Natasha Lyonne Is a Boss (a Boss Trying to Stop Time)

by · NY Times

Natasha Lyonne has her funeral all planned out.

Not just planned, really, but choreographed, produced and directed, complete with music cues and writing prompts, to calibrate the emotion just right. “Otherwise it can run long,” she explained. So Lyonne, the downtown vivant actress, writer and director, has diligently assigned her passel of famous friends “jobs that they didn’t want.”

There will be a month of commemorative screenings at Film Forum and songs by Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“I have a sworn promise that she performs; I’m very grateful”) and the “Color Purple” star Danielle Brooks, because her voice “breaks my heart.” The comedian John Mulaney will be on hand to punch up material. “I actually tasked him with writing speeches for people that wouldn’t want to get onstage,” Lyonne said, like her BFF Chloë Sevigny. “I was like: You need to give Chloë some jokes.”

The plot she acquired, at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, alongside her boyfriend at the time, Fred Armisen, she has now graciously ceded to his wife, Riki Lindhome. “I probably don’t want to be buried in Los Angeles anyway, if I’m honest,” she allowed. But she’s still making him the funerary musical supervisor.

That Lyonne, at 45, has thought at length about her own demise is, to anyone who knows her or her oeuvre, not surprising. All of her recent, most celebrated projects — including “Russian Doll,” the Emmy-winning Netflix series; “Poker Face,” the retro crime procedural on Peacock; and her latest role, in the Netflix drama “His Three Daughters” — find her confronting life’s end. She does it with a spectacular, bewitching buoyancy. Even in “His Three Daughters,” in which she displays an unexpected reserve (but exuberant hair) opposite Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen as estranged sisters caring for their father in his last days. It’s earning her Oscar talk.

As a producer, Lyonne “likes the grind and the hustle, and the hard work that comes with it,” said Amy Poehler. “That’s not always the case.”
Credit...OK McCausland for The New York Times

So, when we found ourselves in an East Village restaurant on a drizzly Friday night, ordering a dessert made of Pop Rocks and talking about death, it felt just as the universe — or New York City, same difference — intended.

A sobriety sponsor once told her “that we don’t talk about grief enough,” Lyonne said. “We don’t talk about the fact that we’re in a constant state of ongoing grief for, like, the moment that has passed.” Someone dies; a relationship ends “or, you know, you look in a mirror one day and you’re like, oh, wow — so I have a neck. So that’s news.”

There is no pause allowed, no space built in, to mourn what was. “It’s just sort of normalized, that we should accept it.”

“Obviously,” she added, “I have a lot of hot takes on how we’re doing life wrong.”

But here’s the thing: At this very moment, Lyonne’s life is trending inestimably right. After bumpy years amid well-documented addiction issues — she has now been sober, she noted pointedly, for far longer than she was ever on the skids — she emerged from an Emmy-nominated performance in “Orange Is the New Black” to become not just a respected, sui generis actress but also a promising showrunner, with a bustling production company and many ambitious projects, beyond funerals, on the docket.

She has four shows on or about to air, like “Loot,” the Apple TV+ series starring her friend Maya Rudolph; three more being shopped, including one with the hip studio A24; a first-look deal that will help her expand her company, Animal Pictures; and a passel of notable voice-over work — all feats accomplished even as Hollywood is contracting.

“Her brain runs on a kind of hummingbird speed,” said Rian Johnson, the filmmaker and creator of “Poker Face.” Lyonne is currently shooting its second season, as a writer, director, producer and star. “The best way I can put it is, she runs at a high creative frequency in all things in life. She’s brilliant.”

“It’s mind-boggling to me the amount of stuff that she juggles,” added Johnson, who is also helming the next “Knives Out” installment. “I couldn’t move at the pace she does. And she seems to genuinely thrive in that place.” (Among her upcoming turns: a role in the Marvel movie “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.”)

Lyonne is undeniably in a hurry to capitalize on her moment. “The thing that I have a beef about is not actually death,” she said. “It’s time.”

AS SHE UNSPOOLED HER ARGUMENTS about the unfair atmospherics that have us racing to catch up, she mentioned the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, the writer Ted Chiang. An evening spent with Lyonne is like pirouetting through a syllabus. There was that 1959 “Twilight Zone” episode, too, about the bookworm (Burgess Meredith) who just wants unfettered hours to read. But when he gets them, thanks to a nuclear apocalypse that only he survives, his glasses break. “I think about that, I don’t know, maybe once a day,” Lyonne said.

