Natasha Lyonne is grimacing. She's straddling a kick drum in a tiny burlesque bar on the Lower East Side, but she's not uncomfortable—at least, not in any way that matters. The actress is cheerfully attempting all kinds of contortions so as to better channel the great punk musician Poison Ivy. In the house Lyonne shares with her boyfriend, Fred Armisen, a photo of Poison Ivy’s band, The Cramps, hangs on the kitchen wall. They also have a matching fridge magnet.



The founding member and guitarist of The Cramps, Poison Ivy (born Kristy Marlana Wallace) was a genius and a vamp. Her signature tiger-striped and fetishwear-inspired looks were typically set off by voluminous corkscrews of coppery-red hair. That is to say, Lyonne and Poison Ivy have a couple of things in common. "This one day I was looking at the magnet while drinking coffee, spacing out," Lyonne tells me a few days later on the phone. "I was thinking about my crazy hair. And then I got this email that ELLE wanted to do a shoot. I was so empowered with the decisiveness of a crazy person recently inspired with their morning coffee and I was like, 'I can only be Poison Ivy from The Cramps.' And then you guys let me do it, which was shocking," she laughs.



Understated Leather jacket; Natasha’s own bodysuit, sunglasses, and necklace; Agent Provocateur boots; Lelet NY headband Tina Turnbow

There was no reason not to go along with Lyonne's flash of inspiration; it wasn't at all a whim. First there's the "iconic" aesthetic—"frankly, I'm surprised that Poison Ivy isn't in everything," Lyonne says—animal-print dresses, cat-eye sunglasses, crotch-skimming mini-dresses, lace. Then, there's that blaze of curls. Lyonne's own red hair is a powerful motif in her new dark-comedy-slash-existential-drama Russian Doll, now streaming on Netflix; we see it again and again in the bathroom mirror as her character Nadia relives the night of her thirty-sixth birthday. But while Lyonne herself leans ginger, we had to get a wig for the Poison Ivy-inspired shoot. "I sort of forgot that my hair was back to blonde for Orange," Lyonne said. "My mother was a very real redhead, and I naturally sit somewhere between the two."



Poison Ivy Clayton Call Getty Images

The actress, 39, has been a longtime fan of The Cramps because of their self-definition as outsiders. "There's a lot of people who laid the track for us to get to exist as the three-dimensional women we are today," she said, citing The Cramps' look and their wild 1978 performance at the Napa Mental Hospital as the results of not caring what other people think. "She's truly an incredible guitar player and musician, and that type of an outsider figure who's essentially saying, A lot of people aren't gonna get us, but that doesn't make us weird, you know?"



Russian Doll's Nadia has a habit of repudiating the regard of others, too—but not necessarily in the good way. She keeps dying in unpredictable accidents, and the Groundhog Day-esque life reboots force the cynical, crotchety New Yorker to re-inspect her every decision, large and small. As she investigates why these peculiar rebirths are plaguing her, Nadia twigs that her habit of self-preservation has mutated from a defensive mechanism into one that distances her from the world. "It's so personal," Lyonne says of the show, which she also co-wrote. "My family's story, my years through the ringer of being at death's door and addiction, and the experience of being a weirdo and an outsider in New York and in this business. There's always the fear when you're digging that deep and exposing that much about yourself."

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Russian Doll seems very Natasha Lyonne. Do you think it's more you than your previous work?

Yeah. I mean, listen. I've been writing versions of what would become Russian Doll for at least 10 years, you know? In the last five years, it started crystallizing more and more. It was always a story that I wanted to tell, and it was incredible to have collaborators like Amy [Poehler] and Leslye [Headland] help externalize what was in my mind's eye. Watching it come to life is an extraordinary process that gives you the strength to go on trying to make things, which is a really hard thing to do.

I had notes upon notes, and notebooks and playlists and image references. I've been collating and cataloging this series for a lifetime—in a deeper sense, on a more PTSD level, cataloging a lifetime of living through so many really dark experiences. I feel so lucky, and it's such a gift to be able to process things through humor that are too graphic and traumatizing to process any other way. It helps us to get a little bit of a distance and concrete awareness around the surreal element, that life is as strange and painful and beautiful as it is.

Natasha’s own blazer and necklace, Realisation Par dress, Lelet NY headband, Cano earrings Tina Turnbow

To have this show being received in this way is just about all my heart can take. The idea that it's being translated to people and that they're not making fun of it or something—that people aren't laughing at it, are in fact identifying with it, means everything to me, you know? It's a heavy thing, and I'm very moved.

The idea that for adult women, there's an option for us to like being our full selves and take up space—I think it's great. To get to collaborate with all female writers and directors on this and never be worrying about...they never worried about, will James Gandolfini's character in The Sopranos be likeable, you know? That kind of stuff was never on the table in this story.

Natasha Lyonne as Nadia in Russian Doll Courtesy of Netflix

At the beginning, Nadia says she's staring down the barrel of her mortality. She's 36 years old. Why that age?

I'm 39. I guess when we were making it I was 38. In the early days of me and Amy working on it, I was maybe 34? So we were thinking, "Okay, well by the time I make it I'll be 35," and then by the time Leslye was involved I was already 36, you know? Though when I first started writing it I was 26.

