March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 59
NATASHA
LYONNE
“I FEEL LIKE I
haven’t used
the bathroom at
Veselka since the
Nineties, but I’m
going to go for
it,” Natasha Ly-
onne an nounces
from within an
aura of red curls and cigarette smoke when she
arrives at the Ukrainian eatery in New York’s
East Village one night in December. She does
an about-face, joins the bathroom line like any
regular schmuck, and returns with this to say:
“Well, it hasn’t changed. That’s my book report
on the bathroom at Veselka. As harrowing as
ever. But I bet the blintzes are still good.” She or-
ders eight pierogies from a no-nonsense Eastern
European woman wearing an ugly Christmas
sweater and a strange, sequined protrusion on
her head. “Great outfit. Ten out of 10,” Lyonne
observes. “Do you have any applesauce?” Then
she leans back in her chair and, primal needs
accounted for, prepares to go deep. “I mean,
it’s a problematic thing, being a person. Shame
and the meaning of life,” she says with a shrug.
“Let’s get into it.”
It’s these very topics, of course — along with
quantum physics, addiction, death, rebirth, nos-
talgia, childhood trauma, religion, aging, mental
illness, and the perpetual haunting visited upon
us by our past selves — that Lyonne plumbs in
her acclaimed Netflix series, Russian Doll (which
she produces, directs, and stars in). And it’s
preparing for the second season that brings her
back to her hometown of New York. She arrived
on a red-eye this morning, she tells me. “But
then again, what is time? These are the kinds
of questions I ask now. These are the things I
consume my days with.”
The rhythms of borscht-belt vaudeville being
her natural cadence, this sounds like a joke, but
Lyonne means it quite literally. For the past cou-
ple of months, she’s been working in a writers
room in Los Angeles — the city where she some-
times lives with her boyfriend, Fred Armisen —
trying to figure out the future of Russian Doll and
perhaps also of her character, Nadia Vulvokov,
who in Season One was constantly dying and
then being reborn in the fun-house bathroom
of the apartment where she’s celebrating her
36th birthday. Nadia ultimately makes it her
mission to discover the cause of this glitch in the
time-space continuum and to probe the layers
of reality — both conscious and subconscious —
that have gotten her to this point. This involves
many a campy romp through the East Village
of Lyonne’s own youth, and a kind of pop exis-
tentialism that sometimes veers into something
breathtakingly deeper. Developed by Lyonne,
Amy Poehler, and playwright Leslye Headland,
the show was nominated for four Emmys. It also
created a new layer of reality for Lyonne, one of
unmitigated success and wide artistic license.
Which wasn’t necessarily a layer Lyonne was
expecting. In fact, Russian Doll was its own sort
of reincarnation, born from the ashes of a show
called Old Soul that Lyonne conceived with
Poehler some years back, when she was still
emotionally and professionally coming out of
what she refers to as a “well-documented Keith
Richards era.” As she tells it, “Amy called me
one day out of the blue, and she said, ‘I’ve been
thinking about you, and as long as I’ve known
you’ — which had been about 20 years — ‘you’ve
always been the oldest girl in the room.’ And I
said, ‘Thank you for calling and insulting me
on this day. Also, I agree.’ ” Poehler suggested
they make a show about it. Lyonne considered.
“I looked around the room. I found nothing butempty containers of food and a laptop: Sold!”
When NBC passed on that show — in which
Lyonne was to play an ex-gambler who runs a
poker ring for her godmother, Ellen Burstyn —
Poehler doubled down. “She turned to me in a
car and said, ‘Kid, I know this show didn’t hit,
but if we could make any show we wanted to
make, what is it we really want to say together?
What is it we’re really after?’ ”
What Lyonne was after, then and now, was
some sort of way of making sense of mortality.
Though it’s decidedly Not Natasha Lyonne’s
Favorite Topic, that well-documented Keith
Richards era had included a well-documented
heroin addiction that had not just landed the
onetime star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Slums of Bev-
erly Hills, and American Pie in the crosshairs of a
massive public shaming (AS TAXPAYERS, WE ASK
THAT THE CITY PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT
NATASHA LYONNE, a 2006 Gawker headline once
gawked), but had also put her in the hospital for
five months with a collapsed lung and endo-
carditis, an infection — known colloquially as
“he roin heart” — that eventually required open-
heart surgery. In an alternate reality, she could
have died. In this reality, she didn’t.
And because she didn’t, all of that “shame
and the meaning of life” stuff made its way into
Russian Doll. “I had taken cracks at some drafts
early on where I was realizing that I was always
perceiving life through the lens of a dead per-
son, essentially,” Lyonne says. “That the closest
version to my experience of my present-day life
was as somebody who had already lived and
died, and was for some reason doing it all over
again, which continues to be a surprise to me.”
It didn’t surprise others around her, at least
not the existential bent Lyonne was mining.
“She’s a very profound person, and there’s noth-
ing surface about her,” her best friend, ChloëPHOTOGRAPH BY Heather Hazzan
The actor took a painful childhood and brushes with death,
and wrote herself the part of a lifetime By Alex Morris