Natasha Lyonne: The Maverick Behind the Madness
On June 5, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2025 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for some of the most impressive and engaging work of this TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire's editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind television well worth toasting. We're showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.
A conversation with Natasha Lyonne is to experience a gravel-voiced one-woman film school with a carousel of cultural references that range from 'The Long Goodbye' to Lou Reed to quantum physics.
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But what makes Lyonne singular (and why she's being recognized with the Maverick Award at this season's IndieWire Honors) is more than her encyclopedic mind or her distinct creative stamp. It's her ability to turn lived experience into genre-busting, soul-searching, radically original storytelling.
In a TV landscape dominated by serialization, Lyonne and co-creator Rian Johnson took a left turn with Peacock's 'Poker Face,' a classic case-of-the-week mystery format with a twist. The heroine is Charlie Cale, a human lie detector with a beat-up car and an even more battered moral compass, and she's received plenty of 'Colombo' comparisons.
'It's quite intentional that I walk around like a rumpled detective,' Lyonne told IndieWire, 'but I'd say I've seen him in more Cassavetes films than 'Columbo' episodes, if I'm being honest. Which I might as well be, given the theme of the show.'
As a result, 'Poker Face' doesn't feel like a riff or homage. She and Johnson developed a character who feels both timeless and unmistakably hers. 'It's not really about assessing the landscape,' Lyonne said. 'It's about inner curiosity. That's more likely to resonate than paperwork.'
Lyonne's commitment to crafting characters with depth and agency began with co-creating Netflix's 'Russian Doll.' The mind-bending, Emmy-nominated series riffed on time loops and existential dread while feeling deeply personal.
'At the risk of sounding pedantic, I do think it's important to mention that — as it so often seems with women — someone assumes a character was created for them,' she said. 'Let's be really clear: That never occurred. This character exists because, like any good old-fashioned entrepreneur, I saw a void.'
Lyonne was never going to fit in the 'beautiful, but she doesn't know it' roles. She's gorgeous but, with her wild red hair and irrepressible intellect, she doesn't look or sound like anyone who's unaware of exactly who she is. To find the work, Lyonne had to create it.
'In modern times, there were no women running around like Philip Marlowe on our screens. Surely, that was a hole I could fill,' she said with a laugh. 'I knew nobody was casting me as a 'Roller Girl' type, you know what I mean? That's Heather Graham's part, and Meryl Streep had her section. Well, I found mine in the basements of YMCAs and Murray Hill in Manhattan, where I would watch a lot of noir films alone in the middle of the day after I dropped out of Tisch.'
'Mae West made her choices,' she added. 'I made mine.'
Lyonne builds her shows from the inside out. She's a writer, director, and producer with her own company, Animal Pictures, which she co-founded to support boundary-pushing creators. She's now prepping her first feature, 'Uncanny Valley,' which she's co-writing and directing with Brit Marling ('The OA').
Lyonne and Marling became fast friends after they were invited to a series of what Lyonne describes as 'backdoor Hollywood AI meetings.'
'I adore Brit Marling,' she said. 'She's a fucking genius. Because of our sci-fi leanings, we'd each developed a deep interest in this space. And in these meetings, it became clear that a lot of what was already happening was AI. Brit and I looked at each other and realized: this is real. It's fascinating. We're both interested in this, and we're both kind of punks, raising our eyebrows at how it's all going down. So we got this idea: attack it sideways and head-on. I think it's going to be a very cool movie.'
In fact, she cracked, 'It's not announced yet, but Joe Pesci is the star of 'Uncanny Valley.' He plays my daughter. Thanks for this conversation, and thanks to IndieWire for this Maverick Award. As a maverick, it's really important that everyone knows Joe Pesci plays my daughter in 'Uncanny Valley.' It's been said, so now it's fact. Throw it on Wikipedia.'
That kind of humor, bone-dry and self-aware, is part of what makes Lyonne's voice so necessary. But underneath it all is a deep understanding of what it means to survive, create, and evolve in an industry that rarely makes space for women like her.
Her advice to others, particularly women taking creative control, is simple and hard-earned: Hang tight. Stick to your guns. Don't worry about being palatable, or overthink the wins and losses. 'It's all grist for the mill,' she said. 'Self-respect is the answer. And blood on the page.'
That's why Natasha Lyonne is this year's Maverick. And why Joe Pesci better clear his schedule. 'There is no reality,' she said. 'It's what you make it. Where you're at dictates how you receive the world.'
'Poker Face' Season 2 is now streaming on Peacock.
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