Keeping Up With Natasha Lyonne: On Her New Hollywood Chapter, Oscar Buzz, and Wanting a Third Boob

This journey informs Lyonne’s work in His Three Daughters, the moving independent film helmed by Azazel Jacobs that features Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, and Carrie Coon as estranged sisters who reunite while caring for their father in his final days. Hitting theaters this Friday before streaming on Netflix beginning September 20, it features Lyonne in a revelatory dramatic turn, playing off of her most familiar archetype—a snarky New York pothead —before she gets the chance to break your heart.

Lyonne looks back on the experience as one her whole career has led to, particularly this past decade—from co-creating and starring in the deeply personal series Russian Doll and Poker Face to honing and deconstructing her beloved, if somewhat fixed, public persona. Talk to people around town, and they’ll tell you she is one of the funniest people in Hollywood. But she’s also an artist in her prime, ready to dig deeper than she ever has before.

Vanity Fair: Azazal Jacobs wrote this movie with you, Elizabeth, and Carrie in mind for each of your parts. In your case especially, there are some familiar notes your character hits at the beginning of the film.

Natasha Lyonne: As I exhale this vape smoke sitting here in this armchair, I have nary a clue what you could possibly mean, sir.

But you get to deconstruct the tropes and deepen them in a way that’s reflective of both the script and Azazel asking you to play those notes a little more deeply than you may have been able to in the past.

By the time I got this script, I was scared. I was definitely spooked to be like, “I just don’t know if it’s legal to play another bad boy of the Lower East Side.” I read it once, and then I read it five more times, and I memorized it. In just reading it so many times, it was getting under the skin. I’m questioning, up at night to myself, How does one go about that distinguishing? I really, genuinely asked myself, “What is behind all the smoking and tough guy schtick and all this?” I know those answers. I know that it’s I’m a real sensitive guy, so I need quite the shelter—whether that’s jokes, or an attitude problem, or whatever—just to withstand the onslaught that is being an empathetic human being who’s even just walking around seeing the stuff that you see in Manhattan all day, just playing out on the streets of New York. So it dropped me into a different pocket that I’d never had access to, or been asked to do, or allowed to do.

Am I right that you shot this pretty chronologically?

Yeah.

I ask because your character, Rachel, is relatively reserved. The film opens on shots of the three of you individually. Carrie delivers this monologue, then Elizabeth delivers this monologue. And then, you’re just like, “I don’t know.” It’s like that until Rachel gets her own moment. How did it feel getting to that moment in the movie, and accessing that emotion?

I went directly from Poker Face season one into this, with probably four days in between or something. During Poker Face [season] one, I was also on the press tour for Russian Doll [season] two, including hosting SNL and doing the monologue. My best friend—really, my sister—Chloë [Sevigny] got married, so I had to give the best man speech or whatever it’s called at the wedding. It was just a lot of me doing speeches. So part of the appeal here was also just the idea of listening. My dream in this life has always just been to be a wallflower and I’ve never been able to pull it off. It would’ve been so much easier to find boyfriends and stuff.

I was really deeply curious and excited about that exercise. It’s this question of, What is behind this need to shut down? They’re all just methods of avoiding true vulnerability—talk the most, make the most jokes, and take up a lot of space, kill yourself with four packs of cigarettes a day, let alone all the other shenanigans in my backstory. To your point, what happened is in shooting chronologically, it actually created some natural space for that internal guy that doesn’t want to talk too much, doesn’t want to get mixed up in stuff—to actually become embedded in my bones in a real way, before she really starts participating.

To set the scene a little bit for you, I was at the TIFF premiere. I vividly remember when your speech came up, because the sniffles around me were audibly loud.

Aw. Yeah, it’s wild. It’s a really nice thing. As somebody who’s accidentally or quite purposefully dedicated my life to the arts almost in total, and now in every direction, there is something very healing. As somebody who they used to write a lot about on desks at school as a scholarship kid or whatever, the feeling in my soul when people understood Russian Doll and they liked it—it felt so exposed, because I was going all the way out on the line. I thought my whole career that I was supposed to be this other girl, and they let me know so early on that I was not her. I didn’t really know what to do with this otherness.

People are catching up a little bit more as we have changed the rules a bit. But there were a lot of years of that. So it was suddenly, “Wait, you guys wanted me to be like me? I just had to tell you more about myself, and you weren’t going to bully me for that? You guys were actually going to receive it?” There really was a healing of that, not just in terms of the industry, but in terms of these kids—when they communicate with you online and stuff, they’re really having an experience of feeling seen and connected. With this one, it’s also like, “Oh, so it’s okay to go soft or quiet now and then. Geez, guys, thanks.” You get a little bit of strength from them. So that’s a nice thing. Anyway, thanks to those sniffling characters at TIFF, is really my point here.

Actors who start young have all these messages coming at you, like what you’re talking about—and especially in your case, there’s a persona that gets developed in the public eye. It sounds like even for you there is some difficulty in letting go of that narrative of yourself.

