Natasha Lyonne on That Accent and How Acid Made Her See Things Clearer – Rolling Stone

During the course of reporting a feature on Peacock’s delightful upcoming mystery series Poker Face, we got far more material from creator Rian Johnson and star Natasha Lyonne than could comfortably fit. So as a bonus, we’re giving you some highlights from the rest of our conversations. 

Last week, we had Johnson going deep on the fun and challenges of giving Lyonne’s character Charlie Cale the ability to tell when anyone is lying. That’s where we open things with the actress, who explains that “I hate bullshit. Yeah, I do love however bullshitting.”

What’s the difference between those two?

Bullshit is a fully shared human being who sucks, or a lie. Bullshitting is shooting the shit, making jokes; gibberish talk it out; absurd concepts floating around, killing time.

Earlier, you seemed extremely surprised to hear that everyone else I interviewed called you one of the smartest people they’d ever met.

Alan, but I’m terrible with shapes. If you give me a simple children’s jigsaw puzzle, I’ll put the edges in the middle of the puzzle. I’m lost. I don’t know. I’m entirely self-taught. So I’m pretty thorough on the subjects that interest me. And thanks to those street smarts, I can glean a healthy amount about things pretty seamlessly. I think part of what they’re experiencing is that I’ve done so much acid in my early life that I can process scientific and artistic and interpersonal and theological and philosophical concepts pretty organically, because it’s almost like I’ve seen evidence of them as I’ve watched the world divide into itself while on acid as a teenager reading Nietzsche. Or I watched Clockwork Orange too many times as a kid. I don’t know what to tell you. My ego likes it. Because it is the quality trait I value most. Along with humor, which is really my favorite thing.

The persona you have now on-camera, and to a degree off-camera, is really very different from the way you presented yourself in those early years. You’re older now, but is any of the Joe Pesci/Andrew Dice Clay stuff you joke about a way to allow more of yourself to come out than you could earlier? Is some of it an affectation?

I don’t know. I think in many ways, my voice changed. Honestly, it scares me. I’m not charmed by it. I’m just sort of turning into a Harvey Fierstein/Elizabeth Ashley against my will, because I smoke so much. There was that Jay Leno bit that went viral recently, and I see myself on that and am like, Oh my god, that’s what I sounded like before all these cigarettes. But I remember that my accent was a problem for Tamara Jenkins and Woody Allen and Jamie Babbitt. It was always a problem. There was a casting director in New York City who showed me this weird old video of New York actors who’d auditioned for him and made it, and it was like me and DiCaprio and Phil Seymour Hoffman and Uma Thurman. And I was very flattered to be in that group. But, like, Uma Thurman comes on and she’s a 17-year-old goddess. And I come on, I’m wearing a mock turtleneck, my hair looks like it hasn’t been brushed in like a year, and I start talking with the thickest New York accent you’ve ever seen your life. And I’m talking about punching someone on the lunch line. Jesus Christ! No wonder I wasn’t getting those jobs! But are you experiencing me as having a New York accent right now?

Your accent right now as we’re talking is much less pronounced than it is in your roles.

I think this is how I talk. I also think my accent is less pronounced in Poker Face than in Russian Doll. But I’m terrified of public speaking. Talk shows terrify me. So I think that when I’m scared, my accent gets thicker. In both Season One and Season Two of Russian Doll, I spent a lot of time in the edit trying to reduce my accent, because I hate it. I find it so annoying. But I think I’m just getting old, honey. But when I get nervous, I get more New York to, like, protect myself from strangers.

Clea DuVall said that one of the reasons you became friends is because back then, you both felt like you didn’t fit into what the business wanted out of young women. What were those years like?

Clea is really extraordinary. We’re both orphans, so we really have each other. At Clea’s wedding, I’m the best man, or like the dad that gives her away. For us to go through this evolution from Nineties indie also-rans into showrunners, creators, writers and directors is pretty fucking wild. We’re both such dark, dark horses that it doesn’t make any sense at all. In the Nineties, I think we were a pair of terrible ingenues. I see these photos of us from when we were teenagers, and we’re pretty smokin’ hot, and nobody knew what to do with us. And we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. It was just, we were weird. They knew it. We knew it. And it felt bad all the time. I think the distortion was, Maybe there’s something broken about our outsides. And that really mindfucks you as a young woman. But I think the truth is, there was something wrong with our insides. Like, our insides were too fully-loaded to really make sense in these narrow parameters. Weirdly, times have caught up to us. If we were teenagers now, we’d be crushing. We’d be cool kids. This generation really likes an outsider as a main event. Our era, if you remember, was as cookie-cutter as cookies can cut — like, “Bring on the Aryan Nation!” It was a dark time to be a weirdo in showbiz. And I’m so grateful to watch that change. Also, because I think it’s dreadfully boring. Honey, they’ll never be as good as Joan Blondell. So keep it moving.

Rian and Clea and Chloë [Sevigny] all say that you never seem happier than when you’re directing. Would you say that’s fair?

Yeah, it makes me feel like Bob Fosse. And I do mean on speed. I like having an orchestra. I like being the conductor. And I think that my weirdo life has set me up well, to really enjoy watching the intensity of the situation. And it’s very natural for me, since I’ve been on sets since I was five, to feel very in control of all the elements. I love actors. I am obsessed with aesthetics. I’m such a major cinephile that I really understand shots and blocking. Watching all of it come together, it brings my soul a deep, deep joy. I feel like my feet are in the right place. And no matter how stressful it is, or people are freaking out about the lights or whatever, I’m genuinely having so much fun. And I feel for the first time fully occupied — like it’s an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. And I come home and I’m tired. I like that it demands of your brain to be using it at full capacity, in so many directions at once. I find that very soothing, and like a white noise feeling comes over my body.

I’ve been obsessed with movies, like — okay, this is weird, but if you actually, for reasons unknown to me, slowly took all the skin off my body, and you’re curious what I was made of on the inside, you’d just see a bunch of images, clung together from all these classic films. And that’s actually how I’m still walking, despite all those cigarettes, is that the images, they don’t experience the downside of nicotine. And so the tar keeps them glued together. That’s what celluloid means. And I love problem-solving. And I love improvising. And despite my seemingly maybe wacky nature, I’m a deeply obsessive workaholic, who’s a very precise perfectionist. So I love heavy preparation and exactitude. I like very clear parameters, and then filling the frame within it with as much information as possible. But I don’t actually like lawless chaos. If you’ve been to my house, my bed is always made. I don’t know how to describe it. I just have big hair — that’s the best way I can put it. And I think it’s potentially misleading to people. But I really, really love directing. All my heroes are really, directors. I love acting. The thing that I love with acting, though, is, it’s almost like being a musician. I like the idea that Rian’s a composer, and he’s letting me know what part of the song I can play in service to his album. And I want to do it as best I can for him, and it makes me happy to do it. But with writing and producing and the way it all kind of comes together with directing now, it’s very fun to have pages on set and be correcting them in real time with the actors, as things are adjusting. I also love looking at the schedule obsessively and figuring it out. I love being in the edit, and the feeling of when a song or score lands correctly over a sequence to tie it together is such a joyful experience. I feel very alive when it’s all happening. And I like to not feel dead inside.