“Go fuck yourself. Let me live my life. I maintain that one out of 5,000 people should have a child. To me, that would be statistically more sane.”
Natasha Lyonne—one of three women on TV featured on a cover for Glamour’s TV Issue—wasn’t, in fact, telling me to go fuck myself on an August afternoon at a grimy coffee shop in Burbank, but rather was addressing anyone who assumes it’s weird that a woman (or a television character) can turn 40 and not have a husband and kids. “It's not that I'm inherently averse to children, although maybe I am. I admire greatly all my friends who have kids.” She shrugs. “But one of the great reliefs about turning 40 is people start backing off.”
Lyonne celebrated her 40th birthday in April. Having just crossed that same milestone myself, I’ll confess that I found it hard to tune out the messaging that often surrounds aging, despite how badly I wanted to, so I'm rapt. “I'm keenly aware that I'm getting older,” she says. “I'm very into it. I'm much happier on this side.” Though she’s not without a twinge of on-brand existential panic (“I would say the underlying anxiety I experienced around turning 40 is just looming mortality”), turning 40 seems to have only encouraged her. “It’s emboldening me to really do the things I want to do before it's too late.”
Time is a concept that feels particularly relevant given her most high-profile project, the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Russian Doll, about a woman who keeps dying and reliving her 36th-birthday party. Like her character, Nadia, Lyonne feels a similar urgency to find meaning in her life—in her case that means prioritizing a long-held ambition to direct. “I gave acting 35 years,” she says. “That’s three decades of letting people choose me. Now I want to make the choices.”
Lyonne has been acting since she was six, with a spot on the ’80s-era Saturday-morning psychedelic mainstay Pee-wee’s Playhouse. During the late ’90s she reigned as a moody screen queen in alternative movies including Slums of Beverly Hills and But I’m a Cheerleader, as well as the occasional blockbuster like American Pie, before developing a drug addiction at the turn of the millennium. Of that period of time, Lyonne has said she was “as good as dead.” Her career stalled—though she still was working, appearing in some television shows and low-budget indie fare with titles like Die, Mommie, Die! Her official comeback was in 2013 as Nicky Nichols, a prison inmate battling substance abuse issues on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which wrapped in June after seven seasons.
But it was this year’s Russian Doll that allowed Lyonne to finally transcend her alt status to become a mainstream voice. The show is nominated for 13 Emmys, three of which are for Lyonne as cowriter, star, and executive producer. It also led to a new path: directing. She helmed the season’s finale, as well as an episode of Orange. She tells me she spent this summer “on a research mission,” directing episodes of shows starring women she deeply admires: Aidy Bryant in her Hulu hit Shrill, Zoë Kravitz in a forthcoming High Fidelity reboot (also for Hulu), and Awkwafina in her Comedy Central series, Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens.
After three decades of taking orders from other people, Lyonne knew what she did and didn’t want to do behind the camera. She wanted to be more transparent with the actors about her process, for one. Even more basic than that, to know everybody’s name. “I was cataloging everyone's different behavior when they would come on set to Orange and not know anyone's name and be like, ‘You, stand there.’”
“Natasha is as generous as a director as she is as an actor,” says Dascha Polanco, who costarred in Russian Doll and Orange Is the New Black. “She would give me scenarios so I could play the same scene differently. I look up to her as an artist as well as a symbol that you can have ups and downs, but it’s all about knowing there is hope ahead.”
“It's so easy for me to love other multidimensional women, but it's so difficult for me to see that same stuff in myself,” says Lyonne, as if the thought has only just occurred to her. We’re discussing her summer directing Bryant, Kravitz, and Awkwafina. She glances sideways at the man working next to us on his computer before she continues. “I can see their complexities for their beauty and see my own as a deficit. This teenage wound remains that wants to tell me there's something inherently broken in me.”
In that sense, Russian Doll is both the wound’s blister and its salve. Each of Nadia’s rebirths begins, not coincidentally, with Lyonne staring into a mirror. While filming the series, which she created with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, Lyonne says she found herself on a parallel journey of self-discovery. “I have not actually broken through the space-time continuum,” she quips, “but life can feel like a strange loop where, no matter what we do, we can't get out of our own way.”
As the doomed Nadia, Lyonne roamed the same East Village sidewalks she herself walked 15 years ago, when she was frequently spotted by local media outlets looking disheveled and high on heroin—scenes that were later reported by tabloids with first-to-the-funeral glee. At the time she was reportedly estranged from her now deceased parents and had appointed her best friend Chloë Sevigny executor of her estate. “In situations where I've had to make up a will, that's been Chloë’s problem,” says Lyonne, who was hospitalized in 2005 with hepatitis C, a collapsed lung, and an infection that required open-heart surgery.
