Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon: ‘Our screaming match? We were ready to rumble’
What does it take for Natasha Lyonne to quit smoking? Like Marlene Dietrich and James Dean before her, Lyonne is an actor who, for as long as anyone can remember, has had a Marlboro Light permanently affixed to her hand. Russian Doll? Pack of cigs. Poker Face? Pack of cigs. Orange Is the New Black? Probably smuggling a pack of cigs into jail.
Getting Lyonne to snuff out the habit, then, was no easy feat. That is, unless you’re Gone Girl’s Carrie Coon and Marvel star Elizabeth Olsen, whose words of sisterly concern did overnight what dozens of medical professionals over the years had failed to do. “They’re why I quit,” Lyonne tells me in the large event room of a Soho hotel.
The three actors had traded verbal blows, and Lyonne lost her voice the next day as a result of all the yelling. “Carrie and Lizzie were like, ‘Gosh, that shouldn’t happen… you know, maybe you should quit smoking?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah! Maybe I should!’” she recalls. “Now granted, doctors and strangers had been telling me this for decades, but that was the turning point – and I’ve been vaping 9,000 vapes a day ever since, so it’s been incredible.” On cue, she takes a puff of her big pink vape and smiles.
Tabloids will despair to learn that the trio’s screaming match wasn’t for real, but part of His Three Daughters, a bruising chamber drama that is now on Netflix. Lyonne, 45, Coon, 43, and Olsen, 35, play semi-estranged sisters who convene to care for their sick father. Like many sibling dramas, this one involves guilt, misunderstanding, recrimination, resentment, and love.
Shot over 21 days in a modest Brooklyn apartment, it’s an insular watch with a tamped-down melancholia. That’s something of a trademark for director Azazel Jacobs, whose last film was an off-kilter adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s French Exit that starred Michelle Pfeiffer. Here, he offers a clear-eyed meditation on grief – if only to say it is anything but.
As often happens when actors portray intimacy, the feelings on screen have bled into real life – the positive ones, at least. Coon and Olsen are ecstatic to see one another tonight, catching up like old classmates at a school reunion. Lyonne, I speak with separately; she’s running late from the set of Marvel’s The Fantastic Four. “You won’t use anything we’ve said, because Natasha will be so interesting,” jokes Coon. “She’ll arrive looking amazing, probably in something black, leather and Chanel.”
None of the three actors had worked with each other before. They are, though, big fans of one another’s work, which might sound like lip service if there wasn’t so much to admire in each of their careers. Coon, for one, is perhaps best known for HBO heavy hitters like The Leftovers and The Gilded Age; Olsen for Marvel’s WandaVision and Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River; and Lyonne for the seminal lesbian romcom But I’m a Cheerleader.
“We’re all women – ‘women in film’ or whatever – and it was an exciting opportunity for me to work with these women who I felt I wanted to become closer with,” Olsen says. It’s rare, too, that you get to share the screen with not one but two women, adds Coon. “Usually films will say, we just need one, thanks. Or one old and one young.” Olsen rolls her eyes in agreement: “Or they want one lead and one supporting!” Coon nods; the point is that “actresses never get to work together, so this was very satisfying”.
Ultimately, their bond was forged in the intellectual fires of Spelling Bee, a daily word game in The New York Times. The three actors would play together in between takes. “Now I’m that girl on set who’s obsessed with her word game,” says Olsen. “Really?” replies Coon, sounding a little rueful. “I’ve never gone back to it. I’ve returned to my hashtag #MomLife.”
When Lyonne does arrive – indeed wearing something black and Chanel as per Coon’s prediction – she is similarly effusive about her co-stars. “I am so in love with those two women,” she says. “They have such a depth of personhood, and we just kept getting a bit deeper each day. By the time we shot the screaming match” – the one that caused Lyonne to lose her voice and quit a lifetime of cigarettes – “nobody was afraid. We were ready to rumble.”
It’s a rare moment of noise in a film that prefers to traffic in quieter sororal friction. It has a tone that dips between elegiac and mordant, and a rhythm of language that recalls theatre. The opening scene is a close shot of Coon’s character performing a monologue against a white wall, no cutaways.
If His Three Daughters were a play, the character descriptions would read something like this:
Katie (Carrie Coon): controlling older sister, bossy and abrasive
Rachel (Natasha Lyonne): laidback middle sister, smokes weed and gambles on sports
Christina (Elizabeth Olsen): flighty pacifist, does yoga
Jacobs wrote the film with Coon, Lyonne, and Olsen specifically in mind, so read into that what you will. But it’s a funny thing to discover how someone sees you, they can all agree. How we sum ourselves up – or how others do it for us – is at the heart of His Three Daughters, throughout which the siblings step out from the boxes they’ve been placed in, out from their prescribed roles.
“We talk a lot about how family perceives you and how you end up performing their expectations,” says Olsen, who has two sisters of her own, the child stars turned fashion designers Mary-Kate and Ashley. In times of crisis, “we all start performing the thing that’s been decided for us in our family. It’s like, this isn’t how I act in my life! Why am I doing this right now? It’s so wild.” She was flattered and surprised to find that Jacobs thought of her as a “tender caretaker” like Christina. “I liked that he saw that side of me,” says Olsen.
The script got to Lyonne (hand-delivered; nothing was sent digitally) at an odd time in her career. “I’ve found myself in a situation where I’ve created an avatar that’s not quite me but does have this big hair and this New York accent, and wears black clothes and smokes a lot of cigarettes,” she says, gesturing to her broad New York accent, her all-black outfit, and the vape in her lap. “I guess I’m at a certain point in my life where Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with you.”
On paper, Rachel felt too close to roles she’d played before. “So, I was flattered that Aza sent me this, but also afraid that it would seem almost like typecasting,” says Lyonne, who was won over in the end by the “beautiful script”.
