Upper
East Side yeshiva where she had been on schol-
arship, a have-not in a sparkling world of haves.
She started NYU at 16, thinking she’d learn to be
a filmmaker, then dropped out at the thought of
having to dissect Apocalypse Now with a bunch
of 18-year-olds from the suburbs.
In the many alternate realities she can create
in her mind, she wonders what would have hap-
pened if someone had put a pen or a camera in
her hand instead of, as she says, “a peace pipe.
Let’s call it a ‘peace pipe.’ I just want to protect
your gentle readers.” Probably, she thinks, she
would have ended up in the same place she is
now, but sooner, without “throwing 15 years in
the toilet, which, to be clear, is the de-romanti-
cized version of drug use.” She doesn’t want me
to write about all of this, of course. It’s an old
version of Lyonne, a layer of reality buried now
beneath so many others. But it’s the layer that
keeps bending the time-space continuum; it’s
the layer that keeps coming back to haunt her.
T
HE PIEROGIES ARE eaten. The bill
arrives. “It’s $400, which feels like a
typo,” Lyonne jokes, deadpan, before
gathering herself into a coat with huge-
ly exaggerated shoulders (“It makes an entrance,
but does it make an exit?”) and plopping on a
black fedora she says she stole from a castle in
Wales (“Fred was very mad. I thought it was an
of sweeping power of sisterhood that washed
through me and created an engine in me.”
That engine propelled her into the part of
Nicky Nichols on Orange Is the New Black, where
Lyonne was again “taken into this community
of women who really rebuilt me.” The show
finally gave her the type of role she had grown
up idolizing, yet felt had eluded her. “I mean,
I’m somebody who’s been in fucking a hundred
movies for 35 years, and there’s like three things
that I can remember that I’m in,” Lyonne says.
“I think that in Orange Is the New Black I was
really allowed to be the sort of New York, male,
Seventies actor that I wanted to be, with an arc,
a storyline, and a fully animated thought life.”
Nadia has all those things, over and over
again. She thinks, dresses, moves, acts, and talks
like few women we’ve seen onscreen. And now
that Lyonne is in New York to bring Russian Doll
back, she finds herself in an interesting moment,
one in which her success stems inextricably
from going down the wormhole and reanimat-
ing those ghosts of her past. “Of course, it’s a
fictionalized show, but it was scary for me to be
so honest and autobiographical,” she tells me.
Then again, it’s good to “envision something
from dust,” she says as we head
east. And it’s good to be remind-
ed of who we no longer are. “I
like getting older,” says Lyonne.
“My main pitch to young women
is to stick in the fight, because
it’s a total lie that it’s great as a
teenager and in your twenties.”
We make our way to Lyonne’s
block. Armisen is on Saturday
Night Live tonight, and she
needs to get ready. Sevigny will
be there, as will Maya Rudolph,
a friend of Lyonne’s from the
Nineties who introduced her to
Armisen, and who runs a production company
with her. They’re currently working on nine
projects, which will allow Lyonne to continue
directing and producing. “The writing-direct-
ing-producing stuff is really, for me, the joy of
my life,” she says. “I can’t believe I’m getting
paid to sit with these brilliant women every day
just to think about things. It’s my fantasy.” Ru-
dolph recently covered the fridge in their office
with photos from their many years of friendship.
“I started crying,” Lyonne continues. “It was just
like, ‘Holy shit. I have a home base in this.’ ”
This is the family Lyonne has built, the ones
who’ve put a pen and a camera in her hand
and helped her see what to do with them. In
the meantime, life goes on, with all its ghosts,
all its wormholes, all its wonderful, frightening
absurdities. Lyonne tips her stolen fedora and
disappears into the East Village night.I like getting older.
My main pitch
to young women
is to stick in the
fight, because
it’s a total lie
that it’s great as
a teenager and
in your twenties.