REBORN: Sober at last, Lyonne is acting again, even playing a druggie con. (Sara De Boer/startraksphoto.com)
DOWN & OUT: A decade ago, heroin addict Natasha Lyonne was an unhinged spectacle and considered unhireable by Hollywood. (
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Long before the likes of Amanda Bynes and Lindsay Lohan terrorized New York, there was Natasha Lyonne, a promising actress who may have had the last epic, drug-fueled, pre-Twitter celebrity meltdown on record.
In 2006, The Post called her “Nut-asha” after she memorably trashed a neighbor’s apartment before threatening their pet. “I’m going to sexually molest your dog,” she vowed. Page Six dubbed her the “cracktress” who was regularly spotted roaming below 14th Street, confused and unwashed and hitting up scenesters for money.
“I was definitely as good as dead,” Lyonne has said. The Guardian recently called her “the original queen of the career capsize.”
Today, Lyonne, now 34, is clean and sober, having recovered from heroin and alcohol addiction. She recently gave up her last vice, cigarettes, after undergoing open-heart surgery sometime in early 2012.
“I’m like a warhorse,” she said.
Lyonne is on the verge of a remarkable career resurgence: She has a supporting role in the upcoming Kristen Wiig comedy “Girl Most Likely,” has done guest spots on “Weeds” and “Law & Order: SVU,” and a has a handful of indies in the pipeline.
Most promisingly, Lyonne stars in the Netflix original series “Orange is the New Black,” premiering in July. Based on a memoir by Piper Kerman, a highly educated middle-class woman who did 15 months for drug dealing and money laundering, Lyonne plays a fellow convict called “the junkie philosopher.”
No one is more aware of the irony than she. “I think I’ve certainly done my fair share of research and investigation into that subject,” she tells The Post. “I mean, I’ve never really been put into the system, in a uniform. But yeah, I’ve done time.”
Lyonne was born in New York City and attended a Jewish prep school on the Upper East Side. Her parents signed her to Ford as a child model (as Dina Lohan did with her daughter, Lindsay) and, when she was 6 years old, Lyonne got her first big break, appearing as Opal on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” Acting was something she never wanted to pursue, she said, but she nonetheless became one of the few child stars to transition to adult roles.
She was then on the verge of major stardom, having been cast by Woody Allen in his 1996 comedy/musical “Everyone Says I Love You.” By her own admission, Lyonne was “the biggest 16-year-old brat.” She said she “would slam my trailer door and put a sign on the outside that said, ‘Do Not Enter . . . Keep Out — And That Means You, Woody!’ And then I’d blare my Led Zeppelin really loud and smoke cigarettes.”
Lyonne was so talented that producers were willing to overlook her erratic behavior, and she starred in two of the decade’s funniest teen movies: 1998’s “Slums of Beverly Hills” and the 1999 blockbuster “American Pie.”
Her work in “Slums” especially impressed critics. “Lyonne shifts keys from tough to tender without hitting a false note,” said Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers. “A comic discovery reminiscent of a young Julie Kavner,” said Entertainment Weekly.
But by 2001, Lyonne was dating fellow troubled actor Edward Furlong, himself so far gone on drugs that he was dropped from “Terminator 3” and could no longer get work. That same year, Lyonne was arrested in Miami on a DUI, infamously telling cops, “I’m a movie star — can I talk to my entertainment lawyer?”
As she so often does, Lyonne claimed that she was only kidding — with the cops, with her Woody Allen anecdote, with her threat to sexually violate a household pet.
“Listen,” she has said. “I’m not for everyone.”
One year after her arrest, Lyonne pleaded guilty to driving drunk and was slapped with a $1,000 fine. She moved back to New York and sublet an apartment in a building owned by actor Michael Rapaport, who later wrote a scathing account of her tenancy in the May 2005 issue of Jane magazine.
Although Natasha was initially a model tenant, Rapaport began receiving alarming reports from other residents about her behavior: strange people in and out of the building at all hours, loud music, Lyonne banging on windows at 3 in the morning and accosting neighbors in the hallway.
A month later, two new tenants ran into Lyonne and were thoroughly freaked out. They told Rapaport that the actress would verbally abuse them in the hallway, block access to the elevators so they couldn’t get to their own apartment, and often scream, “Why the f–k did you c–ts move in here?”