“His Three Daughters,” written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, and streaming Friday, gave her a little reprieve, as she unpacked her character, Rachel, a stepsister to Coon and Olsen’s biological siblings. It was the first time “in decades,” she said, that she was asked to step out of her usual onscreen persona — fast-talking, wisecracking, vaguely Joe Pesci — and slide into emotional nuance.

Rachel, a recessive stoner with a side hustle as a sports bettor, is the only one of the daughters who still lives with their ailing father in their childhood home. Shot on film, in a real Lower East Side apartment over three weeks, the movie is a lived-in set piece with the intimacy of theater. “It’s grown-up acting,” Lyonne said. “There’s nowhere to hide.”

Jacobs, 52 next week, wrote it after he returned to the Lower Manhattan apartment where he was raised, to tend to his parents — the experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and the artist Flo Jacobs, a frequent collaborator with her husband. As Azazel and his sister, Nisi Ariana, also an artist, stepped in, he was struck by how fortunate they were to be able to do that, and how terrible it still felt.

“Like, this is the best-case scenario, right?” he said. And yet, “everything about this feels unnatural — completely confusing and totally out of control.”

Making a film about it (alongside his producer wife, Diaz Jacobs) gave him some steadiness in the experience. “More than anything, I was chasing this kind of strange effect that time has, when you’re dreading someone’s passing,” and simultaneously anticipating that moment, he said.

The screenplay’s rhythms led him to tailor it for the trio of Lyonne, Coon (“The Gilded Age”) and Olsen (whom he directed in the series “Sorry for Your Loss”). Lyonne received a hard copy of the script, to her extreme delight. “Our last analog filmmaker!” she said. His attention to its tempo was so fine-tuned, he added musical notes to the pages, “almost like he could see the song in his head,” Lyonne said. She signed on to produce, to help get it made.

Her co-stars did too, but it was Lyonne who emerged in “this leadership role,” said Olsen, reviewing schedules and team hires. “Oh my God, she’s such a businesswoman,” Olsen said. “I find it incredibly inspiring. She’s just very effective, incredibly professional — even with all the jokes.”

SHE IS HER OWN KIND OF BOSS. One night, Olsen recounted, when they were filming late and revelers on the street were being rowdy, “Natasha opened the window and screams — in like her most New York-sounding accent — ‘Hey, we’re making a movie! Be really great, if you guys could keep it down out there.’” (Olsen, it must be noted, does a credible Lyonne.)

In person, Lyonne is voluble and hilarious. She wore a gold Chanel pendant, a hoodie to protect her trademark curls from the rain, Birkenstock Bostons, and a black-and-white top and loose pants of differing patterns — equal parts stylish and pajamas. She was, indeed, full of hot takes about matters both individual (showers are overrated; cutting bangs made her a better actor because “I had too much face”) and structural.

“It’s fascinating to finally have enough power to understand what all these women have been talking about,” she said of the imbalances in her industry. “There’s, like, five people that make decisions about everything. They think that they have control over my life.”

And though she’s fluent in diatribe, she is also on the lookout for delight. “This is my No. 1 most fun food I have eaten,” she said, as she loudly crunched the Pop Rocks confection over my tape recorder. “Why aren’t there more foods that are like Pop Rocks? Why didn’t the short ribs have Pop Rocks in them?”

“I would give you even one bite,” she continued, “but let’s just say Covid. You know, have you heard that syphilis is back? Yeah, I read an article recently. Something to think about!” We closed down the restaurant — more or less how she rolls.

Coon and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, are her pals; they play word games together. As an artist, “Natasha doesn’t lead with her vulnerability,” Coon said. “She leads with her humor. She leads with the smoke and mirrors of the personality that she’s performing in public, which is, of course, a deeply protective act, and rightly so — what a survivor she is.” Lyonne’s addiction-era ailments include a collapsed lung and endocarditis, a heart infection, around 2004, which led to open-heart surgery a decade later, when she was well into sobriety.

