W hat 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 s.