NATASHA LYONNE

Forever Your Girl

Natasha Lyonne doesn’t believe in “time,” but does believe in art (and also Miu Miu). Faran Krentcil investigates.

Natasha Lyonne wants a word.

She’s heard this issue’s theme is “Nothing Lasts Forever” and… well… no. Lyonne is an actress, sure, and an Emmy-nominated one at that. But she’s also a writer, director, and philosopher whose work explores the emotional fallout of quantum mechanics—essentially, the ways past and present are as inseparable as vodka and nicotine.

“Forever is complicated,” Lyonne says from her home in Los Angeles. “There’s this guy, Carlo Rovelli, a quantum physicist who wrote The Order of Time. He asks, ‘Are we proceeding through time, or are we in all moments at once? If I walk into a moment and something reminds me of a past experience, am I suddenly in the past? Or past and present?” In that way, everything lasts forever.

Lyonne began exploring the space-time paradox in Russian Doll, the bitterly beautiful comedy she co-created in 2019 that centered on a bohemian everygirl named Nadia. The character became a style icon thanks to her vintage Gap jeans and morning-after eyeliner; she also served as an avatar for Lyonne’s own journey through intergenerational pain. “All of us are flashing back and forward, whether we want to or not,” she says. “How we deal with that is what can make meaning. And sometimes, art.”

The 44-year old Aries even pulls quantum entanglement into her style. “The clothes I’ve been loving lately—the stuff by Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli, for instance—have an ongoing dialogue with ideas of the past and the future,” she says. “When a fashion designer understands history, like he does, the clothes are denser. And you know, that’s just very cool.”

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“Very cool” has never been a problem for Lyonne.

Born in Manhattan and raised between New York, Miami, and Israel, she was a Pee-wee’s Playhouse regular at seven and a Sundance darling at 17, thanks to the gritty teen classic Slums of Beverly Hills. In 1996, she played the jaded daughter of Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn in Everyone Says I Love You, which also starred Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman; by 1999, she was in the blockbuster American Pie.

“I grew up on movie sets,” she acknowledges. “But I was never getting the star treatment. I was just the one who just showed up and delivered… When I was younger, I thought I’d be on an island eating cake by now, but that never happened because [my parents] spent my money without me knowing.”

Lyonne’s struggles with her family, and later with addiction, have been well documented. But even in periods of real distress, her brilliance has been a life vest. Today, Lyonne wonders if her past is a gift to her present. “Nobody is destructive in a vacuum,” she says. “Ultimately, I’ve been aided in being down-and-out. It made me focus more on working.”

In 2013, Lyonn re-emerged as a wisecracking prisoner on Orange Is the New Black; she was nominated for a SAG Award as part of the show’s ensemble.She has Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for Russian Doll and Poker Face, the acclaimed mystery romp about a woman with the uncanny (and sometimes unwelcome) ability to spot lies.  A recent muse for Kenzo and COS, Lyonne is also a current Time 100 member alongside Taylor Swift and King Charles. In his homage, Oscar-winning writer and director Taika Waititi wrote, “she exudes that rare magnetism of old Hollywood where you’re immediately drawn to her corner of the room. And she always has her corner. And it’s a good corner to be in.”

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“If you want to talk about Natasha, like, how long do you have?” asks Jacqueline Novak. “We could take a day, and I’m not sure it would be enough.”

Novak paired with Lyonne for the upcoming Netflix special On Your Knees, a ferocious one-woman show about girlhood, rage, and fellatio. In 2019, Lyonne saw Novak perform Off-Broadway. Soon after, she made a bid to direct and executive produce the TV version. “We both have that conviction of ‘It’s a poet’s life or nothing!’” Novak exclaims. “But she also has a get-down-to-business intensity. I call her a tiger mother because she’s so protective of people’s ideas. During meetings [with Netflix], she would wait for a quiet moment, and then ask me, ‘What do we need to solve right now to make this work for you?’ The respect she has for artists is so real.”

Lyonne’s cinematic prowess can be seen throughout the special; in one section, Novak pirouettes across the stage while the camera chases her like in The Red Shoes. But her personal resonance with the material—a secret manifesto on fun sex and brainy power as a girl who’s not afraid to want either—was what Novak especially appreciated. “They were talking about straightening my curly hair for the show,” says the comedian. “Natasha also has curls, and they’ve been straightened so many times in her career… She said, ‘Curly hair catches the light. It’s beautiful in the light. It will help Jacqueline be seen.’ And I was like, ‘Hell yes.’”

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After On Your Knees debuts on January 23, Lyonne is back to catching liars on Poker Face. In real life, Lyonne has the opposite issue: truth comes too easy.

“’I’m deeply transparent,” she says. “That can be a good and bad thing.” As she stepped behind the camera, Lyonne wondered if her bluntness would cause on-set tension, though she found her instincts to lead with kindness quickly took over. “I’ve seen people break down—myself included—on ego and ambition. So I try to go the other way and give people structure to do their best.” What’s Lyonne’s version of doing her best? “Work hard and build out a world… work with better and better people, and relate to them as friends, and artists, and collaborators. That’s what I’ve been doing, and suddenly I look around, and I’ve created this really meaningful life.”

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