russian doll time travel

Natasha Lyonne Is a Time Prisoner in 'Russian Doll' Season 2 — Let's Explain the Rules of Time Travel

Apr. 22 2022, Published 9:20 p.m. ET

From 1985's hit sci-fi comedy Back to the Future to 2004's thriller The Butterfly Effect , time travel rules vary from project to project. Can you change the past, and therefore the future? What's the method of transportation used to travel from era to era? Can a person get permanently trapped in a year that isn't present-day? So many questions.

Well, in Season 1 of Netflix 's mind-bending dramedy Russian Doll , none of these questions were relevant as the storyline involved Natasha Lyonne's Nadia enduring a time-loop. But that changed in Season 2.

Created by Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler , and Leslye Headland, Russian Doll 's highly anticipated second installment sees Nadia and Alan (Charlie Barnett) travel to the past (eventually landing about a month or so into the future) and learn more about their complicated familial roots. With overarching themes related to family trauma, sexism, and mental illness (you know, the good stuff), our messy Manhattan-based protagonists walk a mile in the shoes of their grandmothers — literally.

Via time travel, Nadia inhabits the body of her Hungarian Jewish grandma, Vera Peschauer (Ilona McCrea), in WWII-era Budapest, while Alan is thrown into the body of his Ghanaian immigrant grandma, Agnes (Carolyn Michelle Smith) , in 1962 East Berlin. Nadia also takes over the body of her mother, Lenora Vulvokov (Chloë Sevigny), in 1982 NYC — eventually giving birth to herself on a subway platform. It's all super meta. Let's explain how this happens as well as the Russian Doll rules of trippy time travel.

How does time travel work in 'Russian Doll' Season 2?

We'll admit, there's not always a concrete explanation for things in Russian Doll , but if we had to summarize the reason Nadia and Alan time travel, it's to make peace with their family histories, as well as with the events (and the outcomes) they have no control over.

Regarding Back to the Future and The Butterfly Effect , time-traveling protagonists Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Evan Treborn ( Ashton Kutcher ) are able to drastically change the future with the most subtle alterations of past events — which becomes a complete mess in both films. It's not quite like that in Russian Doll .

Nadia first time travels when she hops on the 6 train — specifically train #6622 — at 77th Street, the subway acting as her own personal time machine (without her consent, might we add). She winds up in 1982 Manhattan, confined in the body of her pregnant mother. As you do. She doesn't realize this for quite a while, which as you can imagine, freaks her out.

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Still, because she's a time-loop survivor (as is Alan), Nadia is perhaps not as freaked out as the average person would be. After a chaotic night involving a sleazy guy named Chez (Sharlto Copley), she gets on a subway at the Astor Place station, and lands herself back in 2022 NYC.

Nadia tells Alan — who's always a little bit on-edge — about her experience, theorizing that the two of them have unfinished business. At first, Alan wants nothing to do with time travel, but another first-date-to-nowhere leaves him craving excitement. He hops on a subway at Astor Place, and winds up in 1962 East Berlin as his grandma.

Overall, time travel seems to be a bit simpler for Alan, as he goes back and forth between 1962 East Berlin and 2022 NYC. It's not always clear where Nadia will wind up. Whether its New York City in 1982, NYC in 2022, or 1944 Budapest, it's as if the past is trying to tell her something. The space-time continuum is wild.

In Russian Doll , time travel always happens by way of trains (not to mention via the bodies of matriarchs). Interestingly, in Season 2, Episode 6 — titled "Schrödinger's Ruth" — Nadia discovers she can rapidly travel between the three eras by walking in a straight line from train car to train car. Is it a coincidence that time is thought to be linear? We think not.

In the end, nothing neither Nadia nor Alan does will change how events play out — their paths are preordained. Nadia is relentless in trying to protect her family's stolen fortune (aka a fruitful pile of Krugerrands) by changing the past, and Alan tries to prevent his grandmother's love interest from tunneling under the Berlin Wall.

You can say that the films we mentioned involve destiny, which you can shape. But when it comes to fate, everything is already set in stone. So, Nadia and Alan attempting to alter the past is literally written into their predetermined fates. Everything is supposed to happen exactly how it happened — you can't change your fate. The universe is a bitch, isn't it?

Seasons 1 and 2 of Russian Doll are currently streaming on Netflix.

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It's Not Easy Being a Manhattan-Bound Time Prisoner — Where Was 'Russian Doll' Season 2 Filmed?

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Screen Rant

Russian doll time travel explained: why nadia & alan use trains.

In Russian Doll season 2, Nadia and Alan are able to travel back in time, but what are the time travel rules, and why do they use trains?

Warning: Contains spoilers for Russian Doll season 2.

In Russian Doll Season 2 Nadia and Alan are able to travel through time by using specific trains. Russian Doll Season 1 famously saw Nadia and Alan sharing similar experiences in a time loop where they each repeatedly died. For Russian Doll Season 2, the dark time-bending comedy has switched up their device in a way that allows them to explore more of the characters’ history and personal lives.

In Russian Doll season 2 , after Alan dismisses the idea that they might get stuck in another time loop on Nadia’s 40th birthday, Nadia goes to take train #6622, but sees Horse just before she boards. When Nadia gets off the train, she realizes that she is in 1982 and inhabiting her mother’s pregnant body. Nadia finds that she can repeat this experience and Alan finds that he can also board a train to the past, although he arrives in 1962 East Berlin in the body of his grandmother, Agnes.

Related: Russian Doll Season 2: Why Is Rosie O'Donnell Credited In Every Episode?

It can feel as though every time travel narrative takes its own approach to the science of time travel. In Russian Doll Season 2, time travel is entirely linear. While Nadia and Alan are able to travel back in time and take actions, the results of those actions have always already taken place in their lives. Ultimately, in Russian Doll Season 2 , it is not possible to change the past because the characters already inhabit a timeline in which they were always going to complete those trips to the past.

Why Nadia and Alan Use Trains to Time Travel

In Russian Doll Season 2, Nadia and Alan’s use of trains to travel through time is highly symbolic of how time travel works in this universe. Just like train cars, Nadia and Alan are on a track and set to run a fixed route. While they are able to travel backwards and forwards along the timeline, it is impossible for them to change where the tracks lead. As time travel in Russian Doll Season 2 is centered on a concept of predestination, the idea of trains as a means of transportation through time serves as a meta-pun about the idea of stations and destinations.

The image of trains as representative of notions of time travel in Russian Doll Season 2 is particularly highlighted by a scene in the penultimate episode of the season. As Nadia attempts to escape the confines of the timeline, she travels from train car to train car, experiencing a sped-up version of her time travel as she appears in trains from different points on her timeline. While Nadia is free to move backwards and forwards through time, she ultimately ends up back where she started, cementing the linear concept of time travel through trains in Russian Doll Season 2.

Next: Russian Doll Season 2 Timeline Explained

Entertainment
Russian Doll levels up in season 2 by catching a new existential train of thought

The ‘M’ in MTA stands for ‘metaphysical’

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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As Nadia Vulvokov realized how she was trapped in a never-ending cycle of death and do-overs in Russian Doll ’s first season , her familiarity with the concept of time loops helped her escape one. Nadia’s self-awareness about her predicament was a major part of what kept Russian Doll from feeling like a simple Groundhog Day riff with little to add to the genre. That cosmic knowingness is also one of the reasons Russian Doll ’s second season makes for such an unexpectedly different and fascinating puzzle box as it takes the series to its next level with another tale of metaphysical birthday madness.

Russian Doll ’s second season picks up a few years after the previous and just days before Nadia’s (Natasha Lyonne) 40th birthday. As always, Nadia fully intends to spend the day of her birth with loved ones like Maxine (Greta Lee) and Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), and she’s confident that she’s going to be able to make good on her plans because — for the first time in a while — she feels in control of her life.

Nadia trying to figure out which train she’s catching.

More than any specific setting details, it’s Nadia’s interactions with neighborhood pillars like Horse (Brendan Sexton III) and bodega owner Farran (Ritesh Rajan) that give you a sense of how much everyone has lived in the gap between Russian Doll ’s first and second seasons. After spending the past few of Nadia’s birthdays together and on high alert in case they were sucked into another loop, she and Alan (Charlie Barnett) have had the chance to develop a genuine friendship and shared sense of safety with one another that helps keep them both grounded.

Russian Doll pads its story with a healthy dose of urban legends

Despite Alan and Nadia having more than earned their right to be in perpetual states of anxiety about their places in the universe, Russian Doll ’s second chapter leads with the idea that their previous experiences have changed them for the better. Neither Nadia nor Alan’s neuroses are ever all that far away, though, and a substantial part of Russian Doll ’s story here is a mind-bending exploration of how the two of them got to be that way in the first place. Similar to how the new season of Russian Doll doesn’t spend as much time reminding you that Nadia’s a video game developer, the show doesn’t try to frame its new time-traveling conceit as a surprise. Rather, Russian Doll presents it as the universe challenging both Alan and Nadia to better understand themselves and how uniquely situated in reality they’ve always been.

Russian Doll once again presumes that you, like Nadia, have consumed enough stories about time travel to know the rules about what people should and shouldn’t do if they spontaneously find themselves transported to the distant past. Season two raises the stakes and puts a unique spin on the genre, though, by padding its story with a healthy dose of urban legends and batshit left turns that all complement Lyonne’s performance as a consummate New Yorker who — mostly — knows no fear.

The importance of living in the moment is one of the larger ideas that shapes much of Russian Doll ’s plot as Nadia and Alan begin bouncing back and forth between the present day and important moments from their past that are somehow connected by New York’s subway system. In any other series, the absurdity of a time-traveling MTA train guiding people to crucial points in their lives might almost be enough to derail the entire endeavor, but it works here because of this season’s focus on how nonsensical things become important parts of people’s identities.

Alan waiting for a train at Astor Place.

Though much of this season is about Nadia looking back on her life, Russian Doll also delves into her interiority by way of her mother, Lenora (Chloë Sevigny), a paranoid schizophrenic with her own history of moving through the world in ways that “normal” people don’t. Russian Doll ’s first season gave us a taste of what Nadia’s childhood with Lenora was like, but season 2 is a proper study of what it meant for Lenora to be a single mother in the ’80s struggling to support a family with few resources at her disposal. Both Lyonne — who also serves as showrunner — and Sevigny bring Nadia and Lenora to life with a raw intensity that feels new despite it gelling with what we’ve seen of the characters in the past.

While Russian Doll ’s taking on a slightly different kind of sci-fi / supernatural trope this season, what’s pleasantly surprising is how uninterested the series is in deconstructing said trope outside of a handful of jokes. Russian Doll knows that you’ve probably seen Back to the Future and thought about what sorts of investments you’d want to make if you woke up in the past, which is why it spends so much of its time pushing you and its protagonists to think more deeply about what’s happening to them.

The more you settle into the Murakami-like pacing and sensibilities of Russian Doll ’s new mystery, the more satisfying this seven-episode-long season ends up being as it begins to increasingly rely on a fuzzy kind of dream logic. The clarity that Nadia and Alan are initially able to view their situations with doesn’t endure, but it’s replaced by a perspective that’s far more interesting and leaves open the possibility for even more Russian Doll down the line.

Russian Doll also stars Annie Murphy, Rebecca Henderson, Waris Ahluwalia, and Lillias White. The show’s second season hit Netflix on April 20th.

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'Russian Doll' Season 2 Review: Natasha Lyonne Time Travels in a Chaotic and Emotionally Satisfying Return

Time travel, what a concept!

The first season of Russian Doll showed life in a loop. Nadia ( Natasha Lyonne ) began every loop at her 36th birthday party, inside a bathroom, while Harry Nilsson ’s “Gotta Get Up” blared. Nadia for the most part knew what to expect: once she left the bathroom, her friend Maxine ( Greta Lee ) would be there to greet her with a birthday chicken, and a joint laced with ketamine, and from there, the choice was hers. Nadia could party, she could go down the stairs (which she would probably fall down and die), she could go down the fire escape and live a few days before dying and restarting the loop once more. In that first season, Nadia and eventually Alan ( Charlie Barnett )—who was experiencing the same time loop phenomenon—knew that if things didn’t go the right way, there was another chance to retry and start again.

