Why Natasha Lyonne Embraced Typecasting (Again) as a Stoner for Oscar Contender ‘His Three Daughters’
A single-location New York drama about quarreling siblings played by Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen? We’re all in.
Azazel Jacobs’ poignant and at times poisonous family portrait “His Three Daughters” premiered at TIFF last year to a mild splash, but it’s now primed to be one of Netflix’s major awards contenders in the coming season along with Malcolm Washington’s August Wilson adaptation “The Piano Lesson” and Jacques Audiard’s Cannes winner “Emilia Pérez.”
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Katie (Coon), Christina (Olsen), and Rachel (Lyonne) convene at their childhood Lower Manhattan apartment to shake their dying father (Jay O. Sanders) off his mortal coil, bickering over how to write his obituary and who should take which shift watching over him in the bedroom (never shown onscreen) down the hall. And why are there only apples in the refrigerator? Lyonne’s character, an around-the-clock stoner who’s also Katie and Christina’s stepsister from their father’s second marriage, has long stayed by her dad’s side in their Dimes Square, Chinatown-adjacent apartment.
Katie is an angry type-A Brooklynite while Christina is a more floaty-brained, New Age Californian, both emotionally estranged from Rachel and absent from the mundanity of caregiving. The stellar cast descends on “French Exit” and “The Lovers” writer/director Jacobs’ smart and unsentimental script with one of the best ensembles of the year. Lyonne will be in the Oscar conversation for a role that both embraces and defies the types she’s already taken on. Those include the chainsmoking game developer in “Russian Doll” to her overall public persona as someone who’s battled substance use and made it her brand of scratchy, charmingly abrasive comedy. Netflix faces a challenge, though, of where to slot the three actresses, who are all really leads here.
Lyonne, Coon, Olsen, and Jacobs gathered for a Netflix tastemaker screening and Q&A for the film on Saturday, July 13 in New York City, the first major screening for “His Three Daughters” following great reviews out of its TIFF premiere. In a talk moderated by Rolling Stone’s David Fear and covered by IndieWire exclusively, Lyonne spoke about why she embraced typecasting to play Rachel, a pot smoker who turns out to be the most emotionally grounded of her siblings. That’s in part because Rachel has long stayed by her father’s side, whereas Katie and Christina flew the coop. Here, Lyonne gives her best performance to date as a woman batting off the stages of grief while trying to keep a cool head.
Jacobs first met Lyonne at her birthday party in New York, where she screened Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.” He was brought there, and not invited, by his “French Exit” star Lucas Hedges, but Jacobs was keen on Lyonne after she “hearted” a social media post about “French Exit.”
“Ah, interesting. Big move. Lucas. I was thinking it was Chlo? [Sevigny]. OK, cool. So happy to know,” Lyonne said. Lyonne, like her co-stars, received the “His Three Daughters” script knowing that Jacobs wrote it with her in mind.
“I just was very surprised, honestly, to be thought of at this level of a team,” said Lyonne, beloved for roles in “But I’m a Cheerleader” and “Slums of Beverly Hills” (that film’s director, Tamara Jenkins, was also in the Neuehouse audience on Saturday). “This was, for me, a high level that I don’t often get to play, really across the board. There’s also that scariness of jumping off the cliff. There’s just no place to hide, and nothing to hide behind. It’s like, ‘OK, well, do I really need to play another stoner?’ I don’t really like stoners. I like other types of things. Their stories are kind of slow, they get lost a lot. It was like typecasting essentially, right? Because it was this group, though … and how you [Azazel Jacobs] knew it was us. That sort of specificity is very seductive. Because you’re like, ‘What do you mean, and how do you know?’ This is a business of rejecting, going at big swings, like, ‘First, it’s Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Viola [Davis]!’ The same four. ‘Like, who are the biggest international stars?’”
“You knew your budget, you knew your restrictions,” Olsen said to Jacobs.
“Nobody does it that way,” Lyonne said. “Just the idea that you knew who it was, and that you were hand-delivering this hard copy [of the script], and it becomes sort of like, ‘Sure, I guess.’ And then it becomes scary. We were very happy that it happened because it turned out we really liked you, so thank you, Aza [Azazel Jacobs’ nickname].”
