‘Russian Doll’ Star On Finding Sobriety And Worrying She’s ‘Already Blew So Much’ Time

“Russian Doll” star Natasha Lyonne opened up about her battle with drugs from her late teens on, finding sobriety and staying sober for more than a decade, and how she worries she “won’t have enough time” to get what she wants done because she feels like she “already blew so much.”

“I was so young that the consequences weren’t that serious yet,” the 43-year-old actress shared about her late-teens, calling her a self-professed “club-kid raver and pothead,” reported The New Yorker for an upcoming issue. “I was seventeen. I was Teflon.”

In 1997, Lyonne landed a role in Tamara Jenkins’s “Slums of Beverly Hills.” During the filming of the movie, the Netflix star ended up driving drunk and crashing her car into the window of a furniture store in Southern California.

In this week’s issue of @NewYorker, I profiled the unstoppable, utterly quotable, obsessively curious actor, director, and quintessential New Yorker Natasha Lyonne. https://t.co/UWhkuSYcCS

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“The jobs and drugs were doing this two-handed dance of pulling me away from an education,” the actress explained. “Slums of Beverly Hills” made her one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young stars, and the roles kept coming with “Detroit Rock City” in 1999 and a role of a sexually sophisticated sidekick in the gross-teen comedy “American Pie” that same year.

In 2001, Lyonne was arrested on a D.U.I. charge. The following year, she moved into a town house with actor Michael Rapaport. She said the place ended up being a party house with common drug use and she would later end up being evicted by Rapaport in 2004 after tenants called police, accusing her of  threatening a neighbor’s dog and ripping a mirror off the wall.

“I just decided to drop out completely,” Lyonne shared. “It gets really dark. I sort of think I’m done forever. And I’m not coming back.”

“It’s a long time between snorting heroin to shooting it to sharing needles,” she added. “I took it to the finish line.”

In May of 2005, Lyonne ended up dealing with a life-threatening health complication that landed her in the I.C.U. Because of it, she missed several court dates for charges related to the neighbor incident. A warrant was later issued for her arrest. In December 2006, she turned herself in. Under court orders, the actress checked into a rehab center — and hasn’t used drugs since.

Natasha said she kept getting a few acting gigs, but it was nothing noteworthy until she landed the part on the hit series “Orange Is the New Black,” which premiered in 2013.

Lyonne said she grew up with a father who was an alcoholic and thinks now her struggles with sobriety was in part her way of dealing with her parents wild ways.

When asked to describe them she said, “they were both into fast cars, fur coats, Rottweilers, cocaine, drinking.” Natasha said she recalled just wanting to be “invisible the entire time” when her “parents were alive.” Both died in the twenty-tens.

“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,”Lyonne shared. “I fully cleaned house on that type of behavior. I make sure that, at this point in my life, I just don’t f*** with chaos.”

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