But life isn’t that easy. Live is sloppy and difficult. We make a choice, that choice is set in stone. The ramifications of that decision can ripple through decades and generations. Our story isn’t just our own, it’s tied to all those who came before us, and all those who will come after us. Season 2 of Russian Doll embraces this sloppiness, this disorderliness of life, the confounding butterfly effect that our choices have that we are all tied to. Time isn’t a flat circle. Time is a clusterfuck.

The second season of Russian Doll —released over three years since the debut of Season 1 —finds Nadia a few days before her fortieth birthday, generally the same as we last remember her. She’s trying to stop smoking, as her lungs are “two shriveled up Nick Caves,” and she finds herself spending more time keeping an eye on Ruth ( Elizabeth Ashley ), whose trips to the hospital are becoming concerning.

RELATED: ‘Russian Doll’ Season 1 Recap: Everything You Need to Know Before Season 2

After a trip on the New York City subway, Nadia finds herself in 1982, and Nadia attempts to try and fix her mom's past mistakes. But as Season 1 showed us, fixing the past isn’t as easy as it might seem, especially when Nadia’s subway trips take her forward and backward in time, continuously throwing her into unexpected times, places, and situations.

Season 1 worked like clockwork, with a compact and brilliant story told over the course of eight episodes that made it seem like a second season wasn’t necessary. By comparison, Season 2 is intentionally shaggy, as this story twists the past and present into a gigantic tangle of a narrative. Season 2 isn’t trying to hold the same tight structure of that first season, but rather, Russian Doll is attempting to create controlled chaos. If the first season explored how the choices we make inform the world around us, Season 2’s zooms out to show just how far back the past informs who we become—a much more daunting and overwhelming task to try to pull off effectively. Yet Russian Doll makes this exploration of the past in conjunction with the present work beautifully.

In order to tell this story, Season 2 latches onto the few loose ends that were left behind in Season 1 — primarily, Nadia’s fear of her past and her troubled relationship with her mother. Season 2 has Nadia mostly searching for the gold Krugerrands her mother lost, which were to be Nadia’s inheritance, yet this is just a MacGuffin for Nadia to reckon with her past and the issues that her mother had at a young age. By walking in her mother’s footsteps, Nadia is able to understand the relationship that she and her mother had with far more depth and compassion.

But part of this reflection on the past also includes seeing just how important Ruth has been to both Lenora and Nadia, as Ruth has been the person who didn’t have to be there, but always was because of her love for these two women. Because of this, Russian Doll Season 2 is fundamentally a story about mothers, both the ones that we don’t have any choice in and the women who raise us into who we are.

This dive into Nadia’s past allows Lyonne an opportunity to showcase all her strengths as an actress. Facing her past and her mother’s past provides some truly moving moments throughout this season, as Nadia tries to accept the things that she cannot change. Season 1’s most difficult moments found Nadia coming face-to-face with the past she had tried too hard to avoid, and by succumbing to that past in this new season makes the emotional payoff even greater. But as always, Nadia remains a hilarious and unpredictable character, always ready with a charming aside, or a great line made for quoting. Lyonne, who also wrote or co-wrote four of this season’s seven episodes, and directed three episodes, has expanded who this character is in remarkable and magnificent ways.

Russian Doll Season 2 is also a feat of writing, a tangled ball of yarns that somehow all comes together masterfully. The writers for Season 2 know that the audience and these characters have seen plenty of time travel stories, which allows them to have fun by defying expectations. Is there something that everyone agrees shouldn’t be done in a time travel story? Well, then Russian Doll is gonna do it. But the series, for the most part, also handles time with a fairly straightforward and universal truth of these types of stories, in that the past can’t be changed, but exploring the past can help one learn more about yourself and make one a better person.

Thankfully, the writing this season allows more opportunities for the supporting cast to shine. A journey for answers teams up Nadia and Maxine for one of the season’s best episodes, while Alan once again gets his own series of adventures, which plays with the same basic ideas as Nadia’s story, but also tells an equally fascinating story about acceptance of the unknowable and not being afraid to make the wrong move. Season 2 also offers plenty of time with Ruth, both in the modern-day and in the 1980s. Ruth and her adoration for Nadia and Lenora is key to this season and the show in general, so it’s great that this season allows for plenty of time with Russian Doll ’s most underrated character.

Russian Doll ’s second season is a truly wild ride, even when compared to the circuital first season, but it’s the looseness and free-flowing exploration of the past that makes this season so remarkable. By untethering this season from a specific pattern, Russian Doll can delve into much more open territory and expand this world in a way that would’ve been impossible with the first season. With its second season, Russian Doll crafts a narrative that is far more confounding and less structured than the first, and while it might not always work, the result is a season that is far more layered, emotionally satisfying, and engrossing than the pristine nature of the first season. Time travel, what a concept!

Russian Doll Season 2 comes to Netflix on April 20.

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In “Russian Doll,” Natasha Lyonne Barrels Into the Past

By Rachel Syme

Natasha Lyonne sits on a bench next to a record player.

On a November evening outside a sound-editing studio in Chelsea, Natasha Lyonne was sipping a can of Red Bull Sugar-Free and puffing on a Marlboro Light 72, her brand of choice. “Short, like Robert Mitchum would have smoked,” she explained. She’d spent the afternoon doing a “watch-down” of new episodes of “Russian Doll,” her macabre Netflix comedy, in which she stars as Nadia Vulvokov, an East Village video-game engineer who in the first season gets hit by a cab on the night of her thirty-sixth-birthday party. The accident is fatal, but instead of expiring Nadia finds herself in a “Groundhog Day”-like loop of reliving the same night and then dying in increasingly gruesome and unlikely ways. Lyonne co-created the series with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, and for Season 2, which premières on April 20th, she has taken over from Headland as showrunner. She wrote four of the seven episodes, directed three, and had a hand in every aspect of postproduction. “Directing is this whole other third thing that came into my life, and I’ve never felt so at home,” Lyonne said. “It just turns all my defects into assets. Meaning, you know, being hyper-decisive and obsessive and tireless.” She pulled out her phone and ordered a Lyft, then decided that the wait was too long and strode to the curb to hail a yellow taxi. Before she could flag one, a group of young men in suits and ties recognized her and gave up theirs. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Lyonne said, and mimed the doffing of a cap.

Lyonne speaks in the rhythms of a Borscht Belt comedian. Her accent is outer borough, featuring rumbustious pronunciations (“cahk-a-rooch”) and the raspy “Ehhhh”s of a tired old rabbi settling into a comfortable chair. In front of a crowd or a camera, the effect becomes even more pronounced. “When I get nervous, I become Joe Pesci,” she told me. She is recognizable by her voice, but also by her Clara Bow eyes and her wild Titian curls, which lend her wise-guy mien a jolt of femininity. In Chinatown, she got out in front of a shabby walkup a block from Canal Street. Inside, at a secret outpost of a Japanese restaurant, she joined a table alongside the director Janicza Bravo, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, the “Succession” star Nicholas Braun, and several others who’d worked on “Zola,” Bravo’s super-fuelled 2020 film about a pair of strippers on a road trip gone wrong. They ate green-bean tempura and lacquered lamb chops while Harris, a precocious dandy of the theatre world, held forth on being fitted earlier in the day for his outfit, a custom Thom Browne suit in red-and-blue gingham. Lyonne picked at the food and chatted with Braun about a bar in the neighborhood that he helped open. In the presence of other outsized personalities, she seemed content to cede the spotlight.

“I’ve been waiting for a New Yorker profile since I was twelve,” Harris said.

“See, that makes one of us, because I was always, like, this is for intellectual bullies who graduated high school,” Lyonne replied.

After dinner, the group piled into two cars and headed to the nearby Metrograph Theatre, where Lyonne moderated a post-screening panel with the “Zola” team in front of a full house. Back outside on the street, she bear-hugged the actor Colman Domingo and brought up a vacation they’d soon be taking together in Mexico. At about ten o’clock, the comedian and actress Nora Lum, a.k.a. Awkwafina, pulled up to the curb in a luxury S.U.V. to whisk Lyonne off to a taping of “Saturday Night Live.”

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Raised between New York and Israel, Lyonne entered show business as a child, and as a young adult she became a star of cult comedies such as “Slums of Beverly Hills” and “But I’m a Cheerleader.” Her family life was tumultuous, though, and by her early twenties she was receding from Hollywood owing to drug abuse. She’s been clean since 2006, but she returned to professional prominence only after playing a scene-stealing role in the Netflix prison series “Orange Is the New Black,” which premièred in 2013. Now forty-three, she is charging ahead through her life at full tilt. She told me, “I get panicky I won’t have enough time. I feel like I already blew so much.”

“Russian Doll” is, in a sense, a show about lost time. In the course of the first season, Nadia drowns in the East River, falls down a flight of stairs, chokes on a chicken wing, and gets stung by a swarm of bees. Each time, she ends up back in the eccentrically renovated bathroom of her friend Maxine as the peppy opening notes of Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up” blare from the next room, where Nadia’s birthday bash is still raging. Eventually, she meets a man in the neighborhood named Alan (Charlie Barnett), who is having a similar problem, and together they set out to solve the mystery of their shared existential glitch. Season 1 was a showcase for Lyonne’s gregarious bravado and her world-weary one-liners (“Thursday. What a concept.”), but it also packed in philosophical musings and hefty themes of mortality and redemption. Its look channelled Lyonne’s favorite New York films, from the downtown grime of “Sid and Nancy” to the urban kookiness of “After Hours.” In a review for this magazine, Emily Nussbaum compared the show to such “arch, deeply emotional puzzle boxes” as “Fleabag” and “The Leftovers.” It won Emmy Awards for its costumes, cinematography, and production design, and was nominated in ten other categories, including Outstanding Comedy Series.

For Season 2, the “Groundhog Day” premise has been traded for a riff on “Back to the Future,” and the result is heavier than one might expect. In an early scene, Nadia discovers that she has teleported, via the No. 6 train, to 1982, the year she was born. This sets her off on a race to uncover a family mystery and its psychological reverberations. Through seven episodes, parts of which were filmed on location in Budapest, Nadia keeps barrelling into the past, connecting the dots between her own sense of dislocation, her mother’s mental-health problems, and her Hungarian grandmother’s experience of the Holocaust. (Alan, meanwhile, delves into his own personal history.) Lyonne admitted that an earnest exploration of inherited trauma might not resonate with every fan of “Russian Doll” ’s jaunty first season. “You don’t get a lot of shots to say what you want to say, so you may as well say what you want while they’re letting you,” she said, adding, “If people don’t like it, I’ll just sue them.”

Lyonne lives in a luxury condominium inside a converted synagogue in Manhattan. An Orthodox congregation still occupies the ground floor. One winter afternoon, she showed me around her three-bedroom unit, which is filled with a stylishly jumbled array of art and personal memorabilia. “This can all be yours for twenty-five hundred a month, in perpetuity,” she joked. “Hear me out, this is not a scam!” The bed was unmade. Framed movie posters were propped along the walls, some two or three deep. Lyonne was wearing her ringlets pulled away from her face in a lopsided bun. On her fingers were acrylic nails—red, white, and spiky—that she’d kept on with Krazy Glue since a photo shoot a month earlier. She pointed out a set of timbales from her ex-boyfriend Fred Armisen, and a Sonos speaker from the “lovely new man” in her life, whom she preferred not to name.

