I tell Lyonne that it’s amazing—but in a way surprising—that her friendships with women like Sevigny, Poehler, and Maya Rudolph survived such a tumultuous chapter. She nods. “Yeah, the simple truth is, I don't know if they chose me or I chose them. But it almost puts people in a situation where there’s a deeper responsibility. When friends become family, they’ve got to put up with more than most, you know?”
In Russian Doll, Sevigny plays Nadia’s emotionally unstable mom; the episode in which she drags her young daughter around New York, stockpiling watermelons, was based on Lyonne’s own experience as a child. “Chloë happens to be the coolest person in the world—my mother was not. She was a messy person,” says Lyonne. “It was a very meta trip, to be filming the show with Chloë, looking around our stomping grounds, but now all the trailers and signs were for the show I created. And being in the editing room with the footage and watching her with a young version of me was almost a way to forgive my mother.”
An earlier, radically different version of Russian Doll created by Poehler and Lyonne called Old Soul with Ellen Burstyn and Rita Moreno failed to earn a green light from NBC in 2014. The idea sprang from a conversation Lyonne had with Poehler, who called her “the oldest girl in the world.” In Old Soul, Lyonne played a gambling addict with an elderly circle of friends. “Russian Doll can hold bigger concepts, but I always thought Old Soul was inherently subversive and would have been fun to put on network TV,” she says. “Like, why do we think that 30-year-olds should hang out only with 30-year-olds?”
While that series died—perhaps so Russian Doll could live—Lyonne has turned her attention to new projects in the works. She recently formed a production company, Animal Pictures, with Rudolph to develop original series, features, and documentary projects, none of which she’d divulge. Animal Pictures inked a first-look deal with Amazon.