“She really understands mortality viscerally,” Coon said. A sense of grief “is actually so close to the surface in her. Her humanity is so accessible — even as she’s trying to hide it, with every sly or crass remark. She can’t hide it. She’s just vibrating with so much life, and it electrifies every room she’s in.”

Lyonne often jokes that she’s been acting for an eon. Her eccentric parents pushed her into the industry when she was a child (her first TV role was on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” Paul Reubens’s influentially batty show) and squandered the money she earned as she graduated from commercials to movies. ”I had one dream, which was to get a Lamborghini,” she said. “Mind you, I was 6.” She found her showbiz stripes, but became estranged from her family. (Her parents died about a decade ago.)

Critical success came when she starred, as a teenager, in the 1998 coming-of-age comedy “The Slums of Beverly Hills.” She enrolled at New York University, studying both filmmaking and philosophy — “so I could have something to write about, because it seemed like that was important” — but quickly dropped out amid what she called an existential crisis about the direction of her celebrity life. “So I went on a very extended walkabout,” she said. “And when I say walkabout, I do mean heroin.”

I suggested to Lyonne that she was now making up for these lost years, but she parried. “First of all, everyone is entitled to at least one nervous breakdown in a lifetime,” she said. Hers ended in what she said was a two-year span of social dropout sobriety. “I really value that time,” she said. “Just, like, walking on the beach and reading Thomas Pynchon. I watched every Mike Leigh film.”

And, she added, “I also learned real spiritual principles.” Bill Bryson’s 2003 pop-science best seller, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” about understanding the universe in scale, “changed my life,” she said. “I suddenly saw this sort of path to freedom that was about the life of the mind and curiosity to learn. That suddenly I had something to say, and that there were many tentacles and ways I wanted to say it.”

AMY POEHLER, A FRIEND AND MENTOR who co-created (with Lyonne and Leslye Headland) “Russian Doll,” said the actress, a devoted East Villager, was like “if New York were a person.”

“She’s just a very creative, esoteric and brave, interesting artist,” Poehler said. “And she also likes the grind and the hustle, and the hard work that comes with it. That’s not always the case.”

Many in Lyonne’s crew compared her swagger to rough-and-tumble actors of generations past. She did, too. “I always am trying to think, How would Peter Falk do this?” she said. But Poehler spun it further: “I think she has the strong sensitivity of a Gena Rowlands, the charisma of Jack Nicholson, and the surreal tenacity of Werner Herzog in ‘Fitzcarraldo.’ She will be like, We’re going to get this ship over this mountain.” (“She’ll appreciate this reference” to the German filmmaker, Poehler added.)

Lyonne’s friends and colleagues also gushed over her current, hard-won success. “It wasn’t necessarily the future one would have expected for Natasha for a very long time,” Coon said.

And they remain astounded at the depth of her inspirations. For a sequence in “Poker Face” that required a disguise, Johnson said, she channeled the French surrealist Jean Cocteau, “and had this very specific horse’s head made for it,” he said. “In an episode of ‘Columbo,’ basically. It’s just really fun to watch.”

As wild and off-kilter as Lyonne may seem, with her perennial night-owl energy, she is quite orderly as a performer. “I like being highly specific, so dialed-in,” she said. That’s what quells her anxiety and lets her get loose. “I must be word-perfect off-script in order to improvise. There is something very relaxing about the precision.”

But as a filmmaker she has a freer view of how careers unfold. “If long legs in show business teaches you one thing, it’s that things have their own course,” she said.

As her schedule allows, she’s been working on her first feature, which she wrote and expects to direct soon, especially “if we can just get me a second or third self,” she joked.

She was coy about its subject but had a hook. “If you’re a dog person” — Lyonne has a 14-year-old pooch named Rootbeer — “then you’re going to love it, because it plays with time, just like dog years do,” she said.

“It’s heavy, if you’re a heavy cat,” she continued, “and if you’re an even heavier cat — well, it’s a comedy.”

If it gets reborn as some other beast, she would take it in stride. “I don’t really take too seriously a pass as a failure,” she said. “I have a lived experience that it’s actually not how it works. It just hasn’t found its correct permutation yet.”

“That’s mostly to say to the kids at home,” she added, “you never know what the destiny of your own work is.” There is always space to resurrect.

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