Lyonne is an autodidact and a film obsessive, who peppers conversations with references to silent cinema, Jewish mysticism, nineteen-seventies Hollywood moguls, New York City trivia, and Lou Reed lyrics. A single question sent to her by text message might elicit a waterfall of replies, plus a GIF of, say, a Pikachu with the caption “Haters Gonna Hate.” In her apartment, nearly every shelf, wall nook, and windowsill was crowded with books. She excitedly showed me a volume called “House of Psychotic Women,” about female neurosis in genre films, and a copy of Cynthia Ozick’s 1997 novel, “The Puttermesser Papers,” which she said she would be reading aloud for a new audiobook recording. Pointing to a beat-up biography of Rasputin, she said, “In my addiction I was always carrying this around. It was my safety blanket.” Lyonne was educated in part at a Modern Orthodox Jewish high school where students read the Talmud in the original Aramaic, and she runs “Russian Doll” a bit like a yeshiva study circle. A lengthy syllabus that she distributed to the writers of Season 2 included texts on Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann, quantum mechanics, and the history of the lobotomy. She told me that the show’s riddle-like construction was influenced by her love of word games. Hanging in her kitchen is a frame containing a crossword puzzle that she wrote for the Times , in 2019, and an accompanying article. “This for me is my favorite interview I’ve ever done,” she said. “Because it was about something I have very clean feelings for.”

Lyonne recalled that she has wanted to be a director ever since her first major film role, in Woody Allen’s musical “Everyone Says I Love You,” playing the Allen character’s free-spirited teen daughter. In her apartment she keeps a cramped “movie room” outfitted with a TV, a love seat, and dozens of vintage VHS tapes. On one wall hung a still photograph from the first project she directed, a short film for the Parisian fashion brand Kenzo, from 2017. Leaning against another was a poster of Linda Manz, a tough-girl actress of a previous generation, from a new restoration of Dennis Hopper’s “Out of the Blue,” which Lyonne and Chloë Sevigny, her longtime best friend, helped finance. In the living room, two huge stained-glass windows cast colorful shadows on the rug. On the coffee table was a copy of the script for one of Lyonne’s most beloved films, Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical musical “All That Jazz.” Boisterous and hallucinatory, it follows a pill-popping choreographer (Roy Scheider) as he burns the candle at both ends while being courted by an angel of death, played by Jessica Lange. Each morning, he tells his beleaguered reflection in the mirror, “It’s showtime, folks!” Lyonne told me, “It’s the closest approximation to what life feels like that I’ve ever seen.” Sitting on top of an old piano were the two SAG Awards that she received for her performance in “Orange Is the New Black.” “You always read about people who say, ‘I put my awards directly in the garbage, because I’m grounded.’ No! Put your awards where people can see them! What are you, a fucking dummy who wants to pretend like you didn’t do that work? Schmucks.”

Lyonne has been working since kindergarten. Born Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein, in 1979, she is the second child of parents whom she describes as “rock-and-roll black sheep from conservative Jewish families.” Her mother, Ivette Buchinger, was the daughter of Hungarian Holocaust survivors who settled in Los Angeles by way of Paris and went into watch distribution. Lyonne described her mother as a “red-headed European prima-ballerina hot chick,” who hoped to become a professional dancer but never quite found an on-ramp. As a teen-ager, Ivette met Lyonne’s father, Aaron Braunstein, a loud-talking, ponytailed Brooklyn native, and they began a high-octane love affair. “They were both into fast cars, fur coats, Rottweilers, cocaine, drinking,” Lyonne said. Ivette moved to New York to be with Aaron, and they had Lyonne’s older brother in 1972. They bought a run-down mansion in Kings Point, Long Island, that they boasted had once been the home of Herman Melville. (It had not.) Ivette worked on and off for her parents’ business, but around the time Lyonne was born the company foundered, and the family struggled financially. “My father was always up to shit,” Lyonne said. “First he wanted to be a race-car driver, then a boxing promoter. So I got put into this business.”

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Aaron and Ivette took a gimmicky approach to stage parenting. When Lyonne was five, they legally changed her last name. She recalled that at parties they would have her take sips of their beer and belt out David Lee Roth lyrics “to show off for their friends.” Riding the Long Island Rail Road to auditions in the city, Ivette would urge her daughter to read the Wall Street Journal stock trades aloud. “It was, like, my street-urchin trick,” Lyonne said. She landed her first film role at the age of six, a minor part in Mike Nichols’s 1986 adaptation of Nora Ephron’s novel “Heartburn,” and, that same year, got a recurring role on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” She auditioned for but didn’t get the lead role in “Curly Sue,” though the character, a frizzy-haired ham who assists her grifter father figure, may as well have been written for her. “When I go to Times Square I get nostalgic, because I think of myself as a little kid with a briefcase walking around, developing street smarts, wondering if my drunk dad is going to pick me up,” she said.

In social settings, Lyonne trots out certain anecdotes from her childhood as if they were bits in a comedic monologue. But in reality her parents’ marriage was volatile, and her upbringing was distressingly unstable. She recalled that Aaron would disappear on drinking sprees or lock himself in his bedroom for days at a time, and that Ivette would move out of the house after the couple’s ugliest fights, dragging Lyonne with her to a Manhattan rental apartment. “It was a lot of basic shit, like Mommy called the cops on Daddy,” Lyonne said, adding, “For me and my brother, it was very much trying to hold on.” When she was eight, her father abruptly announced that the family was moving to Israel, and that he had grand plans to bring Mike Tyson to the Hilton Tel Aviv. (Lyonne refers to the move as her parents’ “tax-evasion scheme,” because they ended up in debt to the I.R.S.) Her dad bought a black Porsche and promoted boxing matches in small venues around the country. Lyonne recalled visiting the ancient city of Caesarea, taking a ski trip in Lebanon, and performing in an Israeli movie involving a hot-air balloon. In a narrow office at the back of her apartment, she showed me a framed photograph of her working as a “ring girl” at a fight in Tel Aviv, grinning and waving an Israeli flag. Lyonne described that period as the “great years” of her childhood, but in 1989 Ivette returned to New York and took Natasha with her. “My dad’s drinking was no longer magnanimous or the life of the party,” Lyonne said. “And it’s not like they were winning at this boxing-promoting life style. That pipe dream was dying, and the money was running out.” (Her brother stayed in Israel, and as adults the siblings lost touch.)

Back in New York, mother and daughter bounced from one apartment to another. Lyonne landed a role in the film version of “Dennis the Menace,” but she was auditioning more than she was landing parts. “I’m no Drew Barrymore, I’m not in fucking ‘E.T.,’ ” she said. “And I’m lugging around this nutjob”—her mother—“and we are a package deal.” Ivette’s parents helped support them financially, and at their insistence Lyonne secured a scholarship to Ramaz, an Orthodox academy on the Upper East Side, but she was expelled in her sophomore year for dealing marijuana to her classmates. In 1995, Ivette moved to Miami, and Lyonne, who was fifteen, stayed behind to make “Everyone Says I Love You,” sleeping on the couch of a family friend’s studio apartment in Murray Hill. The movie was packed with stars—Goldie Hawn, Alan Alda, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts—but Lyonne recalled feeling out of place among them, “like they all had a shared secret I wasn’t in on.” After filming, she joined her mother in Florida and finished high school there, a year early, through a bridge program at N.Y.U. She applied with an essay comparing her co-stars to the characters in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” “It was very over the top, like how I would not be a part of a lost generation and was going to show up and be the real deal because mendacity makes me sick,” she said. “So, basically, me now, but high and sixteen.”

As an adult, Lyonne communicated with her parents irregularly, and by the time of their deaths, in the twenty-tens, she’d mostly cut off contact. Her father moved back to New York and ran a failed campaign for City Council on the Upper West Side, in 2013, the year before he died. In a piece that appeared in the Observer , he showed off an apartment cluttered with images of his daughter but admitted that they no longer spoke. “Poor Natasha. Let’s all cry for her,” he said. “What makes her be angry, angry at the father, that’s part of the thing, right?” Ivette struggled with mental-health problems, especially later in her life. When I asked Lyonne when her mother died, she had to think for a moment. “It was around Season 1 of ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ because I remember being so scared that those billboards were gonna trigger her,” she told me, adding, “I was quite intentionally trying to be invisible the entire time my parents were alive.” She continued, “No one is a villain or a victim; I don’t feel like anyone was trying to cause harm. I make a lot of jokes about my parents and stuff, but ultimately I am very impressed that people seem to have this endless reservoir of strength and empathy to engage with things that are as deeply and constantly triggering as a family unit.”

One of Lyonne’s major creative ambitions is to make a film about the years she spent in Israel—“ ‘Paper Moon,’ but with Jews,” as she put it—but “Russian Doll” is focussed on wrestling with matrilineage. Lyonne’s maternal grandmother, Ella, was a survivor of Auschwitz, and her maternal grandfather, Morris, lost his first wife in the camps. According to Lyonne, they coped with the horrors in their past with a brusque stoicism that left little room for their daughter’s problems. “It was, like, life as an endurance test of how much one can withstand,” Lyonne said. The new season of “Russian Doll” doesn’t draw on Ella’s story directly, but it explores the rift between a traumatized older generation and a vulnerable younger one, and the ripple effects of what Lyonne calls “damaged love.” She told me, “I joke that there’s a straight line from Hitler to heroin.”

Nadia has a surrogate-parent figure on the show, named Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), based on a friend of Ivette’s, Ruth Factor, whom Lyonne considers to be her godmother. In a Season 1 scene that was inspired by actual events, young Nadia (Brooke Timber) helps her mother, Nora, as she manically hauls watermelons out of a bodega and into the back seat of their car, which is already packed with the fruit. Later, when Nora has a meltdown at home, Ruth sweeps in to care for the girl. Lyonne wrote several of Factor’s signature phrases into Ruth’s lines, among them, “Nothing in this world is easy, except pissing in the shower.”

In the second episode of “Russian Doll” Season 1, Nadia goes on a nihilistic bender, pounding shots, snorting cocaine off the end of a comb, and falling asleep in the middle of her party with a lit cigarette dangling from her fingers. Sevigny, who plays Nadia’s mother on the show, recalled sobbing as she watched the episode for the first time. “Seeing her that way again,” she told me, her voice breaking, “I couldn’t handle it.”

By her late teens, Lyonne was a self-professed “club-kid raver and pothead,” but she told me, “I was so young that the consequences weren’t that serious yet. I was seventeen. I was Teflon.” She landed her breakout role, in 1997, in Tamara Jenkins’s dramedy “Slums of Beverly Hills,” playing the adolescent daughter of a huckster used-car salesman in nineteen-seventies California. Jenkins told me that she initially had doubts about whether Lyonne was right for the part. “I was, like, she’s really interesting, but I don’t know. She talks like she’s walking out of ‘Mean Streets’ or something. I kept saying, ‘We have to peel back your De Niro thing, because I want to know who you are, and I want to be able to have your vulnerability present.’ ” Lyonne gave a bravura performance, both insolent and poignantly mature, but during filming she drove while she was drunk and crashed her car into the window of a furniture store on La Brea Avenue. “I’ll never forget the steering-wheel imprint on her chest,” Jenkins said.

In 1998, Lyonne enrolled at N.Y.U., but she quickly dropped out. According to the terms of the bridge program, she needed to complete a year of college studies before receiving her high-school diploma, so she never did receive one. “The jobs and drugs were doing this two-handed dance of pulling me away from an education,” she told me. “Slums of Beverly Hills” made her one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young actresses, and in 1999 she starred in the queer satire “But I’m a Cheerleader,” and in “Detroit Rock City,” a seventies period piece, with her then boyfriend, Edward Furlong. She also signed on to play a sexually sophisticated sidekick in “American Pie,” the gross-out teen comedy, a gig that she told me she took only for the money, after turning it down, “like, five times.” She bought a studio apartment on Sixteenth Street and, at a party around the same time, met Sevigny, an actress and downtown It Girl who was five years her senior. Lyonne described seeing Sevigny as a sort of big sister. “I remember Chloë coming over and washing my fishnets in the bathtub with Woolite,” she said. Sevigny told me, “I found her very dynamic and engaging and reckless in a way that was, at that point, fun.”

In 2001, just as “American Pie 2” became the No. 1 movie in the country, Lyonne was arrested on a D.U.I. charge. The following year, she moved into a town house in Gramercy Park owned by the actor Michael Rapaport, a close friend, with a series of roommates that included the Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur and the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. The place became a rowdy neighborhood gathering spot, and drug use was common. (After moving out and going to rehab, Wainwright wrote a song, called “Natasha,” that goes, “Does anybody know how scary / This is for you and is for me?”) In December of 2004, new tenants in the house called the police, accusing Lyonne of threatening their dog and ripping a mirror off the wall. She spent a night in jail, and, soon afterward, Rapaport evicted her.

