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in jail, and, soon afterward, Rapaport
evicted her.
“I just decided to drop out completely,”
Lyonne said. “It gets really dark. I sort
of think I’m done forever. And I’m not
coming back.” She recalled periods when
she went by the street alias Crystal Snow
and would call her agent from pay phones
to inquire about booking jobs. “It’s a long
time between snorting heroin to shoot-
ing it to sharing needles,” she said. “I
took it to the finish line.” She continued
acting sporadically, including in “My Sui-
cidal Sweetheart,” a 2005 indie flop about
an escaped mental patient road-tripping
with her boyfriend while trying repeat-
edly to end her life. But she wouldn’t
have another noteworthy onscreen role
until “Orange Is the New Black.” The
press pounced on the story of a young
celebrity’s downward spiral. In May of
2005, Rapaport wrote a piece in Jane
called “Evicting Natasha Lyonne.” (He
and Lyonne have since reconciled, but
at the time, she said, “my heart was bro-
ken.”) The same year, life-threatening
health complications landed Lyonne in
the I.C.U., and the details were leaked
to the Post. After she missed several court
dates for charges related to the neigh-
bor incident, a judge issued a standing
warrant for her arrest. In December of
2006, she turned herself in, and, on court
orders, checked into a rehab center in
Pennsylvania. She hasn’t used drugs since.
Lyonne rejects the notion that what
she went through was tragic or shame-
ful. “What always made me feel really
bad with, like, Terry Gross or Barbara
Walters was when they would just come
for me with the drug stuff,” she said.
“And I’m, like, Dude, why are you vic-
timizing something I’m transparent
around?” She told me that in retrospect
she sees her drug use, in part, as an at-
tempt to grapple with her parents’ reck-
less tendencies. “Now that I’m an adult,
I think so much of my being a wild
thing was because I was trying to get
in their shoes,” she said, adding, “I fully
cleaned house on that type of behavior.
I make sure that, at this point in my life,
I just don’t fuck with chaos.”
In “Russian Doll,” Nadia’s self-
destructive moments—and the grisly
deaths that result—are treated without
sentimentality. Lyonne said that she
made the character a video-game pro-
grammer because she wanted her to
confront her knotty predicament “with-
out being spooked by it.” Often, Nadia
discusses dying with a detached curios-
ity. “This is not good or bad. It’s just a
bug,” she tells Alan in one episode. Nadia
sees the world as absurd and wearying,
but also as being suffused with possi-
bility should she make it out the other
side. Lyonne’s friend Michaela Coel, the
creator and star of the British show “I
May Destroy You,” about surviving the
obliterating aftermath of sexual assault,
told me that she admired Lyonne’s will-
ingness to delve into her lowest expe-
riences. “I don’t know if this will make
sense to anyone other than Natasha, but
it feels like we are both living life on
some sort of dangerous and thrilling
edge,” Coel said, adding, “We’re on two
parallel edges. And we’re shouting at
each other, and waving, and talking about
how cool it is to be alive.”S
ince 2018, Lyonne has co-run a pro-
duction company called Animal
Pictures with the producer Danielle
Renfrew Behrens and the actress and
comedian Maya Rudolph, one of sev-
eral close friends who are “S.N.L.”
alumni. “The name comes from when
we were sitting at lunch, and I said,
‘You’re a fucking animal,’ ” Rudolph
told me. “She wants to devour.” The
company is headquartered in L.A.’s
Studio City, in a white stucco ranch
house whose main room is dominated
by a giant painting of Rudolph in thestyle of a Gilded Age heiress. When I
arrived, on an August morning, I found
Lyonne smoking in the back yard and
talking intently on her phone. She was
wearing a backward black leather Tel-
far baseball cap and a Gucci purse with
a lion’s-head clasp, plus her mother’s
gold chain and her grandmother’s
watch. The look was not unlike Nadia’s
punk-rococo style in “Russian Doll,” a
combination of glamorous and street
tough. Noticing me, Lyonne pointedtoward a small guesthouse, between the
patio and a wooden pergola, where I
found Todd Downing, an editor and a
co-producer of the new season, sitting
in front of several monitors cutting a
sequence from Episode 3.
“Sorry,” Lyonne said, a minute later,
entering the cottage and flopping down
on a brown leather couch. “I was just
arguing with the Netflix people about
my music budget.”
On the wall was a whiteboard scrawled
with notes for several episodes and a
framed poster for the 1974 Robert Alt-
man comedy “California Split.” Lyonne
stretched her legs out on a coffee table
and asked Downing, a burly man with
a thick brown mustache, to pull up a
scene that takes place after Nadia has
rocketed back in time. Nadia is at Crazy
Eddie, the now defunct electronics store
in the East Village, exchanging banter
with the store clerk (Malachi Nimmons).
He mentions that he edits a zine about
“commodity fetishism and the Debord-
ian spectacle,” referring to the French
theorist Guy Debord.
“Let’s cut that,” Lyonne said. “It feels
very mundane.” Downing wordlessly
clicked and then played the scene again
with the line scrubbed.
“I kind of miss it,” he said.
“O.K., O.K., we keep the Debord-
ian spectacle!” she replied.
To end the scene, Lyonne had im-
provised several “wackadoo exits.” In
one, she tried a riff on Crazy Eddie’s
slogan: “My prices are also insane!” In
another, she said, “You should know I
have an I.U.D.” Lyonne wrinkled her
nose as she watched herself onscreen,
and said, “What is she doing?” Lyonne
is by all accounts an exacting show-
runner. “She’s very demanding,” Alex
Buono, an executive producer and the
producing director of Season 2, told me
fondly. Amy Poehler, who executive-
produced both seasons, described her
as a “very humane dictator.” But, after
some back-and-forth over Nadia’s lines,
Lyonne settled on the one that made
Downing laugh: “All right, well. We
live and we die, huh? Yeah. Adios!”
Lyonne nodded approvingly when
she saw another shot from the episode,
showing Sevigny’s image replicating in-
finitely on a pair of closed-circuit TV
screens. “What you’re seeing there is in-
trospective camera stuff based on Doug-