Natasha Lyonne
Natasha Lyonne
Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein, better known as Natasha Lyonne, is an actress. She is best known for her role as Jessica in the American Pie series and her appearances in the films Everyone Says I Love You, Slums of Beverly Hills, But I'm a Cheerleader, and Blade: Trinity. She currently portrays Nicky Nichols in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, for which she received a nomination for the 2014 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actress
Date of Birth4 April 1979
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
There's something great about all your worst fears coming true and being said about you. There's a tremendous liberation on some level.
I always see the absurdity in most situations. It's my experience of how life works.
I started wearing all black around the time I got into Nirvana. I first heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' when I was about 12, and I remember jumping on my bed, so excited about it.
I was this kid who had been raised in New York, and now all of a sudden, my mother decided that she was a Jewish divorcee and therefore she should be living in Miami Beach.
When I was a young person working, everybody was older than me, so I had to kind of keep up. I'd see every movie and listen to everything played, and read all the relevant books. Being an actor, it's kind of your job to know what came before you and how big your feelings are allowed to be.
Your trade becomes very much impacted by the quality of your life experiences and your capacity to process them.
There are beauty icons that I can never be like, sorta like a Gena Rowlands - I'll never have that look. I love Giulietta Masina, the great Fellini actress. But I'm probably more Seymour Cassel. Or somewhere between Lou Reed and Nora Ephron?
If I was a bajillionaire, I would spend a lot of time at Barneys just buying all kinds of great things all the time. I would have so many black cashmeres it would be out of control. I like the way nice things feel very much.
Rather than spend so much time wondering if I'm going to get hired, or is it a problem that I've got this black-tar history, I've just got to keep doing what I'm doing and try to be decent.
Over time, you realize that even the things that are most high stakes kind of resolve themselves.
My family moved to Israel when I was eight until I was 10, and then we came back, and my parents split up. I was suddenly in a single-parent home and on scholarship. Fifth grade was such a hard year for me.
It's such a weird thing: to sit and look at yourself is so distracting to the psyche. It would be like me standing in front of a mirror and looking at myself all day, trying to find a flaw.
I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I coulda played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is prone to that you should necessarily put them in a real working industry at six years old.
What I like to do is to give my real name in Starbucks but be really hostile each time, as if they're asking me something that I've never heard in my life. I give them a really dirty look, "Really? It's Natasha. Okay?" Like I've never been to Starbucks before. Each time. I enter the premises looking for combat.