“I just decided to drop out completely,” Lyonne said. “It gets really dark. I sort of think I’m done forever. And I’m not coming back.” She recalled periods when she went by the street alias Crystal Snow and would call her agent from pay phones to inquire about booking jobs. “It’s a long time between snorting heroin to shooting it to sharing needles,” she said. “I took it to the finish line.” She continued acting sporadically, including in “My Suicidal Sweetheart,” a 2005 indie flop about an escaped mental patient road-tripping with her boyfriend while trying repeatedly to end her life. But she wouldn’t have another noteworthy onscreen role until “Orange Is the New Black.” The press pounced on the story of a young celebrity’s downward spiral. In May of 2005, Rapaport wrote a piece in Jane called “Evicting Natasha Lyonne.” (He and Lyonne have since reconciled, but at the time, she said, “my heart was broken.”) The same year, life-threatening health complications landed Lyonne in the I.C.U., and the details were leaked to the Post . After she missed several court dates for charges related to the neighbor incident, a judge issued a standing warrant for her arrest. In December of 2006, she turned herself in, and, on court orders, checked into a rehab center in Pennsylvania. She hasn’t used drugs since.

Lyonne rejects the notion that what she went through was tragic or shameful. “What always made me feel really bad with, like, Terry Gross or Barbara Walters was when they would just come for me with the drug stuff,” she said. “And I’m, like, Dude, why are you victimizing something I’m transparent around?” She told me that in retrospect she sees her drug use, in part, as an attempt to grapple with her parents’ reckless tendencies. “Now that I’m an adult, I think so much of my being a wild thing was because I was trying to get in their shoes,” she said, adding, “I fully cleaned house on that type of behavior. I make sure that, at this point in my life, I just don’t fuck with chaos.”

In “Russian Doll,” Nadia’s self-destructive moments—and the grisly deaths that result—are treated without sentimentality. Lyonne said that she made the character a video-game programmer because she wanted her to confront her knotty predicament “without being spooked by it.” Often, Nadia discusses dying with a detached curiosity. “This is not good or bad. It’s just a bug,” she tells Alan in one episode. Nadia sees the world as absurd and wearying, but also as being suffused with possibility should she make it out the other side. Lyonne’s friend Michaela Coel, the creator and star of the British show “I May Destroy You,” about surviving the obliterating aftermath of sexual assault, told me that she admired Lyonne’s willingness to delve into her lowest experiences. “I don’t know if this will make sense to anyone other than Natasha, but it feels like we are both living life on some sort of dangerous and thrilling edge,” Coel said, adding, “We’re on two parallel edges. And we’re shouting at each other, and waving, and talking about how cool it is to be alive.”

Since 2018, Lyonne has co-run a production company called Animal Pictures with the producer Danielle Renfrew Behrens and the actress and comedian Maya Rudolph, one of several close friends who are “S.N.L.” alumni. “The name comes from when we were sitting at lunch, and I said, ‘You’re a fucking animal,’ ” Rudolph told me. “She wants to devour.” The company is headquartered in L.A.’s Studio City, in a white stucco ranch house whose main room is dominated by a giant painting of Rudolph in the style of a Gilded Age heiress. When I arrived, on an August morning, I found Lyonne smoking in the back yard and talking intently on her phone. She was wearing a backward black leather Telfar baseball cap and a Gucci purse with a lion’s-head clasp, plus her mother’s gold chain and her grandmother’s watch. The look was not unlike Nadia’s punk-rococo style in “Russian Doll,” a combination of glamorous and street tough. Noticing me, Lyonne pointed toward a small guesthouse, between the patio and a wooden pergola, where I found Todd Downing, an editor and a co-producer of the new season, sitting in front of several monitors cutting a sequence from Episode 3.

“Sorry,” Lyonne said, a minute later, entering the cottage and flopping down on a brown leather couch. “I was just arguing with the Netflix people about my music budget.”

On the wall was a whiteboard scrawled with notes for several episodes and a framed poster for the 1974 Robert Altman comedy “California Split.” Lyonne stretched her legs out on a coffee table and asked Downing, a burly man with a thick brown mustache, to pull up a scene that takes place after Nadia has rocketed back in time. Nadia is at Crazy Eddie, the now defunct electronics store in the East Village, exchanging banter with the store clerk (Malachi Nimmons). He mentions that he edits a zine about “commodity fetishism and the Debordian spectacle,” referring to the French theorist Guy Debord.

“Let’s cut that,” Lyonne said. “It feels very mundane.” Downing wordlessly clicked and then played the scene again with the line scrubbed.

“I kind of miss it,” he said.

“O.K., O.K., we keep the Debordian spectacle!” she replied.

To end the scene, Lyonne had improvised several “wackadoo exits.” In one, she tried a riff on Crazy Eddie’s slogan: “My prices are also insane!” In another, she said, “You should know I have an I.U.D.” Lyonne wrinkled her nose as she watched herself onscreen, and said, “What is she doing ?” Lyonne is by all accounts an exacting showrunner. “She’s very demanding,” Alex Buono, an executive producer and the producing director of Season 2, told me fondly. Amy Poehler, who executive-produced both seasons, described her as a “very humane dictator.” But, after some back-and-forth over Nadia’s lines, Lyonne settled on the one that made Downing laugh: “All right, well. We live and we die, huh? Yeah. Adios!”

Lyonne nodded approvingly when she saw another shot from the episode, showing Sevigny’s image replicating infinitely on a pair of closed-circuit TV screens. “What you’re seeing there is introspective camera stuff based on Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘Strange Loop’ theory, made into a half-hour comedy,” Lyonne said. “That’s very satisfying to me.” Hofstadter’s book and many of the other texts on her Season 2 reading list explore ideas about the construction of a self or the hidden forces that shape a life. Lyonne showed me an app called Universe Splitter, which maps the repercussions of small individual choices using quantum theory, and explained that in the writers’ room they’d occasionally use it to “open up story ideas for fun.” She said, “The bigger question I’m asking is if it’s true that we all have the ability, regarding past trauma, to reorient ourselves around it, or if in fact there is no free will, because it’s a set element of the universe, and therefore we must just radically accept the full weight of the past.”

“Russian Doll” came about after Poehler approached Lyonne, in 2014, with a concept for a sitcom, called “Old Soul,” in which Lyonne would play a reformed rebel working at a home for the elderly. They pitched the show to NBC and recruited Ellen Burstyn, Fred Willard, and Rita Moreno as co-stars, but the project languished in the pilot stage. Poehler and Lyonne continued exchanging ideas, one of which involved Lyonne’s being stuck in a time loop and entering a new romantic entanglement each week. “I think it came from the fact that I just selfishly love to watch Natasha argue,” Poehler said. Lyonne met with several potential showrunners before settling on Leslye Headland, a playwright and the director of such acerbic comedies as “Bachelorette” (2012) and “Sleeping with Other People” (2015), in which Lyonne had played a small role. Together, the two decided to use the “Groundhog Day” conceit to tackle Lyonne’s troubled past through the metaphor of a death wish that won’t stop coming true.

Headland recalled that Lyonne asked her early on to read “You Can’t Win,” the cult-classic memoir by Jack Black, from 1926, about life as an opium-addicted drifter. “That was a big ‘Aha’ moment for me,” Headland said. “I saw that Natasha is a transient figure, one who moves in and out of spaces without ascribing to social norms or dictates.” In “Russian Doll,” the character of Nadia in some ways fits the trope of the lonely young woman in the big city. “She has the same cat as Holly Golightly,” Headland said. And yet the show is refreshingly uninterested in a conventional heroine’s journey toward romantic or professional fulfillment. In 2017, Lyonne and Headland secured a straight-to-series order from Netflix. They partnered with Jax Media, the production company behind “Broad City” and “Search Party,” and recruited a team of quirky character actors to populate the show’s surrealist world, including Greta Lee, whose hilarious performance as Maxine includes ditzily uttering the greeting “Sweet birthday babyyyyy!” each time Nadia crashes back to the land of the living.

Because of the pandemic, Season 2 took three years to create. Headland left the show before writing began, and in 2020 she signed on to make “The Acolyte,” a “Star Wars” series for Disney+. Lyonne cited the “Star Wars” commitment as the reason for Headland’s departure. “There’s also tricky stuff that happened that has nothing to do with me, to be honest,” she added without elaborating. Headland didn’t comment on the circumstances surrounding her exit, but told me, “I used to say to Natasha all the time, ‘You have all these incredible ideas, but it’s like you need the gel cap to put the NyQuil in. It doesn’t have a container.’ What I did for the show was a lot of narrative wrangling. But, by the second season, I wasn’t really sure I needed to be there anymore.” Lyonne had some reservations about stepping in to head the team, but Jenji Kohan, the showrunner of “Orange Is the New Black,” and Poehler encouraged her. Poehler told me, “With Russian nesting dolls, you open them and they get smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter. When you look at the show, she is the distilled tiny doll.” Lyonne jokes that she wants to become like Robert Evans, the matinée idol who went on to run Paramount Pictures in its seventies glory days. “Even though this is so stressful and intense, I’ve never been happier,” she said. “As a child actor, you have this hypervigilance that the rug is gonna be pulled out from under you. As the showrunner, I feel very calm by having all the information.”

Lyonne loaded Season 2 of “Russian Doll” with visual references to the auteurist cinema she reveres—Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence,” Coppola’s “Dracula,” Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.” She attributes the Dutch angles in one episode to Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil,” and a long tracking shot through a morgue in another to “Spike Lee dolly tricks.” “The entire season is an Easter egg,” she told me. Perhaps as a consequence, the season is more shambolic than the first. As Nadia’s adventures expand into multiple time lines, the story becomes disorientingly twisty. The result is less a puzzle box than a messy metaphysical punk opera, for worse and for better. In life and in “Russian Doll,” Lyonne employs the classic Jewish coping mechanism of leavening difficult moments with shtick. There are scenes in Season 2, though, when Nadia’s wisecracking finally gives way to quiet emotion. When she first sees her mother’s image, in the 1982 time line, the camera lingers on Nadia’s terrified face as tears roll down her cheeks. “I figured out how to stop dying,” Lyonne said. “How do I learn how to live? That’s what Season 2 is about.”

Lyonne told me that one of the great moments of her life was being invited to read Lou Reed’s song “Coney Island Baby” at his memorial service, in 2013. An episode of “Russian Doll” ’s new season was named for the song. Reed was one of many hard-living men whom Lyonne idolized in her youth. “Any macho swing involving a guy on a Greyhound bus with a notebook,” she said. “A Hemingway type with a glass of whiskey. Bukowski at the bar. John Fante on the case,” she said. “I started to think, O.K., so that’s what being a person is. You’re supposed to go into the belly of the beast.”

But her recovery and her second act have been shaped by the guidance of other women. In 2009, Lyonne auditioned for Nora and Delia Ephron’s Off Broadway play “Love, Loss, and What I Wore.” Nora remembered her from “Heartburn,” and the two struck up a friendship. She cast Lyonne in the play and later offered her second home, in L.A., as a place for Lyonne to stay during work trips. “I was, like, ‘Nora, what are you doing? I’m a crackhead and a chain-smoker!’ ” Lyonne recalled. “She was, like, ‘Oh, shut up already. Not anymore. Just smoke outside and tell the housekeeper when you’re done.’ ” (On the wall of her office, Lyonne keeps a note from Nora that reads, simply, “I love you.”) In 2012, Lyonne appeared in her third “American Pie” film, and the following year she had small roles in a string of other forgettable comedies. Then Jenji Kohan launched her comeback by casting her in “Orange Is the New Black,” in the cheekily self-referential role of a former heroin addict whom another inmate dubs “the junkie philosopher.”