Jacobs previously directed Olsen in the Apple series “Sorry for Your Loss.” Here, she again gives a deeply felt performance far-flung from the world of “WandaVison” and more aligned with indie work on films like “Martha Marcy May Marlene.”
Olsen said, “It’s different when someone says, ‘I wrote something for you’ versus ‘I want to do that.’ Because when I make the choice that I want to do that, I try to do something that’s adjacent and removed from myself that I learn how to navigate, and someone’s saying — which I’ve never had the experience of — ‘Oh, I wrote this for you.’ I don’t really see myself as that soft [as the character Christina]. I do see myself as a nurturer, but someone who really leads with that? I think I lead with a bit more directness or aggression, potentially. Aza and I had this awkward conversation about him seeing me that way … Aza is so empathetic and kind and gentle so maybe I morph, in a way. Or maybe not.”
As for Carrie Coon, she delivers another predictably excellent, flaws-and-all performance as a control freak with emotional baggage. Jacobs previously directed her husband Tracy Letts in the A24 release “The Lovers.” “The first thing actually was Tracy said, ‘Aza wrote a script, so you’re doing it.’ Before I read it, actually. I actually could see myself playing Katie. That wasn’t a surprise. I can be controlling, but I can also be very relaxed and charming. Then you [Azazel Jacobs] said Lizzie [Olsen] and Natasha were doing it. If they’re doing it, I’m definitely doing it. It didn’t matter what the script was, but it just so happened the script was really excellent as well, and I hadn’t seen relationships written this specifically and this realistically in a long time.”
Coon, celebrated for her turns on HBO’s “The Leftovers” and “The Gilded Age,” added, “With the sense of humor, and the awkwardness, I just don’t think there’s that much good writing out there, frankly. There aren’t that many great scripts. There’s a lot of arbitrariness in art, especially if you’re working in TV. ‘Did anybody read this scene?’ Nope, it’s fine, we’ll just do it like that. That’s fine. So it was really nice to have someone have such a specific vision.”
“His Three Daughters” gives the actors a great deal of space to play in scenes with prolonged arguments and past resentments bouncing, like Katie bitching over apples being the only groceries in the home. (Or, later, getting pretty wine-drunk and chewing out Rachel’s boyfriend, accusing him of stepping on their grief when he shows up.) It turns out, as Rachel can attest, their father just loves apples. And the film was personal for Jacobs as well, who previously cast his own parents in his 2008 breakout feature “Momma’s Man.”
“I’ve had experience with close people passing, and it’s only increased as I’ve gotten older, and there’s always been a fear with my own parents,” Jacobs said. “There’s a sense of how time shifted that I was really pursuing that I really hadn’t seen so much in film, how time collapses and expands when you know that something you’re dreading happening is absolutely going to happening, similarly to the way a film is going to end. I was halfway through the first draft when I realized I was just pictured [these actors in the movie].”
Working with “Lady Bird” and “Frances Ha” cinematographer Sam Levy, Jacobs also shot “His Three Daughters” in 35mm, and the filmmaker’s particular “analog” way of working excited cinephile Lyonne.
“Aza is analog is really what I’m discovering,” Lyonne said, adding, “In a super, way too digital, lost-art-form world, flyers, handprinted script, notes in the script, it’s timed to the music of it in the edit. … Do you know what I’m saying? That is such a lost fucking gift to all of us. Imagine if when we went to make shit, there was no phone, no emails, you could do landlines, faxes, telegrams, talk to people in the room, that’s kind of what happens.”
Jacobs added, “With this film, I was trying to create an environment I want to escape to. Even though I was dealing with these heavy things, I wanted to be in this world. I wanted to be with these actors. I wanted to be on this set. I wanted to be able to walk to this place from my neighborhood. … Once we found that apartment, that that courtyard was exactly perfect, that we didn’t have to piece anything together, that the hallway was right, I didn’t need to second guess any of it. It was very clear all the way through, for whatever reason, with this film specifically.”
“His Three Daughters” will release in select theaters on September 6, and globally on Netflix on September 20.
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