Yeah, I was put in this business at four years old or something. Pee-wee’s Playhouse by six, then Woody Allen’s kid at 15, and Alan Arkin’s kid at 17. When I went to Tisch around then—I think I was 16, they had skipped my senior year, it’s the only school I applied to—it was to be a film and philosophy double major. I could put some Bergman into these Fellini-esque things, where maybe I would play-act as a Charlie Chaplin type doing all the jobs. I wanted to be a filmmaker and a thinker. I always had this desire, more than anything, to be a mind, a brain in a jar who could actually use storytelling to shift a perspective. That’s always what I’m aspiring to.

I don’t want to undermine the beauty of comedy within all that. George Carlin has really pulled off some tricks. It isn’t really a desire to shake a self or feeling hampered by it. It’s just this idea of being able to understand the gift. You stick around long enough, and you may get a few opportunities for people, or even commerce, or whatever to allow you to just show more sides of a 360 human being. We are all different people in private and in different relationships with different people and in different scenarios.

I’ve always wanted to do something like a Merchant-Ivory [film]. There was a limitation on being allowed to play a self-made character, like a hustler or whatever. I knew that the main one to switch was my very own Sam Kinison. I’m very grateful for that idea, mostly. It’s not so much that I want to shake the other guy. I like this guy. I am not too mad at who I am on a daily basis. It’s good to have a blazer, and loafers, and some black jeans, and sunglasses, get out of the house, look like a muppet—they can’t catch you. It’s nice to feel a little bit seen, and there’s a shorthand for it. It’s nice to lead a transparent life in a way where—such that if I do, I don’t know, fuck up, tweet some crazy thing—I can say, “Hey guys, remember, I’m that one that said I’m human. Guilty as charged. That’s my mistake. I’ve just been out here doing my best.”

But the opportunity for growth and new experiences, and even as an artist and a human being to be in the discovery process of that, it feels like just now am I beginning to get an opportunity to do that. I’m very grateful to Aza.

The shows that you mentioned, Russian Doll and Poker Face, are also examples of rich collaboration, as you created them with folks like Amy Poehler and Rian Johnson. Given how personal they are, how does that aspect inform the experience?

I’m trying to get a life. I discovered that recently. I was like, “Oh, shit.” I think, probably, because my parents died, and well, my brother’s been out on the lamb for a couple decades. But anyway: I’ve been out here on my own for a solid, I don’t know, 25 years or something. Weird because I just turned 30.

Yeah, I’m not seeing a day over 30 here.

Well, I always say not a day over one. If this all goes well, I am hoping to hit some carpets with a third boob like Total Recall. Somebody can ask if I’ve had any work done and I could say, “Yes.” I can’t just say it’s a Total Recall boob.

You heard the Total Recall boob here first.

Let me tell you something: you know that’s a hot move in a world that’s moving too quickly toward futurism, et cetera. The real move is to show up with half of a cyborg face, one of those metal faces and a little beady red eye and say, “What? Oh, this gown? It’s Versace.” So anyway: yeah, I’ve been walking around alone, I guess, in a way for decades now. Meaning, no kids and no parents. I have made my friends in this business and I’m grateful to them. They really have become my family. Gaby Hoffmann just did an episode of Poker Face this season, and that’s the person that I’ve known and am still in touch with the longest. Actually, her and Natalie Portman, because they played my little sisters back in Everyone Says I Love You. I was 15, Gaby was 12, and Natalie was 13. They met my mom, who’s dead—stuff like that. I still see them around and love them.

So these collaborations are really the way in which I get to—we spend time together. You know what I mean? We get to make something together. It’s a very special experience. There’s a sense of like, “Oh, I’m not alone in this world.” It’s actually not just about finding, “Do you have the right partner? Do you have the right house? Do you have the right this? Do you have the right that?” That’s how I see it more and more as the time goes by. But yeah, like I said: Looking to get a life outside of the biz. If you’ve got any ideas, send them my way.

You mentioned making this movie outside the system. How would you assess “the system” these days? I was thinking about Leslye Headland, your friend whose show The Acolyte was recently canceled. Clea DuVall, another friend of yours, made this great show, High School, that couldn’t last. There’s a lot of contraction happening, and as you’re someone very much on the ground developing stuff, I’m curious for your take on it.

I mean, you’re definitely asking some questions that I’ve had some phone calls about recently. It’s a super weird time. I have this production company Animals that Maya [Rudolph] and I started together, and during the strike and everything, it became mine in no small part because it’s a lot of work…. What we were seeing was just how many of our friends’ things were not happening. Just how crushing it was, and how much time you’re spending. We have a real issue that I think is starting to be raised. I can’t tell you the amount of countless hours that I’ve spent making these look books for giant studios. It’s unpaid work when these projects don’t come together, the contracts don’t come together. I don’t want to say their names. I’m only telling you about the ones that are go-pictures, go-series—extraordinary, award-winning blue chip teams, and nobody will buy the pitches. You’re talking about, in some cases, three years of work. Unpaid work.