Through Animal Pictures, Lyonne is currently developing shows with several female creators, including Alia Shawkat and the “Russian Doll” writer Cirocco Dunlap. She compared her friendships with other women in the business to the fellowship among such men as Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Paul Schrader in nineteen-seventies Hollywood. “It’s almost like they had a pickup-basketball-game community of filmmaking, where they came around and saw each other’s stuff,” she said. A few nights after the “Zola” panel, I went with Lyonne and Janicza Bravo to see a Romanian film called “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” at Film Forum. The movie is an experimental romp about a teacher’s weathering the aftermath of her homemade sex tape appearing on the Internet. Its middle section features a dispassionate narrator reciting facts about Romanian history. “Have you guys seen Lina Wertmüller’s ‘Seven Beauties’?” Lyonne said afterward. “I don’t want to insult this movie, but that one is better done.”

She and Bravo retired to the nearby Washington Square Diner, where they settled into the same side of a booth. Like Bill Murray in the diner scene in “Groundhog Day,” Lyonne ordered with abandon: two grilled cheese sandwiches, two cups of chicken-noodle soup, French fries, turkey sausage, a side of pickles, and black coffee. Bravo asked only for mint tea. As Lyonne dipped a sandwich into a puddle of ketchup, she spoke of being a teen star in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood.

“After ‘Slums of Beverly Hills,’ they were, like, ‘Welcome to the WB! What do you want to do here?’ ” she said. “And I was, like, ‘I don’t fucking want to be on “Dawson’s Creek”!’ I went into that meeting in a Lenny Bruce T-shirt with a bottle of whiskey in my back pocket. My manager had to get me out of bed because I was so hungover. I came in and was, like, ‘You guys have seen “Chinatown”? Have you thought about anything like that?’ ”

“I actually do wish you’d found yourself in ‘Chinatown’ for teens,” Bravo said.

“I was in there pitching it before I knew what pitching was, like, ‘You guys need slats in the shades where the light gets through.’ ”

“And a suit, right? And a secretary!” Bravo said, putting on a Lyonne accent.

Lyonne talked about her family.

“I mean, I got really lucky, because they died,” she said. Bravo laughed sympathetically. “I only mean that it was so all-consuming, and I think it’s very hard to let go of that,” Lyonne continued. “Now I’m an adult, and I can start my life. That’s no longer a present danger in my psyche.”

“Did you ever see them in your dreams?” Bravo asked.

“It was worse than that. I would think I saw them on the street or in a grocery store, because I was terrified of running into them. For me, it’s a great relief to feel like I can walk free in New York.”

After dinner, we strolled south through Washington Square Park toward Bravo’s hotel on the Lower East Side. Despite the rise of Omicron, the night-life crowd was out in full force. Lyonne has a distinctive way of moving through the city: clomping, springy, coat collar popped high. Season 2 of “Russian Doll” opens with one of many shots of Nadia perambulating, her black boots tapping in rhythm with Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.” Lyonne is currently working, with the director Rian Johnson, on a “Columbo”-style crime show for Peacock, and it’s not hard to picture Lyonne, an avid Peter Falk fan, as the hardboiled detective, stalking the streets with a cigarette between her fingers and a wry expression on her face. Waiting to cross Houston Street, we spotted a group of fratty-looking revellers on the far side of the intersection, elbowing one another and pointing in Lyonne’s direction. “Oh, no, we need to get away from them,” Bravo said. But Lyonne just cocked her head confidently as she stepped off the curb. I asked her if the attention bothered her. “In New York, I like to think I’m a gnome or a leprechaun,” she said. “I’m part of the psychedelic journey through Manhattan.” ♦

An earlier version of this article failed to list Amy Poehler as a co-creator of “Russian Doll.”

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“The Sympathizer” Has an Identity Crisis

By Inkoo Kang

By Adam Douglas Thompson

By Anna Wiener

Time travel and trauma: Netflix’s ‘Russian Doll’ is an exercise in therapy

“Russian Doll,” the hit Netflix series, is kind of a Jewish “Fleabag” meets time travel, a mind-bending and searingly honest exploration of trauma. Stomping around the streets of New York City, Natasha Lyonne (of “Orange is the New Black” fame) plays the fast-talking, chain-smoking, irrepressibly sarcastic Nadia Vulvokov as she navigates her personal and family history, the fabric of time warping around her.

Much of “Russian Doll” is an exploration of Nadia’s subconscious, shaped by her identity as the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, a propensity for substance abuse and a childhood marred by her mother’s schizophrenia. The show is a visual expression of the twists and turns of her psyche, the effects of generational trauma and cycles of abuse that are difficult for Nadia to admit or articulate but persistently— insistently —underlie her behavior.

As writer, producer and lead actress of “Russian Doll,” Natasha Lyonne understands this better than most. The similarities of the show to Natasha Lyonne’s own life are hard to overlook: Lyonne’s own identity as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, her struggle with addiction, her born-and-bred-New-Yorker attitude. Lyonne hosted the season finale of “Saturday Night Live”; in her monologue, she charted her acting career from being a child star to her sudden (and public) fall from grace. With her trademark blend of piercing vulnerability and caustic wit, she jokes: “So things are going great and then knock knock, who’s there? It’s multiple arrests and drug addiction!”

Lyonne says she has been working on “Russian Doll” in one version or another for almost 10 years. It’s a sort of culmination of her acting and producing career as well as her own life experiences. Perhaps it is not surprising then that so much of “Russian Doll” reads like an exercise in self-therapy.

The similarities to Natasha Lyonne’s own life are hard to overlook: her identity as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, her struggle with addiction, her New Yorker attitude.

Season 2 of the show, which recently debuted on Netflix, explores how Nadia’s life has been shaped by the twin forces of mental illness and trauma that defined the women in her family. At first accidentally and then intentionally, Nadia travels back in time via the 6 subway train, finding herself inhabiting the bodies of first her mother Nora, in New York in 1982, and then her grandmother Vera, in Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944.

When Nadia goes back in time, she thinks she is going to fix her life by righting the wrongs of the past. Nadia’s struggle with substance abuse seems to stem from her unpredictable childhood, where her mentally-ill mother squandered the family inheritance of 150 gold Krugerrand coins, worth $152,780.86. After Nadia’s grandmother saw her family taken to the concentration camps and their possessions stolen, she traded for the coins to protect the family from another Holocaust.

Nadia wants to stop her mom from losing the inheritance, so that she (Nadia) can use it in the future; she views the Krugerrands as not only her birthright, but a sort of reparation for the trauma of her childhood. But time travel isn’t so simple. Time, she discovers, is a closed loop; regardless of how she tries to change the past, the future stays the same. Also, in the process of pursuing her goal, she discovers an unexpected, and in some ways unwanted, empathy for her mother. While living in Nora’s body, Nadia begins to experience the hallucinations of Nora’s mind, and eventually ends up institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. Seeing firsthand both Nora’s illness and Nora’s own difficult childhood being raised by the disapproving Vera, Nadia begins to understand for the first time the intense pressures Nora was subject to.

"Russian Doll" is a visual expression of the twists and turns of Nadia's psyche, the effects of generational trauma and cycles of abuse that are difficult to admit or articulate.

The cycle of matrilinear pressure comes to a head near the end of the season, when Nadia—in the body of Nora—gives birth to herself on the 6 train platform. Looking at herself as a baby with full knowledge of the childhood she would endure, Nadia vows to raise her(self) back in her present with the childhood she wishes she could have had, so as to finally break the cycle.

It’s a physical manifestation of the idea of reparenting, a therapeutic strategy of treating one’s “inner child” with the unconditional love and support that one missed during childhood due to trauma or neglect. Nadia cradles baby Nadia with a fierce protectiveness we have never seen from her, a maternal instinct that is new for the breezily substance abusing, “live and let live” adult Nadia. But when she brings baby Nadia back to the present with her, it creates a time paradox that starts to unravel the fabric of reality. Despite her desperate desire to parent her younger self, Nadia is forced to return baby Nadia back to her proper timeline, in the care of her mother.

On the train finally returning to the future once and for all, Nadia sees a line of the women who shaped her: her mother, her grandmother and Ruth, a lifelong friend of Nora’s and a rare beacon of stability in Nadia’s life.

Completely unaware of the damage she has done to Nadia, Nora asks, “If you could choose your mother all over, would you choose me again?” Nadia looks from Nora to Ruth, who has been her real mother figure throughout her life, then wryly jokes, “I didn’t choose you the first time.” It’s both an acknowledgement of the trauma of her upbringing and something of a concession to the fact that her mother did her best, as woefully inadequate as that was. Nadia has an opportunity to take her mother to task for her failings and verbalize her clear, life-long desire to have Ruth as her mother instead. But whether out of love, resignation or a new empathy, Nadia lets the moment pass. After an entire season of trying to change her past, it’s a rare and hard-won moment of acceptance.

The show is a physical manifestation of the idea of reparenting, a therapeutic strategy of treating one’s “inner child” with the unconditional love that one missed during childhood.

Nadia knows that when she steps off the train and returns to the present, it will be to a world in which Ruth got sick and died while Nadia wasn’t there. In immersing herself in the past, Nadia missed Ruth’s final days. It’s devastating. After a season of exploring the ways in which Nadia was failed by her real mother and grandmother, Ruth’s maternal love has never been as needed or as miserably out of reach. Looking at a younger version of Ruth before she steps off the time-traveling train and into the present, Nadia says goodbye: “You had no obligation, but you loved me anyways, right? Bye, Ruthie.”

Coming to terms with the unchangeable facts of her childhood and the reality that she must step off the train into a world where she will never see Ruth again both require radical acceptance from Nadia. It’s a therapeutic technique in dialectical behavioral therapy that focuses on coming to terms with the fact that something life changing has happened. Instead of trying to deny her experience, she must accept the damage that has happened, and consider how to adapt to a life in which that damage may now be a defining feature. Rather than trying to deny the reality of Ruth’s death and Nadia’s failure to be with her, she instead has to radically accept the truth of the situation; instead of running from it or trying to make herself feel better, she must learn how to move forward.

“Russian Doll” was always conceptualized as a three season run. But it hasn’t yet been confirmed for a third and final season, and amid Netflix’s dropping profits, it could fall victim to Netflix’s classic two-season-and-cancel tactic. That would be a shame because the season ends in a kind of circularity, with Nadia unable to find a way out of the cycles of trauma and substance abuse. It’s telling that in the three years since the events of the first season, Nadia has changed very little. After two seasons of running around in circles and being unable to escape her own shadow, a third season of “Russian Doll” would need to show Nadia finding her way forward instead of around again—a potentially difficult feat if the third season is to involve some version of the signature time travel of the series.

But after two mind-bending seasons exploring trauma and growth, I trust Natasha Lyonne to do the job and do it well. After all, it seems to pull so heavily from her own life—maybe a Season 3 could show how she herself found her way out of the same cycle Nadia finds herself in. As Lyonne herself said, closing out her S.N.L. monologue: “There’s always hope in despair.”

Sarah Vincent is an O'Hare Fellow at America. She graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 2021 with degrees in creative writing and criminal justice.

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‘Do We Have the Game All Wrong?’: Natasha Lyonne’s Cosmic Journey Into ‘Russian Doll’ Season 2

By Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Elisabeth Garber-Paul

“I’m deeply cracked from a combination of Talmud and LSD,” says Natasha Lyonne , flicking a cigarette in her hand from the couch of her Los Angeles home, where she’s been chatting by Zoom for over an hour. She is attempting to explain the underpinnings of her show Russian Doll, a metaphysical mindfuck she writes, produces, and stars in, whose second season recently dropped on Netflix. Based on a character Lyonne had long imagined — essentially a hard-partying, alternate-reality version of herself named Nadia — the series explores the nature of life and death, goodness and regret, of memory, ghosts, family, and the New York City she loves. It is both extremely personal and universal. And also, because it’s Lyonne, it’s fucking hilarious.

Without Lyonne’s vast swath of experiences — an intense early education at a Jewish yeshiva, where she learned about the Torah and the Talmud; time as an East Village junkie, seeing how much of that education she could forget — she probably wouldn’t have had the range for, or the interest in, building such an intricate, multi-planed universe. In fact, it was in rehab that she became deeply interested in the metaphysical aspects of existence. “The thing that was most challenging for me, getting clean, is that you’re supposed to rearrange your relationship to earthly things, so that you’re not constantly being like, ‘Oh, let me go smoke dope,’ ” she says. “Where a lot of people find comfort in church, I started reading a lot of science books, and finding comfort there.” She devoured Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day . “It just made me walk into the world differently and think about all the things that I didn’t know, which felt very grounding.”