I think the reason to have a character who was facing her own mortality not be older than 36 was so that we didn't have to unpack that endless conundrum of "Should I or shouldn't I consider children?" It feels like you have up 'til 37 to really be still playing fast and loose with that. We didn't want her to be going through sort of that internal indecision and chaos. Of course, thanks to being able to freeze your eggs and adoption and such, there's a little bit of leeway. But the main reason was to keep her, sort of, decidedly not turning 40.

"For women, children are always so deeply on the table in a way that, frankly, I think is absurd."

For women, children are always so deeply on the table in a way that, frankly, I think is absurd. I think that children should be the anomalies, that we're constantly in awe, like, "Wait a minute. You had a child?" Because a child is such a precious thing. You should really be certain that that's what you want to do. People are constantly like, "Are you getting married? Are you gonna have a baby?" It's so exhausting. How is this supposed to be a normal question? That's an insane person's science project on your body that changes your whole life. How are you ever going be able to afford anything again? How did they have the energy to do this thing? Isn't everybody exhausted?



Natasha’s own bodysuit, sunglasses, and necklace; Agent Provocateur boots; Lelet NY headband Tina Turnbow

As Nadia keeps dying, she notices that there are things she would like to change about her life. How did the morality of how you live and treat other people become a focus of the show?

What we wanted to explore was this idea of a selfish person, the negatively self-obsessed person, who thinks that they're not selfish. We're obviously living in a time that's appalling as far as injustice and racism and homophobia and misogyny, and it was like saying, "Hey, unless you're kind of connected to the world around you, you're a participating member in all of this."

If you are so busy thinking about your own self-loathing that you don't think it's necessary for you to participate in the world, and it's okay to just be a full drop-out, there's a part of you that's cosigning a lot of shit that's going on. Without getting into things that were broad or sweeping or potentially preachy, what we were saying was, she has to start looking at her life and saying, "Hey, these are the things that I've been historically in denial around, and this is where I've been an asshole in my own life, and this is where there were things I was throwing into the back seat of my car while I kept barreling along driving as fast as I could and thought I wasn't gonna have to deal with."

"The shit that we think maybe we'll be able to avoid, at some point it does come for us."

I think that is very true of life, the experience of getting older: The shit that we think maybe we'll be able to avoid, at some point it does come for us. And if we are searching for a meaningful life, we have to look at the darker stuff that we're avoiding in order to become truly participating members of our world. I'm not saying...I don't know what you're supposed to do when the plastic straw comes in your glass. You're like, "No! I didn't need this." But it's kind of already too late. There's a plastic straw in your smoothie.

If nothing else, self-awareness seems to be a first step in trying to effect change, so that we as a team can start making bigger, more important changes. We're at this tipping point where it feels like there's not a lot of time to wait, you know? There's gotta be a sense of fighting back pretty quickly to make this an inhabitable world that we actually want to be in.

None of that is the business of Russian Doll itself. But that's the experience of being a person—you're constantly trampled under the weight of the small details of your own life. That text message exchange was atrocious. Oh my god, I'm late and now I'm overcompensating and making weird jokes. Then it starts getting bigger from there. This relationship is wrong. My life choices are wrong. My chosen profession is wrong. I don't have any money. What about health? What about the world? What about Trump? What about ICE?

Nadia spends some time thinking about her younger self. Is that something you reflected on while making the show—how you could have been kinder or better to the younger version of you?

I think that our younger self is so key to who we are and a heartbreaking thing to look at. I'm often struck by the damage I inflicted on my younger self. Why was I beating her up? I would never do that to you. I would never look at a child or a teenager, and say, "Hey, you're broken. There's something wrong with you." You know? What an atrocious way that we treat ourselves. Especially women in this society. The amount of time wasted for a young woman wondering, "Am I fat? And is that a reason I should wanna be dead?" is so harrowing to consider. Just the wasted years of a lifetime. We live and we die and that's it.

"I'm often struck by the damage I inflicted on my younger self. Why was I beating her up?"

I will say that finally now, at 39, I'm so relieved to be older. That we put so much preciousness on the teenage woman's body and the 20-year-old woman's body—fuck all of that. It's so unfair and so minimizing to our true worth. We're all in our own little weirdo fucking bodies with our own little weirdo faces and our own little weirdo ideas.

The experience of Orange Is the New Black was incredible. To be surrounded by so many extraordinary women and realize that we were all different and unified. We're all in our uniforms every day for seven years. It changed my world view in a lot of ways. I'm not saying that's not something I still don't go through, but I'm so grateful to now be writing and directing and producing as opposed to just acting. Even something like, I wanna be fucking Poison Ivy at the shoot. I don't wanna play "I'm a pretty actress," you know, try to fit into these weird borrowed clothes. Beautiful, designer borrowed clothes, but let it be about telling a story that has some sort of personal connection to something I want to say rather than this idea of somebody else getting to determine if I'm worthy, and that they get to choose me or not.



I think the biggest idea of Russian Doll would be that we start to talk about removing some shame around the underlying idea of our own brokenness, and realizing that we're all broken in our own ways and that's part of our power and our beauty: our imperfections and our differences.

Russian Doll is streaming on Netflix now.

Photography by Tina Turnbow

Makeup by Tina Turnbow



Styled by Justine Carreon



Wig by Chantell Carrtherol



Hair by Marcia Lee @ One Represents using Oribe



Shot at Nurse Bettie



Estelle Tang Senior Editor Estelle Tang is the former senior editor of ELLE.com.

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