Last night was the season premiere of Russian Doll season 2. This season is currently at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, so it’s starting off with a bang. I haven’t read anything on it yet because I don’t want it spoiled. By the time this post comes out, I will have seen the premiere, but I haven’t watched it yet. As Natasha finished up press for the kickoff, she didn’t phone in any of her answers. For her piece in the NY Post, she touched on drug addiction, Auschwitz and Hitler and being overwhelmed with concepts that are too large for us. Whew. Natasha’s grandmother is a survivor of Auschwitz. Natasha said knowing how close her family line came to a halt because of Hitler’s murderous crusade has shaped much of her life. Those are the kinds of ‘big thoughts’ she says people all around us are wrestling with.
Natasha Lyonne believes that traumatic family history — her grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor — has deeply affected her life choices.
“I’ve obviously had a very checkered past, to say the least, and I’ve been very open about it,” Lyonne, 43, told The Post in her signature sandpaper voice. “And it’s like along the way, you’re supposed to kinda go digging for some meaning to life other than self-destruction.”
Discussing her high-profile struggle with drug addiction in the early aughts, she said, “I don’t think you can take Hitler out of the equation, the way I moved through my teenage years especially. I’ve almost not been able to reconcile the real weight of what it means that that can happen, and that that can happen within a line of family that’s so close to you.”
The native New Yorker further suggested that even trying to ponder the Holocaust’s far-reaching effects was too overwhelming.
“It’s too big a concept to process, and I think that that’s happening pretty frequently, especially because of social media,” she said. “It’s like we’re being inundated so constantly with ideas that are too big to hold.”
Natasha has been very open about her drug addiction, which almost killed her and very nearly killed her career. Much of her Orange Is the New Black character, Nicky Nichols, is taken from Natasha’s own experience, including needing open-heart surgery due to drug complications. And while Natasha was arrested twice, she never went to prison. But she still fell pretty low before she crawled back up, sober and clean. She is also, of course, a child actor, starting her career at the age of six. And I didn’t realize that Natasha is a high school dropout, by her own admission. She probably had on-set tutors for most of her schooling. I consider her to be an intellectual. Not just smart, but someone who needs to turn ideas over in her mind and flush them out with others. If she’s contemplating the proximity Hitler had to her ancestors with no one to talk to but a tired tutor, I could see Natasha stagnating.
I agree with Natasha, we do constantly grapple with ideas that are too big to hold. And they are ideas across the social strata, most with answers larger than us as well. The answers would be aided by discussion. One in which we lend and listen to ideas and experiences. But social media, as Natasha points out, often drops these massive thoughts and what results is not a discussion, but a shout fest. If a person such as Natasha said that something in her world was shaped by her anxiety over the Holocaust’s icy grip on their family, we need to listen. And yet, I promise at least one comment would start with “Yeah, but… “ Because we can’t handle a thought that big. Like systemic racism or outlawing being gay or women living as property – those concepts are too big for people who haven’t lived them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from dismissing them before they’ve listened to someone who has lived with it.
Photo credit: Avalon Red and Instar Images
Listen, I know this is about big thoughts and all but I can only look at her hair and feel super elated. I have a similar hair and never see stars with the old frizzy curly / wavy hair combo, which took me years to 1) understand 2) learn how to groom 3) enjoy and sincerely like.
Re: big thoughts. drug addiction and psychological instability are big mysteries for me still. Some people have the same history, same inherited trauma and deal with it very differently. Drugs are terrible and western societies see them as « recreational » whereas indigenous people use them as rituals or in spiritual processes by a shaman. We just have so much access to so much shit without any depth attached to it that we fall for everything (see the Depp / Heard mess of a trial – drugs infused lives are so unforgiving).
So glad Lyonne came out of it and is living her best life. Her mind is one of a kind!
She brings up some interesting points. There’s generational trauma in what her family went through, and as with other families carrying that, it has shapes you in ways that can be complex and damaging.
In modern life, we have such great access to information about the breadth of history, about what society and leaders good and bad have done, and what came next, so much more access than generations before had. Yet I think we’ve lost something, a way to make sense of it, to take meaning from it in our cultures and our societies. It doesn’t help that now it’s so much easier for liars and conmen to spread their warped views and propaganda and gather weak minded/hateful people to their cause.
(For example the fact that the orange menace STILL has a platform and a rabid following … not a good thing for the world)
Well, I can’t explain all of it, but I can partially explain the whole thing with access to information causing it to lose meaning. People have access to more information, but they don’t necessarily retain it. There is no need. It can be easily looked up again. Also, people, in general aren’t seeking out in-depth information. They want a general understanding. So, it’s like trying to put together a puzzle when you only have a couple pieces (facts) at a time and you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like (the meaning). You either throw the pieces away because they are useless by themselves or you stick them somewhere out of the way in case you decide to look for all the pieces later. Either way, it can always be done later because all you have to do is google it to find the pieces. So, our access to information has actually decreased how much we know. You can’t understand the wider meaning of anything unless you can put it into context. It’s funny because, at least one ancient cultures,I think it was the druids, who memorized everything instead of writing it down because they were afraid of this very thing.
I know several grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Generational trauma from a huge event like that is most definitely a thing. It shapes the entire worldview and impacts the way each future generation is raised. The same can be said for descendants of soldiers who went in and liberated the camps.
I wish her success and happiness in her future.
I also believe generational trauma is a very real thing.
I did not know she was a child actor.
Russian Doll is a good show, with some true and original writing.
Glad to watch something that is not a remake or a sequel.
This is a great post Hecate thank you.
I agree with her about ideas too big to hold. I also feel like social media and to an extent, the news, desensitizes us to those ideas. There is so much horror currently going on in the world, and there is so much horror in the past that it just accumulates and festers. The current climate does nothing to help.
Highly recommend reading The New Yorker piece on her. Really fascinating. I had no idea of the depths of trouble with her parents and biological family. Reading the New York interview puts Russian doll in a whole new context.
Thank you for the recommendation–I will read it. Thanks to Hecate for a post that’s got the real heavy stuff in it. Lyonne is a real one, and her work is really important, I think. She’s an auteur disguised as a comedian.
Thanks for telling us about the New Yorker piece. So much to learn about Natasha. I didn’t even know she was the showrunner; I just love Russian Dolls in an easy, natural way.
I’m really glad she’s talking about this. Even the DNA of the offspring of Holocaust survivors is impacted.
Sorry if links aren’t allowed
I love her so much! She seems like a really smart and level-headed person, and fun to be around. I’d love to sit down and talk with her.