In Russian Doll, Lyonne revisits these themes with the help of a very qualified writers room (“these fucking brilliant women, just fucking Ivy League geniuses”), creating a show that questions not only the world but also our place within it. If Season One was largely based on the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop, the time travel that defines the new episodes comes from physicist Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time . “It’s really smacking wide open this idea of ‘What if the nature of time is not as we experience it?’ ” Lyonne explains. “It’s just fun as hell.”

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With all her accumulated expertise, we asked Lyonne to drop some knowledge on building the show’s world — and understanding ours.

How Time Travel Works (or Doesn’t) It’s really just asking the question of “What is this thing that I would go and change? What is that butterfly-effect event that I’m looking for?” We [in the writers room] thought a lot about, what would the rules be? Is it just a “kill Hitler” season? And it’s like, well, of course, we all want to kill Hitler. But assuming we could make that machine, would you actually be able to do things like that? Nadia’s not actually the center of the universe, she’s just another bozo on the bus. For her and [fellow time looper] Alan, it really feels like the most you want to have them be able to do is handle their own case in a way, or at least try and fail to handle their own case but come away with a deeper understanding of what it is to be alive on the other side, having walked through that epigenetic footprint that was mapped onto them in a way where now they see their own trip differently, so that they can possibly be set up to enjoy the ride. It is pretty philosophical — therapeutic by way of quantum physics and high concept and multiverse, and time travel, and death loops and all these things.

Addressing the Big Questions “How do we know we exist?” I think the bigger question is “Does it matter if we don’t?” That sort of speaks to [the idea of us living in a] multiverse simulation as well, which is where, as a storyteller, I philosophically deviate from something that truly ends in magic. Because in a way it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter if the concept of karma is not real. Does it not seem that it would still be a life better lived to do unto others [as they would do to you]? Is it not helpful to think that it’s better to not be a total fucking piece of shit in your daily dealings, and expect to have a lovely life and people that care about you? Probably wise to show up with some empathy in a life, even if life has no meaning. Even if none of this is anything, we’ve still got to go through it.

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Russian Doll Premiere Recap: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again (Plus, Grade It!)

Dave nemetz, west coast bureau chief.

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Russian Doll is back — and yes, Nadia is still, in her words, a “time prisoner.”

Wednesday’s Season 2 premiere kicks off with an old woman hammering a hole in the wall of a sewer and retrieving a bag (huh?) before catching us up with Nadia. She’s approaching her 40th birthday; she’s playing caretaker to her godmother Ruth, who’s had a host of health problems; and she’s trying, and failing, to quit smoking. (“I am keenly aware that my lungs are essentially two shriveled up Nick Caves,” she quips to her pal Maxine.) When she boards the subway, though, she sees posters for Cats and Sophie’s Choice . She grabs a Village Voice and checks the date. Yep, she’s somehow traveled back to 1982. She can’t find her cell phone, but she does have a matchbook for a bar called the Black Gumball with the name “Chez” written in it.

Russian Doll Season 2 Premiere Chez Nadia

Back in 1982, Nadia gets to Chez’s and looks inside the leather bag, finding a stash of gold Krugerrands. She asks Chez where he got them, and he’s confused. He reminds her they took them together. She plays along and cuddles him in bed a bit before excusing herself to the bathroom again, giving herself a pep talk to get the money back. But then she hears a door slam. When she comes out, she sees Chez has run off with the bag of gold. She chases him down the street, but a pregnant lady can only run so far, you know? It’s looking like “outstanding prick” may have been an understatement.

Give the Russian Doll premiere a grade in our poll, and then hit the comments to share your thoughts on Season 2 so far. (No post-premiere spoilers, though, please.)

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The entire season was a fun-filled, confusing romp through time. I loved it.

It’s fun but pointless especially 3 YEARS later. This is probably the last one anyway.

Uh, yeah, sure. There was this thing called a PANDEMIC! that shut everything down in Tinseltown for almost two years.

Russian Doll is one of my favorites, and I have been eagerly anticipating this season. The music and cinematography were fantastic. Natasha Lyonne and Charlie Barnett are just so good. I would say the weakest point is the present-day trip to Budapest because it doesn’t do anything to further the plot. With only seven 30 minute episodes, that little side jaunt did nothing for me. Overall, the season is an A for me!

couldnt watch more after chapter 2. Boring, boring and boring… Its quite a pity, cause season 1, i really enjoyed it.

Definitely loved season 1 more but season 2 was okay, as far as I have gotten. Not sure if they plan to do more but I would give it a try.

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‘Russian Doll’: Natasha Lyonne on Playing with Fractured Time, Pure Anarchy, and the 6 Train

Sarah shachat, associate craft editor.

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Season 2 of Russian Doll is about a lot of things, from the fantasy of attempting to gain a version of self not limited or defined by familial flaws or generational trauma to stealing from Nazis. But its leaps back through Nadia’s (Natasha Lyonne) and Alan’s (Charlie Barnett) past this season are organized in an intuitive, visually and sonically rich way: they step through time portals by jumping on some very dated 6 trains in the New York subway.

In the video above, Lyonne reveals how much Amy Poehler was at fault for Season 2’s time-travel device and discusses what worked about using signature pieces of Nadia’s New York in order to show how the time-travel worked and how Nadia’s actions could lead to the breakdown of time itself and of all meaning. Lyonne leans on iconography that is squarely New York (and also squarely part of the fringe culture “Russian Doll” revels in) in order to find a way of making the birthday party of Season 1 even more chaotic and of opening up the show to a multiverse of new possibilities.

Watch Lyonne discuss Season 2’s time-travel device above, or listen to the entire discussion below.

In this episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcsat, Natasha Lyonne discusses the games that “Russian Doll” Season 2 is playing (of which time-travel via the 6 Train is only one), how she refined her preparation as both a director and an actor over the pandemic, the existential concerns she finds more relatable than coffee shop meet-cutes, plus a little love for everything from Sergio Leone to “The Shining.”

Partial Transcript Highlights Below:

Influences On Russian Doll Season 2:

I’m often confused that, you know, things we want and accept are kind of about meet-cutes and coffee shops. Like as a human being, I experience great confusion around that as the status quo of and externalization of life, because I just don’t identify with that experience at all. So in many ways [the success of Season 1] also was, yeah, there’s encouragement to say, “Okay, your point of view is also valid and let’s see what’s next.”

We definitely knew going in that it was sort of “Pink Floyd season,” and in which ways can we use these kinds of detective cues — what we call the “on the case” cues, but sort of build on them sonically with this kind of Jacob’s Ladder game into this underbelly. And obviously there are some people like your Cronenbergs and Dave Lynches, they just play in such a fun way with sound. I remember even in Season 1, we would often talk about the party and this kind of desire to throw sound around that room like the way Altman used to. Not all of it comes to fruition. Visually, a big [influence] for me is always this idea of playing with time, à la Nic Roeg, even when we get into the editing and everything. I just love that sense of fractured time. I think even as a kid I was so in love with Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America.” I often talk about “All That Jazz” and “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling,” and even “The Singing Detective” in the sense of a story about somebody who’s, like, from the hospital bed, looking back at a life. But I often think about that phone call ringing and, you know, De Niro in bed in the opium den that sort of launches us into a tale back through time in “Once Upon a Time In America,” and the sort of Sergio Leone version.

He’s also the person I most often try to lie about and say that there’s nepotism there, even though our names are spelled differently. And clearly there is no relation, but I do wish there were.

The New York Subway as a Portal Through Time

The actual subway device is Amy Poehler’s fault. And I say that because I’m the one that actually had to deal with the MTA, but it was a brilliant idea. She came into the room — early days, initial blue sky, but early enough that we were still breaking this device of what was going to be this “portal,” for lack of a better word. And she was like, “Well, if you’re already going to be on the 6 Train going up to visit Ruth at Lennox Hill, why isn’t it just the train? You know, kind of cut out the middleman.”

It was definitely a white light moment in the room. Also that idea of abandoning a limited perspective. I don’t even think that we had registered the ability for the budget [to do that]. And not to say that we weren’t talking about things like “The Taking Of Pelham 123” and understanding that this was a subway season. Obviously it’s a show that loves dealing in the underground and fringes of society and underground made front and center — fringe mainstream. It just really felt like, “Oh shit, right. That’s the fucking thing. What’s more New York than the subway? And what’s more New York than this show?” I say that because of my love of Sipowicz and “NYPD Blue.”

Returning to the Party Sequence of Season 1

The party was always a cracked environment. And then the idea that it is historically accurate to the canon of the show that [the building the party is taking place in] was, once upon a time, a yeshiva is just funny. The idea that those two worlds can converge. Ultimately, it came out a budget necessity. I remember, it was Christmas break. It was like, “Fuck, how do we show that we broke time?” If you can have King Kong come through and topple the Chrysler Building, that’s one way to do it, or a tidal wave or an earthquake. But, it’s not that kind of show. And then it was like, “Holy shit, the party.” That’s our world. Just break our own internal world.

And [the party is] the place that would be the eye of the storm of inciting event, worst nightmare. This is the reset location of this video game that we’re in. And obviously we’re doing a lot of things with similar framing. You know, it’s always that Kubrick Stare game that you seeing of her in the mirror. So there’s an element of that, that whenever those train doors open on Nadia now in what we would sort of call the hero shot, it plays that kind of reset game this season.

I think that Nadia has this instinct, and obviously I identify with it, of “But what if there was anarchy? Would that not be an ideal state? Is life not too organized?” I became really taken with this book by this guy, Carlo Rovelli, called “The Order of Time” and this idea that we may not be seeing time correctly — but is it not this sort of ordered time that gives life meaning? And [on back of] that is this Viktor Frankl “Man’s Search for Meaning” that is what the show is about. And Doug Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop” book and so on.

We talk about the arrow of time and this idea of “Why can I remember the past, but I can’t remember the future?” And for Nadia, this idea of, “Well, why do I have to fucking play by the rules?” Right? “If I can live and die, why can’t I just sort of break time, reset, reframe, and let’s start this over.” And the idea of putting her in this situation, that would mean that suddenly all of those other experiences may become meaningless in a way, that perhaps it would be like, it’s almost like a vampire complex. So if you’re going to live forever, but then, everyone you know someday will die, what does it look like to have this fantasy of anarchy? Where does meaning go?

Ultimately it’s a season that’s about having to become an adult, whether you’re caught up to it or not. So there’s a knock on the door, it’s coming from inside the house, and it’s saying, ‘Hey, get with it. You’re 40. Now you’re supposed to show up for this parent and you’re the adult. Now you’re the caretaker.” And [it] obviously goes into this sort of “Shining” stuff that [co-creator] Leslye Headland and I always loved so much and the idea of being the caretaker on some deep sort of spiritual level, what does that mean?

The Filmmaker Toolkit podcast is available on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Overcast , and Stitcher . The music used in this podcast is from the “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” score, courtesy of composer Nathan Halpern .

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'Russian Doll' does the time warp, again

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Anna Isaacs

Jessica Reedy

Natasha Lyonne stars as Nadia Vulvokov in Netflix's Russian Dol l. Netflix hide caption

Natasha Lyonne stars as Nadia Vulvokov in Netflix's Russian Dol l.

In the first season of the Netflix show Russian Doll , we meet Natasha Lyonne's Nadia, a woman who gets stuck in a seemingly endless loop of death scenarios, and is forced to confront her personal demons in the process. Now season two has arrived, and Nadia's next phase of self-discovery manifests itself in a completely different way: time travel.

Netflix's Russian Doll is an exquisitely trippy odyssey in season 2

Natasha lyonne travels through time and generations for a wild and soul-stirring second season.

Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll season two

In Russian Doll season two, New York City’s subway system is the freakiest it’s ever been on screen, and that’s really saying something. The 6 train transforms into a portal for Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) and Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett) to inadvertently travel back in time. The duo spent season one trying to escape a diabolical time loop where they kept dying at the same time, only to restart at a specific point. Four years after escaping this fate, they’re at the mercy of temporal madness again. Several train trips unravel their family’s past, setting Nadia on a course to possibly alter her future. The result is seven bewitching, off-kilter, and visually stunning episodes.

‘Russian Doll’ Star Natasha Lyonne on Season 2’s Nadia-Nora Twist, Exploring the Future in a Season 3

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Russian Doll. Natasha Lyonne as Nadia Vulvokov in episode 201 of Russian Doll. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

SPOLER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Matryoshka,” the Season 2 finale episode of “ Russian Doll .”

In Season 2, “Russian Doll” broke out of its first season’s “Groundhog Day”-style time-loop format with a “Quantum Leap”-like time-travel device that allowed Nadia ( Natasha Lyonne ) and Alan (Charlie Barnett) to jump into the bodies of their deceased loved ones by taking a trip on the New York City subway. Nadia becomes her mother, Lenora “Nora” (Chloë Sevigny), in the East Village in 1982, and later grandmother Vera (Irén Bordán, younger version Ilona McCrea) in World War II-era Budapest, while Alan is inhabiting his grandmother Agnes (Carolyn Michelle Smith) in Germany during the Cold War in 1962.

The time travel allows them both to explore the pasts that had shaped them long before they were born. Nadia specifically makes multiple futile attempts to change the course of history for her mother and, therefore, herself, all while avoiding the present day, where her surrogate mother Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley) is dying and Nadia’s friends Maxine (Greta Lee) and Lizzy (Rebecca Henderson) are trying to keep her focused on that, in favor of a past where Young Ruth (Annie Murphy) is alive and well.

All of this culminates in Nadia giving birth to herself and taking the baby to the present to try to raise her better than Nadia was raised by Nora. That decision begins to rip apart the fabric of reality around Alan and Nadia, who dive further into the bowels of time and the MTA underworld — until Nadia finally brings Baby Nadia back to Nora and allows history to properly repeat itself.

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Variety spoke with “Russian Doll” star, co-creator and showrunner Lyonne about all the twists in Season 2, and what she has in mind for a third season, should Netflix renew the show.

Having finished Season 2, in a simplified breakdown here, it seems Season 1 is focused on the present, Season 2 is focused on the past — does that mean you’d be looking into the future for a potential Season 3?

Without saying too much, that thought has occurred to me, as well. The show is always going to be a philosophical, psychedelic meditation on the nature of time, mortality and so on. Yes, one of the jumping off points of Season 2 is this Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli and this idea about the arrow of time and asking the question, why can I remember the past, but I can’t remember the future? That opens up some big questions. And who knows? Who knows if they’ll ever let me do this again?

Intergenerational trauma is a big theme in Season 2, explored in a very literal way thanks to the body-swapping element. What were you trying to say with this version of time travel, versus a more traditional way of approaching that plot device?

I always find it incredibly frustrating that in therapy, you cannot escape your family of origin. And try as you might to be like, “No, really, this boyfriend is different. My questions about this boyfriend are just in the here and now. I don’t like his chewing. It’s not about my mother or father, doctor.” And yet here we are, and it is.

I remember Allison Silverman bringing Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” into the room as a female lens of time travel. Of course, we all love “Back to the Future,” but are there other ways to see time? And when we talk about block universe, which is, to my limited-high-school-dropout understanding, this idea that moments in time are conceivably happening at the same time, but we lack the ability to see them. So I wonder from a PTSD standpoint, if the trigger points of this epigenetic trauma is not something that has us time-traveling in our present, mundane moments more than we actually realize. Yeah, all those character based explorations, despite very specific character work and using a lot of like personal specifics to get there, those are the bigger questions that I’m after.

Nadia very clearly is not concerned about casually revealing who she really is to people when she’s in Nora’s body, who don’t actually listen to her or believe her, and is actively trying to change things, but Alan is very, very careful about not wanting to disrupt past events while inhabiting his grandmother’s body. When it comes to the rules of time traveling, how did you decide what Nadia and Alan’s behavior would be like?

In the most simplified version, Season 1 is “Groundhog Day” and Season 2 is “Quantum Leap.” We’ve all seen this, so there is a shorthand with the audience. As a New Yorker, there’s a shorthand with the pals who are only half-listening and really just want to know if you’re going to make it to dinner or not. Or in Maxine’s case and Lizzy’s case, regardless of what wormholes you’re finding, you’re not showing up for Ruth, who is your real godmother who really needs a caretaker right now. And Nadia is like, “Hey, Annie Murphy is back there in the ’80s, so I got to get back.” Nadia has this weirdly specific skill of being a coder and working in this video game design space where she understands the rules of play easier than the next person. You see that a lot in Season 1 when she’s cutting the orange and explaining the nature of time and experience and what’s going on. Similarly in Season 2, the jump is that Nadia can integrate an experience and use it to her own purposes pretty quickly. Oftentimes, you see these characters who aren’t supposed to know the rules of other states of play. But she’s like, “No, I’ve seen movies.” And I do like the idea that Alan and Nadia are opposite sides of a spectrum in their approach to the rules of time travel.

Where did the idea come from for the Nadia-as-Nora-giving-birth-to-Nadia scene?

Obviously, this show is trying to have a bit of a sense of humor. As a person, I’ve spent a lot of years going into very dark places and you do a lot of work to get out. And they talk about this idea of re-parenting and loving the inner child. I just think that’s so funny, the idea of an inner child made tangible. It makes you laugh. Because you do so much therapeutic work to be a high-functioning person. I love that idea that she’s really curious about free will on the most instinctual, guttural level of, “OK, well, let’s do this.” At various points in the room, that was actually a 13-year-old rebellious tween Nadia, who is a ’90s kid into Nirvana and being a troublemaker. But it became, if you introduce a gun in Act One, you’ve got to fire it — and that was Nora’s baby. Where’s that scene? It’s got to be in it. There were so many different ideas. Baby Nadia and Teen Nadia walking around with a Beta Alan. There was a babysitting episode where it was Teen Nadia had to get around the city with a “Child’s Play”-like version of Little Nadia, who was just giving her a really hard time. There’s a lot of things that got left on the floor, but it did feel like, what would be the most immediate version of re-parenting? Take the baby.

Nadia struggles with Ruth slowly dying in the present day throughout the season, and due to her focus on changing the past, she misses Ruth’s death. She did get to say goodbye to Young Ruth in the past, but as Nadia herself, and so she just looked at her like she was crazy. Why was it important Nadia not be able to say goodbye to her Ruth, and would we see that in a Season 3?

It’s the idea that, as we get older, we’re expected to become the caretaker. But it doesn’t mean that we’re adult enough to do it yet. So part of Nadia’s journey this year is Ruth, the thing that she can’t handle in the present. She thinks she’s getting a free pass by heading into the past, and who wouldn’t want to hang out with Annie Murphy? She’s sort of the heart of the season. And she has such unconditional love in that intergenerational female friendship. The same as Vera and Delia (Athina Papadimitriu) are making it through the war. And Ruth and Nora getting through this non-judgmental version of female friendship. And down to Nadia and Maxine. I love the chosen sisterhoods.

But Nadia gets to go hang out with Annie Murphy, and she’s like, “Oh, cool, now I’m with Ruth. I’m showing up, even though I don’t actually have to be in the hospital, which I don’t have the emotional maturity to do.” But of course, nothing in life is that easy. So you’re either going to go willingly or you’ll be dragged kicking and screaming. It was important that, in a weird way, by Nadia not being able to get exactly what she wants by way of closure with Ruth, this other deeper thing happens, which is Ruth doesn’t hold that against Nadia. The idea of true unconditional love in a life is also this idea that, I forgive you your shortcomings as a person. Ruth knows Nadia well enough to know, in her own way, she is showing up. Since you’ve been breaking Season 3, it’s worth noting that maybe she will get to say goodbye.

So where are you at with ideas for Season 3, and do you foresee that as being a final season?

First of all, I’m so excited that you’ve been greenlighting the third season this entire interview. I’m really grateful and we’ll tell Netflix and we’re all so excited to hear the news from you: It feels like there’s an idea cooking for Season 3. And it would be really fun if it was one of those shows where, five years later, it’s like, “No, wait a second! I think we’ve got another idea for a few episodes.” I would love to see that for “Russian Doll.” “Oh, wait, I think we’ve got an idea of our original movie now. It’s been 20 years later.” I don’t think I’ll ever be done with this show. It depends a lot about appetite and reception.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Russian Doll Season 1 Recap: Let’s Do the Time Loop Again

Before Nadia and Alan go back in time in Russian Doll season 2, let’s relive the first time loop(s) that brought them together.

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Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) wields a turkey in Russian Doll season 1

This article contains spoilers for Russian Doll season 1.

It’s trippy to think that Russian Doll premiered on Netflix all the way back in 2019—the day before Groundhog Day, no less. It was of course fitting timing for the high-concept television series from Leslye Headland, Natasha Lyonne, and Amy Poehler about New York City video game designer Nadia Vulvokov (Lyonne), stuck in a time loop where she keeps dying over and over, only to reawaken at her 36th birthday party to the sounds of Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up.” As with many series, the pandemic delayed production on season 2, but it’s finally returning to the streamer on April 20.

With Nadia and fellow looper Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett) seemingly achieving closure for their respective timelines, their time travel—or, as Nadia calls it, time imprisonment—is going to be markedly different on this go-round. But first let’s refresh our memories as to how they broke the morbidly hilarious and poignantly affecting cycle in season 1.

A Russian Doll recap—what a concept.

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Nadia’s Time Loop

Even before she knows the night is going to end with her a crumpled corpse on First Avenue, Nadia’s 36th birthday is not going well: Stuck at a party thrown by her friend Maxine (Greta Lee) that she doesn’t want to be at, Nadia engages in plenty of self-destructive behavior—going on a bender, engaging in an ill-advised hookup—in order to make it through the night. But when she gets hit by a cab in the first of many quintessential New York deaths, it teleports her right back to the bathroom at that party… and no one else knows that she’s died and is reliving the night.

Though she initially chalks it up to some crazy-strong weed, the actual why of Nadia’s time loop is not immediately apparent. Subsequent experiments with her own mortality (including falling down stairs and into a sidewalk grate, another New Yorker nightmare) as well as investigations at a local synagogue are all for naught: No matter how many days past her birthday Nadia makes it, when she dies she returns to the bathroom, albeit armed with new knowledge. Though the series, like Groundhog Day , at first plays the montage of deaths for dark humor, Nadia gets increasingly desperate that she will never escape; or, worse, that she could get far enough out from her birthday to think she’s safe, only for these surreal laws of physics to strike her down again.

And then she meets Alan in an elevator plummeting to their deaths.

Alan’s Time Loop

Nadia and Alan meet in one of the series’ best moments: “Didn’t you get the news?” she demands as their elevator picks up speed. “We’re about to die.” And he calmly responds, “It doesn’t matter. I die all the time.” In the next episode that temporarily switches perspective, we learn that Alan is indeed caught in his own infinitely repeating day, but his involves the added emotional trauma of going to propose to his girlfriend Beatrice (Dascha Polanco), only to learn that she’s been cheating on him, ironically with Nadia’s on-again, off-again hookup Mike (Jeremy Bobb).

Unlike Nadia casting about haphazardly for how to avoid her constant deaths and resurrections, Alan establishes a very precise routine in the hopes of making his awful day end in any other way than the humiliation of losing Bea.

And then he meets Nadia in the elevator and realizes how little control he has, but that he’s not actually alone.

As Nadia and Alan team up to figure out why they’re both stuck in this bizarre purgatory, they ultimately discover that his first death was suicide by jumping off his building. It’s only as they retrace these chronological steps that he hits upon a potential reason: Each of them had the chance to help the other before their original deaths, but being bad people, they failed to notice someone else in the universe hurting.

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And even though they seem to resurrect over and over without consequence, Nadia begins noticing rotting fruit and wilting flowers—implying that there must be a finite number of resurrections before their time loops begin decaying their respective worlds.

