Natasha Lyonne, the actress who won control of her work and keeps risking it

Natasha Lyonne

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 4, 1979 New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Actress, screenwriter and director
Known for	Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Uncut Gems, American Pie
Awards	SAG Award (shared) · TCA · Chicago Film Critics Association

Few performers have been handed a second career as explicitly as Natasha Lyonne, and fewer have spent it so restlessly. The woman who once checked into a Manhattan hospital under a false name now writes and directs the shows that carry her face, and runs the company that makes them. Every time the industry settles on a version of her, she reaches for something that puts that standing at risk: an artificial-intelligence studio, or an exit from the most popular show she has ever led.

The childhood behind that restlessness was never ordinary. Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein is a New Yorker by birth, the daughter of Orthodox Jewish parents. Her mother had been born in Paris to Hungarian-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust; her father, Aaron Braunstein, promoted boxing matches and later hosted a radio show. She spent her first years in Great Neck, on Long Island, then about a year and a half in Israel, where a part in the children’s film April Fool gave her a first taste of a film set.

She was working before most children can read. Barely seven years after her arrival on April 4, 1979, she was Opal on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and she later told Heeb magazine that “by 10, I was a jaded professional.” The Ramaz School, a private Jewish school in Manhattan that had taken her on scholarship, expelled her for selling marijuana to classmates. She studied film and philosophy for a short time at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and left when she could not pay the tuition.

The late 1990s gave her the part that still defines her for a certain kind of fan. In Tamara Jenkins’s Slums of Beverly Hills she played Vivian Abromowitz, a teenager dragged from one cheap apartment to the next by a broke father, and the film caught a tone, deadpan and exposed and very funny about humiliation, that she has been refining ever since. Woody Allen had already cast her in Everyone Says I Love You. Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader made her a reference point of queer cinema, and American Pie put her in front of a mass audience as Jessica, the worldly classmate.

Then the career nearly ended with her. The early 2000s brought arrests and an eviction, and in 2005 she was admitted to Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan under a pseudonym, with hepatitis C, a heart infection and a collapsed lung, while on methadone treatment for heroin addiction. She entered treatment in 2006 and began a long sobriety that December. The damage to her heart required open-heart surgery in 2012. The rebuild started on stage rather than on screen, with Mike Leigh‘s Two Thousand Years in 2008 and the Ephron sisters’ Love, Loss, and What I Wore off-Broadway.

Orange Is the New Black gave her Nicky Nichols, the inmate whose wit kept outrunning her addiction, across 81 episodes and an Emmy nomination in 2014; she also directed an episode in the final season. The real turn was Russian Doll, which she co-created with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler for Netflix in 2019. Nadia Vulvokov, a software engineer who keeps dying and waking up at her own birthday party, let Lyonne write mortality as comedy, and the series brought her Emmy nominations as producer, writer and lead actress in a single year. That same year she founded Animal Pictures with Maya Rudolph, who left the company in 2023.

Rian Johnson then built Poker Face around her for Peacock. Charlie Cale, a casino worker who can tell when anyone is lying, drifts through motels and diners solving a murder a week, and Lyonne wrote and directed episodes as well as starring. The role won her the Television Critics Association award for individual achievement in comedy in 2023 and drew Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. On film, Azazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters earned her the Chicago Film Critics Association prize for best supporting actress, and Marvel cast her as Rachel Rozman in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

The complication is how she has chosen to spend that leverage. Asteria, the AI studio she co-founded with Bryn Mooser, was meant to make her feature directing debut, Uncanny Valley, co-written with Brit Marling, a showcase for what the company calls clean and ethical technology trained only on licensed material. The announcement landed in an industry still sore from the 2023 strikes, and the backlash was immediate: critics rejected the “ethical” label and asked what would happen to the set designers and animators such tools could replace. Lyonne replied that it was not a “generative AI movie” and that AI would handle things like set extensions. It is an odd position for a performer whose appeal rests on an unmistakably human voice, that gravel-and-cigarette rasp no software has to invent, to be the most visible actor-director attached to the technology her colleagues fear most.

The past year has tested her in public. Peacock cancelled Poker Face in November 2025 after two seasons; Lyonne and Johnson agreed she would step back from Charlie and stay on as an executive producer, while Johnson shopped the show with Peter Dinklage in the lead. In January 2026 the Golden Globes nominated her for the role once more. Less than two weeks later she disclosed on X that she had relapsed after years of sobriety, describing recovery as a lifelong process, and in March she said she was doing “a whole lot better.” In April she joined the third season of HBO’s Euphoria, and in July the Italian Global Series festival gave her its Maximo Excellence Award.

Her next moves point in two directions. Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel with Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams, reaches US cinemas on October 23 with Lyonne in the supporting cast. She is producing Red Sea, a survival thriller directed by the Saudi filmmaker Lina Malaika. And she has written Bambo, a 1980s boxing drama she plans to direct with Craig Mazin among the producers, about a Brooklyn promoter who chases Don King’s success with his young daughter in tow. After decades of other people deciding who she was, the story she has chosen to tell next starts in her father’s trade.

Featured Films

The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025) — as Rachel Rozman

The Bad Guys 2 (2025) — The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025) — as Rachel Rozman

Tags: actors, actresses, Natasha Lyonne, Rian Johnson, Orange Is the New Black, Amy Poehler, Poker Face, Russian Doll

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