Natasha Lyonne makes quick-witted women funny without making them smug or invulnerable. We rate her most highly in Russian Doll and Poker Face, where the familiar rasp leaves room for fear, curiosity and kindness.
Fi1m perspective
In Poker Face (2023), Charlie Cale looks too dishevelled to inspire much confidence, until Natasha Lyonne lets her register a lie. She talks at her own pace, never seeming in a hurry to get to the important part. We laughed at how little her rumpled appearance prepared us for her certainty about other people’s dishonesty. She notices more than the people around her without treating them as fools.
That assurance was already there in Everyone Says I Love You (1996), where her narrator thinks she understands everybody and frequently does not. In American Pie (1999), Jessica’s scepticism gives us welcome relief from the boys, though it cannot excuse the film’s treatment of sexual privacy. As Nicky Nichols in Orange Is the New Black (2013), she makes the sharpest lines sound barely worth the effort of saying. With Russian Doll (2019), she also took responsibility for the writing and direction.
She co-created Russian Doll with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler, and plays Nadia Vulvokov, caught repeating the night of her birthday. Lyonne initially treats each return as a tiresome interruption, but her face can make the joke frightening without a speech to explain the change. Chris Teague shoots the party in dense reds and ambers, while Michael Bricker and Diane Lederman give Nadia a cramped bathroom to return to. Those repetitions let us notice small differences in Lyonne’s response. Joe Wong’s restrained score leaves room for the recurring Harry Nilsson song to become steadily less reassuring.
The writing is strongest when it lets Nadia’s impatience reveal how unwilling she is to accept help. Charlie Barnett’s anxious precision gives Lyonne’s disorder something useful to push against, and their arguments are the series’ strongest scenes. The last episode overreaches, but the earlier ones earn their kindness without making Nadia agreeable.
Poker Face gives her a different task: make a repeated investigative routine worth returning to. Creator Rian Johnson understands how much pleasure there is in following someone whose company we enjoy, and Lyonne also contributes as a writer and director. Editors including Melissa Kent and Bob Ducsay cannot always solve the problem of openings that keep Charlie away too long. We would start here for Lyonne’s warmth, provided a few dawdling cases are an acceptable price for it.
Biography
Natasha Lyonne is an American actress, writer and director. She began her career as a child actor with an uncredited role in Heartburn (1986) and a recurring part in Pee-wee's Playhouse (1986).
Lyonne gained attention for supporting roles in films including Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), But I'm a Cheerleader (1999) and American Pie (1999). She later received Emmy nominations for her performances in Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019) and as co-creator, writer and star of Russian Doll (2019–2022).
She stars as Charlie Cale, writes and directs episodes of the series Poker Face (2023–), and appears as Rachel Rozman in The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025). Lyonne has received five Primetime Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Award nominations.
