16 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
ONWARD ANDUPWARD WITHTHEA RTS
SHOWTIME
In “Russian Doll,” Natasha Lyonne barrels into the past.
BY RACHELSYME
PHOTOGRAPH BY MALERIE MARDER
O
n 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 ac-
cident 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 grue-
some and unlikely ways. Lyonne co-
created the series with Leslye Head-
land, 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 post-
production. “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 recog-
nized 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 be-
comes 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 Chi-
natown, she got out in front of a shabby
walkup a block from Canal Street. In-
side, at a secret outpost of a Japanese
restaurant, she joined a table alongside
the director Janicza Bravo, the play-
wright Jeremy O. Harris, the “Succes-
sion” 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 lac-
quered lamb chops while Harris, a pre-
cocious 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,” Ly-
onne replied.
After dinner, the group piled into
two cars and headed to the nearby Met-
rograph Theatre, where Lyonne mod-
erated 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 to-
gether 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.”
Raised between New York and Is-
rael, Lyonne entered show business as
a child, and as a young adult she be-
came a star of cult comedies such as
“Slums of Beverly Hills” and “But I’m
a Cheerleader.” Her family life was tu-
multuous, though, and by her early twen-
ties she was receding from Hollywood
owing to drug abuse. She’s been clean
since 2006, but she returned to profes-
sional 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
The second season of Lyonne’s Netflix series is a riff on “Back to the Future.”
