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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 fin-
ished 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 Ob-
server, he showed off an apartment clut-
tered 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 vil-
lain 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 peo-
ple 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 am-
bitions 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 grand-
mother, Ella, was a survivor of Ausch-
witz, 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 sea-
son of “Russian Doll” doesn’t draw on
Ella’s story directly, but it explores the
rift between a traumatized older gen-
eration 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 Hit-
ler 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 watermel-
ons 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.”I
n the second episode of “Russian Doll”
Season 1, Nadia goes on a nihilistic
bender, pounding shots, snorting co-
caine 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 pot-
head,” but she told me, “I was so young
that the consequences weren’t that se-
rious 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 sales-
man 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 in-
teresting, 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, be-
cause I want to know who you are, and
I want to be able to have your vulnera-
bility present.’ ” Lyonne gave a bravuraperformance, both insolent and poi-
gnantly 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 for-
get the steering-wheel imprint on her
chest,” Jenkins said.
In 1998, Lyonne enrolled at N.Y.U.,
but she quickly dropped out. Accord-
ing to the terms of the bridge program,
she needed to complete a year of col-
lege 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 com-
edy, 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 Se-
vigny, 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 bath-
tub with Woolite,” she said. Sevigny told
me, “I found her very dynamic and en-
gaging and reckless in a way that was,
at that point, fun.”
In 2001, just as “American Pie 2” be-
came 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 mov-
ing 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 Decem-
ber 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