Rapaport had had enough and told her she had to go. Lyonne agreed, but one month would go by, then another, then another, and finally Rapaport had to hire a lawyer to evict her. When he finally got inside the apartment, he was devastated.
“It looked like a grenade had gone off in her bedroom,” he wrote in Jane. “There was garbage everywhere: scripts, contracts, pages from Hustler magazine, photos, letters and things I can’t even mention. There were glasses smashed in the kitchen and there was standing water in the clogged tub with flies hovering over it. When the plumber saw the condition of the bathroom, he said he’d never seen anything that bad before. A freakin’ New York City plumber — that’s how bad it was.”
Rapaport spent $16,000 repairing the damage; even the ceiling had to be ripped open to fix the pipes. “I know that girl needs help, and I tried to help her — a lot of her friends did,” he wrote. “But she screwed me. She can kiss my ass.”
After her eviction, a cache of her diaries was found in the trash next to her building. They were bought by a man named David Hans Schmidt, who had a reputation for collecting odd celebrity artifacts.
The entries dated back to 1997, and veered from megalomaniacal to suicidal. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just too strong, too bold to cohabit this planet,” read one. “I wonder if I’ll ever really kill myself,” read another. “I know I will, but at this rate . . .”
Between 2004 and 2006, dispatches were filed to Gawker and elsewhere by NYC residents who’d seen Lyonne in bars, drugstores, restaurants, on streets and stoops, the actress in varying states of decompensation, such as: “I saw her in the pharmacy section of [Walgreens on Union Square]. She walked right up to the cashier and asked for syringes! Specifically, she said, ‘Can you get me a pack of 1-cc syringes?’ ”
In July 2005, Lyonne was admitted first to Bellevue, then transferred to Beth Israel’s Intensive Care Unit. She had a collapsed lung, hepatitis C and a heart infection. She was there for five months and was placed on methadone, a drug used to treat heroin addictions.
“I remember being in pain a lot,” she later said. “I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could hardly talk, could barely walk.”
Lyonne estimated her weight then at 70 pounds, and even today — having been through stints in jail and rehab, having nearly lost her friends and career — she has a love-hate relationship with heroin and booze and cigarettes. She recently told Rosie O’Donnell that junkie writer William Burroughs is “my idol.” She told another reporter that she thought “heroin was hilarious,” then quickly expressed regret at what she’d already put her body through.
“I love how I have what is probably early-onset emphysema,” she said. “I’ll catch all the diseases out there. They’re for free!”
It’s a testament to Lyonne’s inherent likability that many of her peers are not only willing to work with her but advocated for her when she needed it most. In 2007 — with Lyonne less than a year out of rehab — Chloë Sevigny encouraged director Mike Leigh to cast her friend in the off-Broadway play “Two Thousand Years.”
“It was hard to stand by and not be able to help when it was down and dirty,” Sevigny told Entertainment Weekly. “I tried to forgive whatever bad behavior she displayed because she wasn’t herself. She wasn’t in her right mind.”
After “Two Thousand Years,” Lyonne did a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 2008 and an off-Broadway production in 2010 with Ethan Hawke.
It’s her latest role, however, as that incarcerated “junkie philosopher” that has the greatest resonance. “I certainly think that my personal experience gave me a lot of access to my character’s internal world,” Lyonne tells The Post. “She’s not too different from me. She comes from a pretty good home, not a ton of financial difficulty, but still with its own dysfunction.”
Of her own experience in jail, Lyonne says, “very quickly you’re stripped of the idea of yourself that you’re trying to present to the world. You’re forced to stand up and figure out pretty quickly what you believe in. And how not to end up a sucker or a punchline.”
As for the troubled starlets in her wake, Lyonne sympathizes — to a point.
“I mean, I have a lot of compassion for any of these girls going through this stuff,” she says. “It’s not easy trying to navigate your internal world in the public eye. I just hope that everybody turns out OK.
“And, who knows, maybe they’re kind of on the ride that they need to be on to get where they’re going. Certainly a lot of these girls who are a lot more mainstream than I am will have access, down the line, to [people who can] help them.”
Yet she holds fast, in her darkly comic way, to her legacy. “I got arrested back when it meant something!” she says, laughing. “Back when it mattered.”