How They Break Out of Their Loops

Once they both acknowledge that this all goes back beyond their first deaths, Alan but especially Nadia must confront where in their lives they’ve gone astray. Flashbacks fill in details of her unstable childhood, from her eccentric mother Lenora (Chloë Sevigny) who didn’t make it to her own 36th birthday. Even more disconcerting for Nadia is the realization that in every reality in which she has died, she’s been mourned by her mother’s best friend and her mentor figure Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), who even accidentally shoots her in one scenario where she thinks Nadia is a burglar.

Nadia’s emotional journey involves making amends with her ex John (Yul Vazquez) and finally meeting his daughter Lucy, though that goes awry when she offers the girl her beloved childhood copy of Emily of New Moon and then gruesomely coughs up blood and pieces of a shattered mirror before succumbing to the death loop. The same goes for realizing that Horse (Brendan Sexton III), the homeless man she passes in Tompkins Square Park in various realities, is someone she might actually know. She even has sex with Alan in one loop, which isn’t exactly the way out but isn’t the worst idea, either.

However, the only way in which Nadia and Alan can actually break the cycle is to each help the other when they cross paths at the deli… the only problem being, each resurrects into a reality in which the other doesn’t know them and is indeed at their most supremely self-destructive. The season 1 finale “Ariadne” features the Nadia and the Alan who we’ve watched learn hard truths about themselves from their many deaths and half-lives using that growth to reach out to the other when each of them most needs a kind stranger.

While that would have been a bittersweet note to end on, the parallel realities converge when they each join a procession—led by Horse—of the parade of life through a tunnel in the East Village. As the split-screen effect shows the two parades seemingly encountering one another, we see one Nadia pass several others, and then suddenly our Nadia and our Alan find each other again, this time in life instead of death.

Russian Doll Season 2

So, what to expect from Nadia and Alan’s further adventures in time? According to Netflix , season 2 is set four years later, though the official synopsis is still pretty vague:

Discovering a fate even worse than endless death, this season finds Nadia and Alan delving deeper into their pasts through an unexpected time portal located in one of Manhattan’s most notorious locations. At first they experience this as an ever-expanding, era-spanning, intergenerational adventure but they soon discover this extraordinary event might be more than they bargained for and, together, must search for a way out.

This time travel has a literal vehicle: the New York City subway, which transports Nadia and Alan to different points in time: 1982 (the year she was born), but also decades before that, as she unravels her family’s inherited trauma by way of the Holocaust but also delves into a mystery of gold lost twice via trains. While Alan seems to join her in breaking time, he also has his own time periods to (re)visit.

Lyonne likened the narrative to Back to the Future in a recent interview with The New Yorker , especially with the emphasis on exploring the lives of Nadia’s mother and grandmother. In addition to Sevigny returning as Lenora Vulvokov, other big names joining the season 2 cast include Annie Murphy ( Schitt’s Creek ) and Sharlto Copley ( District 9 , Chappie ). Plus, Greta, Ruth, and other familiar faces will return and possibly even join the time shenanigans.

Leslye Headland is working on the Star Wars series The Acolyte , so Lyonne stepped in as showrunner, calling this season less of a matryoshka doll and more of an Easter egg for her iconic character. “I figured out how to stop dying,” she said of season 1. “How do I learn how to live?”

Russian Doll season 2 premieres April 20 on Netflix.

Natalie Zutter | @nataliezutter

Natalie Zutter is a playwright, audio dramatist, and pop culture writer living in Brooklyn. She writes what she loves reading/seeing: space opera, feminist epic fantasy, time…

Russian Doll Season 2 release date, time, plot, cast, and trailer for Netflix’s time travel show

Nadia is back for more time-traveling mayhem in this hit fantasy confection

In Netflix’s Emmy Award-winning Russian Doll , Natasha Lyonne stars as Nadia Vulvokov, a New York City video game designer who’s struck by a cab on her 36th birthday. The party girl bites it, but is resurrected and finds herself stuck reliving the same evening ala Groundhog Day, perishing in exponentially more unexpected and brutal ways every day after her birthday bash.

Nadia is joined by Alan (Charlie Barnett), a fellow time-traveler she casually met in an elevator and whose fate is somehow intertwined with hers. Season 2 of the oddball sci-fi show is expected to be another wild time travel story with more outrageous surprises and a wicked sense of humor. Let’s dive into the details.

When is the Russian Doll Season 2 release date?

The new season of Russian Doll will stream exclusively on Netflix on Wednesday, April 20, 2022.

What is the Russian Doll Season 2 release time?

Netflix unveils new movies and TV shows at midnight Pacific, which is 3 a.m. Eastern.

Sometimes time travel can feel like work.

How many episodes of Russian Doll Season 2 are there?

Russian Doll Season 2 will consist of seven episodes, all released simultaneously.

Who stars in Russian Doll Season 2?

Lyonne revises her role as Nadia, and Barnett portrays Alan Zaveri again. Greta Lee (Maxine), Rebecca Henderson (Lizzy), and Elizabeth Ashley (Ruth) all return from the first outing, while new faces for Season 2 include Annie Murphy, Carolyn Michelle Smith, and Sharlto Copley.

Is there a Russian Doll Season 2 trailer?

Yes! Netflix released the most recent trailer for Russian Doll Season 2 on April 7, and it’s a wild ride of treasure hunting for lost gold amid a serious ‘80s flashback.

What is the plot for Russian Doll Season 2?

Russian Doll is channeling a Back to the Future vibe when Nadia gets teleported back to 1982, the year of her birth, courtesy of the New York City Subway System. From there she embarks on a kooky race to solve a family mystery involving missing gold. As the season unfolds in New York and Budapest, Nadia is buffeted by the time stream while trying to piece together clues regarding her temporal dislocation, her mom’s mental health issues, and her Hungarian grandmother’s tragic memories.

Will there be a Russian Doll Season 3?

Natasha Lyonne has said that the endgame for Russian Doll has always been three seasons. Netflix has yet to officially announce production of a final season, but we expect there to be some news after the second season hits.

Russian Doll Season 2 hits Netflix on April 20, 2022.

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Trailer for RUSSIAN DOLL Season 2 Plays With the Concept of Time Travel
Russian Doll Time Travel Explained: Why Nadia & Alan Use Trains
‘Russian doll’: inherited Holocaust trauma spills over
Natasha Lyonne Is a ‘Time Prisoner’ as She Travels Across Eras in
7 facts about Matryoshka, the iconic Russian doll
7 facts about Matryoshka, the iconic Russian doll

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Village Life of Russia
Our First day in RUSSIA & Red Square
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How Does Time Travel Works in 'Russian Doll'?
The space-time continuum is wild. In Russian Doll, time travel always happens by way of trains (not to mention via the bodies of matriarchs). Interestingly, in Season 2, Episode 6 — titled "Schrödinger's Ruth" — Nadia discovers she can rapidly travel between the three eras by walking in a straight line from train car to train car.
Russian Doll Time Travel Explained: Why Nadia & Alan Use Trains
In Russian Doll Season 2, Nadia and Alan's use of trains to travel through time is highly symbolic of how time travel works in this universe. Just like train cars, Nadia and Alan are on a track and set to run a fixed route. While they are able to travel backwards and forwards along the timeline, it is impossible for them to change where the tracks lead.
All the Rules of Time Travel in 'Russian Doll'
From new timelines to characters inhabiting new bodies, here's everything you need to know.
All the Rules of Time Travel in 'Russian Doll'
According to Lyonne, who is also the writer and producer of Russian Doll, time travel isn't just some otherworldly, fantastical element brought into the show for entertainment. It serves a higher purpose — one that peers into the nature of each character's very essence and unpacks why they exist in the timelines that they do.
All the Rules of Time Travel in 'Russian Doll'
In 'Russian Doll,' Time Travel Is More Than Just a Mystical Trope. New timeline, who dis? By Jean Bentley Nov 2, 2022. In the very first episode of Russian Doll, we meet Nadia (Natasha Lyonne), a native New Yorker celebrating her 36th birthday. She confronts her reflection in the mirror of her friend's ornate East Village bathroom ...
Russian Doll season 2 review: a new train of thought and new levels
In season 2 of Netflix's Russian Doll, due out April 20th, the series reinvents itself as a new kind of existential journey through time, space, and NYC's subway system.
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Netflix. Because of the time travel, Russian Doll Season 2 has an opportunity to bite off more existential themes. Season 1 had Nadia re-examine her relationship with her mother by reliving her ...
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Season 1 worked like clockwork, with a compact and brilliant story told over the course of eight episodes that made it seem like a second season wasn't necessary. By comparison, Season 2 is ...
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"Russian Doll" is, in a sense, a show about lost time. In the course of the first season, Nadia drowns in the East River, falls down a flight of stairs, chokes on a chicken wing, and gets ...
Time travel and trauma: Netflix's 'Russian Doll' is an exercise in
Sarah Vincent July 01, 2022. Nadia on the 6 train. Photo from IMDb. "Russian Doll," the hit Netflix series, is kind of a Jewish "Fleabag" meets time travel, a mind-bending and searingly ...
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Natasha Lyonne's Cosmic Journey Into 'Russian Doll' Season 2. The writer-creator-star does a deep dive on philosophy, quantum physics, and the mind-fuck of human existence to explain the ...
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In "Russian Doll," the exact rules of time travel or the facts of epigenetics or psychology are beside the point — the entire thing is visceral and artistic. ... "Russian Doll" is a much ...
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Watch: Natasha Lyonne built up (then broke apart) the world of "Russian Doll" by creating a portal through time on Lexington Avenue subway line. Season 2 of Russian Doll is about a lot of things ...
Russian Doll (TV series)
Russian Doll is an American comedy-drama television series, created by Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler, that premiered on Netflix on February 1, 2019. The series follows Nadia Vulvokov (Lyonne), a game developer who repeatedly dies and relives the same night in an ongoing time loop and tries to solve it, leading to her finding Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett) in the same situation.
'Russian Doll' does the time warp, again : Pop Culture Happy Hour
Natasha Lyonne stars as Nadia Vulvokov in Netflix's Russian Dol l. In the first season of the Netflix show Russian Doll, we meet Natasha Lyonne's Nadia, a woman who gets stuck in a seemingly ...
Review: Russian Doll season 2 is exquisitely trippy
Russian Doll isn't a serious, all-out futuristic show, so the time travel doesn't adhere to strict rules. Nadia often goes to-and-fro from 1982 to 2022, and to some other places too.
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In Season 2, "Russian Doll" broke out of its first season's "Groundhog Day"-style time-loop format with a "Quantum Leap"-like time-travel device that allowed Nadia (Natasha Lyonne ...
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In 'Russian Doll,' Time Travel Is More Than Just a Mystical Trope. New timeline, who dis? By Jean Bentley. April 20, 2022. In the very first episode of ...
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Season two of Russian Doll on Netflix sees protagonist Nadia Vulvokov time-travel via a New York subway as she tries to change her family's past
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This time travel has a literal vehicle: the New York City subway, which transports Nadia and Alan to different points in time: 1982 (the year she was born), but also decades before that, as she ...
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What is the Russian Doll Season 2 release time? Netflix unveils new movies and TV shows at midnight Pacific, which is 3 a.m. Eastern. Sometimes time travel can feel like work.
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The second season of Russian Doll ditches the Groundhog Day premise altogether in favor of sending Lyonne's Nadia Vulvokov, via an ancient subway car, back in time to solve the mystery of her ...

Natasha Lyonne Is a Time Prisoner in 'Russian Doll' Season 2 — Let's Explain the Rules of Time Travel

How does time travel work in 'Russian Doll' Season 2?

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Russian Doll Season 1 Recap: Let’s Do the Time Loop Again

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Russian Doll Season 2

Russian Doll Season 2 release date, time, plot, cast, and trailer for Netflix’s time travel show

When is the Russian Doll Season 2 release date?

What is the Russian Doll Season 2 release time?

How many episodes of Russian Doll Season 2 are there?

Who stars in Russian Doll Season 2?

Is there a Russian Doll Season 2 trailer?

What is the plot for Russian Doll Season 2?

Will there be a Russian Doll Season 3?

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