Natasha Lyonne, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a self-described “oddball” who has been in the business for more than 30 years, experiencing many personal and professional ups and downs along the way, but emerging a respected actress, writer, director and producer with four Emmy nominations to her name.
GQ once said of Lyonne, a lifelong New Yorker, “No one on television looks or sounds like her, with her raspy, 1940s-bartender voice, big curls and New York-specific sense of cool. So distinct is her presence that it inevitably bleeds into her work on screen.”
In recent years, that work has included three notable TV comedy series: Netflix’s Jenji Kohan-created Orange Is the New Black, on which she appeared as Nicky, an addict incarcerated in a women’s prison, from 2013 through 2019; Netflix’s Russian Doll, which she co-created with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, and on which she played Nadia, a woman caught in a time warp, in 2019 and 2022; and, most recently, Peacock’s Rian Johnson-created Poker Face, the first season of which rolled out from January through March, with her starring as Charlie, a Vegas cocktail waitress who has the ability to tell when someone is lying, in what Peter Travers, among others, has called “the role of her career.”
Over the course of this episode, the 44-year-old reflects on her complicated childhood and experience as a child actor; her rebellious spirit and addictive nature that led to drug use that sidelined her career for a number of years; the events of the past decade, during which she has made a remarkable comeback as an actress and also increasingly ventured into writing, directing and, through Animal Pictures, a company she founded in 2018 with Maya Rudolph, producing; and more.