I tell Lyonne that it’s amazing—but in a way surprising—that her friendships with women like Sevigny, Poehler, and Maya Rudolph survived such a tumultuous chapter. She nods. “Yeah, the simple truth is, I don't know if they chose me or I chose them. But it almost puts people in a situation where there’s a deeper responsibility. When friends become family, they’ve got to put up with more than most, you know?”
In Russian Doll, Sevigny plays Nadia’s emotionally unstable mom; the episode in which she drags her young daughter around New York, stockpiling watermelons, was based on Lyonne’s own experience as a child. “Chloë happens to be the coolest person in the world—my mother was not. She was a messy person,” says Lyonne. “It was a very meta trip, to be filming the show with Chloë, looking around our stomping grounds, but now all the trailers and signs were for the show I created. And being in the editing room with the footage and watching her with a young version of me was almost a way to forgive my mother.”
An earlier, radically different version of Russian Doll created by Poehler and Lyonne called Old Soul with Ellen Burstyn and Rita Moreno failed to earn a green light from NBC in 2014. The idea sprang from a conversation Lyonne had with Poehler, who called her “the oldest girl in the world.” In Old Soul, Lyonne played a gambling addict with an elderly circle of friends. “Russian Doll can hold bigger concepts, but I always thought Old Soul was inherently subversive and would have been fun to put on network TV,” she says. “Like, why do we think that 30-year-olds should hang out only with 30-year-olds?”
While that series died—perhaps so Russian Doll could live—Lyonne has turned her attention to new projects in the works. She recently formed a production company, Animal Pictures, with Rudolph to develop original series, features, and documentary projects, none of which she’d divulge. Animal Pictures inked a first-look deal with Amazon.
Rudolph and Lyonne met at Manhattan’s Mercer Bar in 2001. “It was love at first sight,” says Rudolph. Two years ago Lyonne directed the SNL alum in a visually lush experimental short called Cabiria, Charity, Chastity, about a woman who makes peace with her vaudeville past. “The surprise for me was the ease and comfort in watching her in charge on set,” says Rudolph. “It’s rare when you see someone in their right place. This is her calling. She knows her shit.”
It’s no accident that Lyonne collaborates often with close friends. “We're slowly realizing that, since we're no longer teenagers, we can't just hang out,” she says. “People have children and lives and stuff, so if we can find a way to work with each other, we'll get to spend more time together that’s not just, like, Let's meet for lunch three times a year.”
It was Rudolph who introduced Lyonne to her boyfriend, Fred Armisen. They met for the first time years ago—though Lyonne doesn’t remember it. “I was going through a rocky road, as we know,” she says of her “Grey Gardens phase.” Ever the storyteller, she relishes the details (as told to her by Armisen): Rudolph and Armisen came by Lyonne’s apartment and found her swanning around in a long silk robe, sunglasses on, chain-smoking. “I pulled out a copy of [Legs McNeil’s oral history] Please Kill Me, autographed it, and was like, ‘Welcome, kid. Fred—what a name. Happy birthday. Enjoy the book.’” She grins. “He still has it.”
The two have been dating since 2014 and split their time between her apartment in Manhattan and his house in L.A. She compares him to Sevigny in terms of their caretaking instincts. “They're always going to pick me up from school on time.”
With Russian Doll renewed for another season, Lyonne will return to the writers room soon. But prep for a show about defying metaphysical dimensions has its drawbacks. “I could do with at least 20% less mathematics,” she says. “I'm reading so much about quantum physics that there's no way I actually understand.” One thing she’s not spooked by: fans and critics who are already worrying that more episodes could destroy the series’s beloved debut. Three seasons was always the plan, she says. “There's so much in that show that's deeply autobiographical,” Lyonne explains, “so it's very funny to me that people think that's the whole story.”
If Russian Doll evolved from Lyonne’s search for meaning, then it seems only natural her next chapter will be about what a person might do once they’ve found it. “It’s been fun as a woman being in charge and stepping into the role of an elder in a society that tells us so often that a woman's sweet spot is in her 20s,” she says. “The older I get, the more I feel protective over young people—particularly outsider women.”
She continues, “I want to tell them there’s not only space for their underlying otherness, but also that, sometimes, what we experience as lows and rejections are because that’s not actually the best outcome.”
Or put another way, “If I'm not this broken person, then I'm suddenly freed up to be much more available to the world.”
