With 'Russian Doll,' Natasha Lyonne wants to 'catalog a life.' Just not her life
LOS ANGELES — Natasha Lyonne has a message for people who see "Russian Doll," the time-trippy dark comedy on Netflix she co-created and stars in, as a kind of television memoir: The show is personal but not autobiographical.
"One of the stories about the show is how much it's me, personally," Lyonne says, alluding to her chaotic childhood and history with addiction. " It has been my life experience that there's a lot of stuff that we don't talk about or that we're ashamed of, family histories, stuff like that, and it's actually not as rare as we like to pretend. The only thing I could tell you about my family is that there's such extreme character studies that I think, as a writer, as a director, as an actor, as a producer, it's given me a huge window into the human condition more than I think I'm exorcising personal demons through my work."
In other words, as she later quips: "No, my mother did not give birth to me on the subway tracks at Astor Place station while I was time traveling."
Created by Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Lesly Headland, the series spent its first season pivoting around Lyonne's Nadia Vulvokov, a scraggily East Village video game engineer who is fatally struck by a cab the night of her 36th birthday party and gets stuck in a "Groundhog Day"-like time loop, reliving the night in new and more bizarre ways — and meeting a fellow time-loop pal, Alan (Charlie Bennett), in the process. Time is still on a loop in Season 2, but it takes the 6 train to the past. The new season picks up four years later, days before Nadia's 40th birthday. Before long, Nadia — and eventually Alan — find themselves traveling back in time, bouncing between decades and coming up close with their family histories while once delving into mortality, existentialism and inherited trauma.
"I want
