THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 17
full tilt. She told me, “I get panicky I
won’t have enough time. I feel like I al-
ready 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 open-
ing 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 Bar-
nett), 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 mus-
ings and hefty themes of mortality and
redemption. Its look channelled Lyonne’s
favorite New York films, from the down-
town grime of “Sid and Nancy” to the
urban kookiness of “After Hours.” In a
review for this magazine, Emily Nuss-
baum compared the show to such “arch,
deeply emotional puzzle boxes” as “Flea-
bag” and “The Leftovers.” It won Emmy
Awards for its costumes, cinematogra-
phy, and production design, and was nom-
inated 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 Holo-
caust. (Alan, meanwhile, delves into his
own personal history.) Lyonne admit-
ted that an earnest exploration of in-
herited 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.”L
yonne lives in a luxury condominium
inside a converted synagogue in
Manhattan. An Orthodox congregation
still occupies the ground floor. One win-
ter 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 un-
made. 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 Holly-
wood 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 neu-
rosis in genre films, and a copy of Cyn-
thia Ozick’s 1997 novel, “The Putter-
messer Papers,” which she said she would
be reading aloud for a new audiobook
recording. Pointing to a beat-up biogra-
phy of Rasputin, she said, “In my addic-
tion 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 ye-
shiva study circle. A lengthy syllabus that
she distributed to the writers of Season
included texts on Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s
Search for Meaning,” the Hungarian-
American mathematician John von Neu-
mann, quantum mechanics, and the his-tory 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 con-
taining a crossword puzzle that she wrote
for the Times, in 2019, and an accompa-
nying article. “This for me is my favor-
ite 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. Lean-
ing against another was a poster of Linda
Manz, a tough-girl actress of a previ-
ous 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 be-
loved films, Bob Fosse’s semi-auto-
biographical 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 reflec-
tion in the mirror, “It’s showtime, folks!”
Lyonne told me, “It’s the closest approx-
imation to what life feels like that I’ve
ever seen.” Sitting on top of an old piano
were the two SAG Awards that she re-
ceived 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 de-
scribes as “rock-and-roll black sheep
from conservative Jewish families.” Her